Mark v. GRE Literature

Essentially, I am planning on taking both the GRE and GRE literature subject test within this year…or the next ten years, who knows. Beyond that, I would actually like to do well. So, I am setting up this posting series as a sort of supplement to my regular reading and studying.

Everyday I read or study some aspect of literature, and more often that not I have some sort of reaction: wonder, confusion, anger, or even just plain and simple boredom. Instead of momentarily embracing these feelings, and then go drink them away or watch Seinfeld until I can’t remember what state I’m in, I hope to put them to words in a way that will be helpful and undeniably my own.

Today we have the undeniable pleasure of looking at the ever popular literary term bildungsroman. Bildungsroman, and its apparent synonym erziehungroman, means “formation novel” or more literally “upbringing” or “education” novel. German critics love to drop this term (I do to) to describe any novel in which the hero or heroine displays any kind of development through the storm that is young adulthood. Many of the novels classified as bildungsroman are German, most notably Goethe’s The Sorrows or Young Werther. If one is feeling gently feminist we might even claim Jane Austen’s Emma or even Northanger Abbey. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel also has been deemed worth of bildungsroman status.

Some might also think James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a bildungsroman, and it is to an extent. Daedalus does develop through a series of ups and downs: prostitutes and priests, crises of individuality and crises of faith. However, Portrait is more accurately described as a künstlerroman or an “artist novel.” Among the roman styles are this also the zeitroman or “novel of the times/ages.”

It might be apparent by now that roman, means something like novel. While it does denote a novel now, it originally referred to any imaginative works in the vernacular, often verse. By the 16th century it was commonly applies only to prose. The term itself actually comes from the French. The common usages of the French term are used to describe such genres as realist (roman réaliste), psychological (roman psychologique), and imaginative (roman d’imagination). Also there is my personal favorite, the roman existentialiste, which might be well applied to a work such as Camus’ The Stanger.

The connection between roman and romance might be a little clearer now. Roman with its popular vernacular and non-historical style is a direct source for our term romance. But that is for another time.

In a last note we might ask what the bildung prefix means. We gather it means “education or “formation,” but I am familiar with this term as meaning something more along the lines of “culture” it is in this way that my hero H.-G. Gadamer uses it. However, that is also for another time.