Abraham Cahan’s self-image as an educator, which encompasses his literary and journalistic careers, is shaped by the “Doctrine of Interest,” a pedagogical theory promoted by the Herbartian movement. Teaching, for Cahan and the Herbartians alike, means making the transition from old ideas to new ones as smooth as possible, changing one’s students (or audience) without challenging them. Cahan’s Yiddish novella Vi Azoy Rafael Na’arizokh Is Gevorn a Sozialist works as a kind of Herbartian bildungsroman in this sense. For all its effectiveness, though, Cahan ultimately finds the Herbartian approach unfulfilling, and he works through this problem in some of his English-language fiction, including “Tzinchadzi of the Catskills” and The Rise of David Levinsky.

Goethe's Heirs@@@The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

The Doctrine of Interest: Abraham Cahan and the Herbartians

In the multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual setting of contemporary Spanish America, the Bildungsroman has evolved to incorporate contestatory features necessary to address the tens...

Formation and Language: Hybrid Subjectivity in the Spanish American Bildungsroman

In the novel Life of Pi. the story uses a human-animal story to articulate Martel’s transpersonal aesthetics which reconsiders traditional Western philosophical notions of the self, maturity, and rationality. The naming of Martel’s protagonist enacts a symbolic subversion of the subject-object hierarchy, placing the self in a relational continuum with other inanimate and insentient beings. It also blurs the boundary between humanity and animality, thus questioning the role of Western rationality which defines the self as a perfection of unity, autonomy, and independence. The novel also sets forth the notion of a transpersonal, transcultural self through religious pluralism, and expresses an ecological, metaphysical self coterminous with the entire universe. Martel’s philosophical reflection on the transpersonal self expresses the need for breaking the limits Western philosophy has imposed on the boundary of the self.

Questioning rationality: Martel’s philosophy of transpersonal self in Life of Pi

At the time of its publication, German writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone (2017; Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, 2015) was hailed for its particular timeliness, as its story revolves around the most recent influx of asylum seekers and refugees from African to European countries, including Germany. In contradistinction to readings of Go, Went, Gone as a narrative of migration, our article places the novel in the tradition of the bildungsroman and takes Erpenbeck’s choice of protagonist as its starting point: in asking what is rendered visible through the privileged perspective of Richard—a recently retired classics professor—we argue that Erpenbeck’s novel reckons with the colonial underpinnings of western epistemology, the fundamental Eurocentrism of Bildung and its established narrative, and their effects on German political and social attitudes toward migration. As a bildungsroman with an aging protagonist, Go, Went, Gone renders migration as the consequence of European modernity and colonialism.

/pdf/migration-meets-bildung-jenny-erpenbecks-go-went-gone-3fq8h3vl.pdf

Migration meets Bildung: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

/pdf/collapsing-the-secret-self-thackeray-s-the-history-of-31h226gfve.pdf

Goethe's Heirs@@@The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

Citations

The Doctrine of Interest: Abraham Cahan and the Herbartians

Formation and Language: Hybrid Subjectivity in the Spanish American Bildungsroman

Questioning rationality: Martel’s philosophy of transpersonal self in Life of Pi

Migration meets Bildung: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

Collapsing the Secret Self: Thackeray's The History of Pendennis as a Performative Parody

Related Papers (5)

5. Pushkin’s Quest for National Culture: The Captain’s Daughter as a Russian Bildungsroman

Italy in the German Literary Imagination: Goethe's 'Italian Journey' and Its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen, and Heine

The classical centre : Goethe and Weimar, 1775-1832

Goethe, the sorrows of young Werther

The Hamlet Project in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship