The Bildungsroman : re-birth, travels, and conversations across the Mediterranean, Irish, and Red seas.

Abstract

Scholarship on bildungsroman novels-European, Arab, postcolonial, male, female, or otherwise—is mostly traced back to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) as the archetype of the genre. Goethe’s novel is commonly used as the reference point for West-East, East-West frameworks in the discourse of the bildungsroman genre. This however, disavows literary traditions and influences on the bildungsroman novel that may have originated at earlier times or at different places, and limits the study of bildungsroman novels across disparate geographies and times. This study aims to relocate spatially and chronologically the bildungsroman tradition from an exclusively western scene outwards towards a global scene, to challenge narrowly defined national canons by analyzing the bildungsroman as a genre in motion, and to read Ahdaf Soueif’s novel, In the Eye of the Sun, alongside James Joyce’s bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to better understand the evolution of a coming of age tradition and its cultural translation across space and time. As we travel along the complicated and messy routes in this study, we uncover old, new, and different strands of the bildungsroman genre that have been buried in the dust, set them in motion, and watch them culminate into one constellation of a bildungsroman. Chapter One of this study, titled “The Bildungsroman in Global Perspective”, demonstrates how tracing particular strands to different origins, strands that are inclusive of various cultures and traditions, creates a unity of fiction that helps negotiate cultures across space and time. As we explore the earlier complexities of the genre and its messy history, we challenge the compartmentalization of branches of knowledge, i.e. the bildungsroman genre, into exclusive categories such as “Western literature”. This chapter reads history as continuously in flux and sheds light on the travel of ideas and influence among individuals and the interrelatedness of nat