This essay examines the pervasive language of chance in Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869) and argues that the novel's competing models of probability reveal tensions in the bildungsroman form. Although Phineas's advancement has been read as demonstrating Trollope's investment in the “career” as the form of individual development, the characterization of Phineas as an adventurer—and the depiction of romantic and political outcomes in London as stochastic—reveal a causal disjunction between individual choice and the mechanisms of social progress. Parliament is the setting of both Phineas's individual development and the plot of social progress, but the novel's use of competing languages and models of probability to describe the movement of the two reveals an incommensurability of scale. While Phineas's personal choices draw on a model of probability that manages chance by focusing on “odds” and rational decision making, his encounters with statistics in his parliamentary duties demonstrate how models of aggregation that mitigate chance and randomness cannot be reconciled with or incorporated into individual experience. Thus this essay argues that the novel's form, including its peculiar resolution, does not represent a reconciliation of Phineas's private and public identities but rather reflects a frustrated attempt to coordinate the progress of the individual with the progress of the nation.

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

The Language of Chance and the Form of Phineas Finn

This article offers a complement to previous readings of Kertesz's Nobel-Prize winning novel Fateless and his other significant fiction The Failure. While previous critics of these key texts often read Kertesz's representation of the Holocaust experience in the context of twentieth century European history or that of his personal biography, and The Failure in the context of the author's own experience of authorship in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, this essay argues for his indebtedness to the classic nineteenth century topos and genre of the Bildungsroman and to the genre of Kunstlerroman. While in Fateless, the structural elements of the plot redeploy the elements of the Bildungsroman, its fundamental indebtedness to the modernist concept of the contingency of plot, action and character, and the essentially postmodernist contention about the futility of knowledge display a degree of tension in the text. The Failure also explores the well-known late-nineteenth century topos of the Kunstlerroman and the representation of literary authorship. Studies about Kertesz's work, the article suggests, could be further expanded by exploring the relationship between Kertesz's work and different Hungarian literary traditions.

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Tradition and Subversion in Imre Kertész's Work

This chapter explores the teenage dreamer’s liminal terrain, focusing upon states of borderline consciousness rather than upon more familiar aspects of subcultural identity. Beginning with the premise that ‘youth’, ‘teenage’ and ‘adolescence’ have distinct but overlapping discursive resonances, Croft argues that teenage dreamers occupy a uniquely borderline position: caught between bedroom and street, they straddle the divide between (threatening) public space and (introspective) private space. The chapter traces continuities between different inscriptions of liminal subcultural identity, from August Aichhorn’s ‘wayward youths’ and ‘juvenile delinquents’, to Frederick Thrasher’s ‘susceptible gang-boys’ and Ian Hacking’s ‘fugueurs’. Highlighting the relationship between borderline spatiality and ambivalent mobility, Croft concludes with an intertextual reading of Graham Greene’s ‘The Destructors’ and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, foregrounding the teenage dreamer’s ambiguous creative potential.

From Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer: Between the Bedroom and the Street

Narratives are models for time. They figure the conflict between desire and what thwarts it. Such dialectics of desire define what we hope time will bring and what we fear forestalls such fortune. Thus stories conceive our experience as lived, charged temporality. But the time narratives represent is never simply "time in general/' They focus an apprehension of their culture's forms of aspiration and resistance. These figures of temporality go far beyond simple "manners of speaking." They are how time occurs for us. To read them is to engage the character of temporality that defines a culture. To get at the phenomenology of time as it was experienced in the middle part of the nineteenth century in France a moment of epochal changes in the socioeconomy of the period I want to reconsider some fictions that migrate from province to Paris. The seemingly unilinear narrative of such novels is familiar. They represent a dynamic that appears obvious: the desire of and for the capital. Characters like Rastignac, Rubempre, Julien Sorel, and Frederic Moreau come immediately to mind. The action of their stories is motivated by a conjunctural appetite, promoted by generalized patterns of value-formation and social development at the heart of the culture and enacted by an entire class of writers who in turn projected them onto their protagonists. In these tales, time is an intense preoccupation: everything in them seems to press toward Paris in a headlong craving for acceleration of property accumulation, of erotic intensity, of personal power. This longing for velocity inscribes and describes a construction of time that characterizes the post-Revolutionary period. But such a vision misses a complex of other temporalities that cohabit and collide in these fictions in particular a powerful counter-dynamic that pulls the city toward the country, toward the provinces, toward "underdevelopment" and the "not fully realized." The myth of Paris "culture" evokes another cultural

From City to Country: An Outline of Fluvio-Critique

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/7392/sevet_ku_0099d_10566_data_1.pdf?sequence=1

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

Citations

The Language of Chance and the Form of Phineas Finn

Tradition and Subversion in Imre Kertész's Work

From Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer: Between the Bedroom and the Street

From City to Country: An Outline of Fluvio-Critique

Aspects du roman d'apprentissage dans les trois mousquetaires, sylvandire et joseph balsamo d'alexandre dumas père.

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