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"Bildungsromans."
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Spells : a novel within photographs
Twenty years ago, while working as a security guard in an art museum, Peter Rock staved off the job's inherent boredom and loneliness by trying to make up a story for each photograph, painting and object in the museum. A few years ago, reminded of the pleasures and play that he felt in danger of forgetting, he began to envision a similar project. As he explains, \"First, I found photographers whose work I was drawn to, and contacted them with a very hypothetical and tentative description of what I was doing. Somewhat arbitrarily, I decided that five photographers would be a good number; I was gratified that the first five I contacted were excited to join me. Next, I let these photographers know why I was drawn to their work, noted some images I really admired, and shared some of my previous writing with them. I asked them to send me 20-30 images; of these, I chose five at a time, and proceeded incrementally, generating the specific stories as I went. The images are not merely illustrations for a pre-existent story, then, but the conditions and possibilities and limitations of how they proceeded. The images came first. One way to think of it is that the stories herein, and the larger story they become, were already embedded in the photographs.
Book
Principle and Propensity
Scholars have for many years now relied upon the largely unexamined assumption that the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman in the Goethean tradition is somehow an intrinsically secular genre exclusive to Europe, incompatible with the literature of a democratically based culture. Combining intellectual history with genre criticism, Principle and Propensity provides a critical reassessment of the bildungsroman, beginning with its largely overlooked theological premises: Bildung as formation of the self in the image of God. Kelsey L. Bennett examines the dynamic differences, tensions, and possibilities that arise as interest in spiritual growth, or self-formation, collides with the democratic/quasi-democratic culture in the nineteenth-century English and American bildungsroman. Bennett reexamines two long-held beliefs about the nineteenth-century bildungsroman: that it is based primarily on secular individual growth and that it is a genre exclusive to Europe. Beginning with the idea that interest in an individual’s moral and psychological growth, or bildung, originated as a religious exercise in the context of Protestant theological traditions, she shows how these traditions found ways into the bildungsroman, the literary genre most closely concerned with the relationship between individual experience and self-formation. Part one of her study examines the attributes of parallel national traditions of spiritual self-formation as they convened under the auspices of the international revival movements: the Evangelical Revival, the Great Awakening, and the renewal of Pietism in Germany led respectively by John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Count Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf. Part two explores the ways these traditions manifest themselves in the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in England and America through Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Pierre, and Portrait of a Lady. Though Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship], Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s prototype of the genre, was a library staple for most serious writers in nineteenth-century England and in America, Bennett shows that later writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Henry James also drew on their own religious traditions of self-formation, adding richness and distinction to the received genre.
eBook
The drifter : a novel
Betsy Young is a seemingly successful New Yorker with a job at an auction house, a supportive husband, and a feisty four-year-old daughter she's terrified to let out of her sight. The reason for this fear dates back twenty years to her college days, when a series of horrific acts of violence changed the lives of Betsy and her friends forever. Since then, Betsy has tried to escape the ghosts of her past -- but her carefully curated life has begun to unravel, forcing her to confront the past she's tried so hard to forget.
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Human Rights, Inc
In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literatureand international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality. Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.
eBook
Such fine boys
\"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted chums, the boys of Valvert misbehave, run away, get expelled, and engage in various forms of delinquency and disappearance. They emerge into adulthood tragically damaged, still tethered to their adolescent selves, powerless to escape the central loneliness of their lives in an ever-darkening spiral of self-delusion and grim consequence\"--Back cover.
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Representations of the Female Bildungsroman in Modern Narratives of Travel
This thesis explores the concept of a reworked Bildungsroman in modernist texts that have not previously been studied together. This project maintains that The Voyage Out (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) expand traditional Bildungsroman and Grand Touristic narratives by representing gender limitations within the literary frameworks. I demonstrate how the texts represent non-conservative paths of development for women by using travel as a mechanism for exploring the impossibility of integration and equality between the sexes, as well as well as a means for demonstrating how women are constructed, perceived and historically mythologized in a foreign space.
Dissertation
Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture
Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman draws on work by Kinji Imanishi, Frans de Waal, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, materialist notion of culture for ecocritical analysis. In this timely intervention, Feder examines the humanist idea of culture by taking a fresh look at the stories it explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of individual acculturation that participates in the myth of its complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder argues, is culture's own origin story. Moving from Voltaire's Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, the book dramatizes humanism's own awareness of the fallacy of this foundational binary. In the final chapters, Feder examines the discourse of animality at work in this narrative as a humanist fantasy about empathy, one that paradoxically excludes other animals from the ethical community to justify the continued domination of both human and nonhuman others.
eBook
Reef
A man's transition from errand boy in Sri Lanka to sophisticated restaurateur in London. It happens thanks to the influence of Ranjan Salgado, an aristocratic bachelor with an interest in things intellectual. At age 11 the boy goes to work on Salgado's estate as an assistant to the houseboy. Bit by bit he advances to become houseboy and cook, picking up in the process general knowledge and the art of conversation. By the author of Moonfish Moon.
Book
Coming of age in contemporary American fiction
This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures.
eBook