The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification

Abstract

This article discusses and problematizes the usage of the concept of Bildungsroman; both the indiscriminate, imprecise use perceived in part of the North American critics, as well as the restrictive (and nationalistic-driven) visions of the Germanistic, a product of Wilhelmine canonization, that confine the term to the German territory. With the aim to restore its theoretical and critical contents, in addition to its utility as a historic and literary category, it circunscribes the applicability of the term Bildungsroman to the novels that mantain any type of relation –be that of identification as of parody or refusal– with the humanistic, early-bourgeoise concept of Bildung. In this manner, the definition proposed encompasses the historic arquetype, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship the romantic Antibildungsromane up to the novels of Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann in the first decades of the twentieth century.