MODERNISM AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN

Abstract

This talk explores the modernist novel's formal and narrative subversion of the traditional Bildungsroman, the most notable aesthetic legacy of the Enlightenment humanism and the Bildung paradigm of the late eighteenth century, through a critical and comparative framework. I argue that the contradictions that remained suppressed in the traditional genre so as to attain Bildung paradigm's ideal of aesthetic and social harmony finally erupt as formal problems and narrative dissolution in the moment of modernism, when the classical Bildungsroman meets its demise through a relentless dehumanization of form. If the classical Bildungsroman presents us with the image of man in the process of becoming as Bakhtin has suggested, I argue that the modernist Bildungsroman enacts the dissolution of that process in its very form. Through a discussion of the three modern versions of the genre - In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz -I analyze the impact of late modernity, capitalism, Great War, technology and post-Freudian articulation of subjectivity on the traditional genre, while also comparing the unique geopolitical contexts (France, Germany, Poland) and modernisms of the works. I conclude that the modernist Bildungsroman provides a new model of formal realism as a critique of the illusory realism of the traditional Bildungsroman.