Transcript Week 11-A Rethinking the Bildungsroman

Week 11-A
Rethinking the
Bildungsroman
Feng, Pin-chia.
The Female
Bildungsroman by Toni
Morrison and Maxine
Hong Kingston. New
York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Chapter One
“Rethinking the
Bildungsroman: the
Politics of Rememory and
the Bildung of Ethnic
American Women
Writers.” 1-49
Chapter One
 I. Traditional Definitions of the
Bildungsroman
 II. Definition of the Female
Bildungsroman
 III. Narratives of Bildung by Ethnic
Women
 IV. Knots of Subjectivity
 V. Breaking Silence
I. Traditional Definitions of
the Bildungsroman
Derived from the quest
motif in traditional heroic
narrative (2).
German Bildungsroman
Two narrative patterns:
1. a linear progression toward
knowledge and social integration
2. a [spiral] upward movement
toward spiritual fulfillment (2)
German Bildungsroman
 Bild → imago or portrait (3)
 Bildung → the process by which a
human being becomes a replica of
his mentor, and is identified with him
as the exemplary model. (François
Jost qtd. in Feng 3)
 Bildungsroman → the father-quest (3)
Victorian English Bildungsroman
Adds an overt class ideology
--Instructs the middle class
that finding a proper vocation
is the path to upward mobility
(4)
Minority Subjects
Description of traditional
plot elements becomes
unsatisfactory when applied
to contemporary
Bildungsromane by ethnic
women. (6)
II. Definition of the Female
Bildungsroman
A major source:
 The Voyage In: Fictions of
Female Development
shared assumptions
 The shared assumptions in the female
Bildungsroman and the traditional
male Bildungsroman are
 belief in a coherent self
 faith in the possibility of
development
 insistence on a time span in which
development occurs
 emphasis on social context. (11-12)
The female Bildungsroman
 Two narrative patterns:
 An essentially chronological
apprenticeship (similar to the linear
structure of the male Bildungsroman)
 The awakening, which generally
occurs later in the heroine’s life and
consists of brief, internal epiphanic
moments. (11)
III. Narratives of Bildung
by Ethnic Women
 “I regard any writing by an
ethnic woman about the identity
formation of an ethnic woman,
whether fictional or
autobiographical in form,
chronologically or retrospectively
in plot, as a Bildungsroman.” (15)
Main Features
 Multiple consciousness (16)
“slippages of selves” (Shirley Geok-lin Lim)
 Rememory (Toni Morrison)
Counter-memory (Foucault)
Re-presenting various negotiations with
interweaving and oftentimes repressed
memories. (19)
 Mother-quest (20-22)
Bildungsroman by Ethnic Women
 Mosaics of heterogeneous dialogues
heteroglossic utterances
divided discourses
 Conformity (sameness)
shared human experiences
linear historical development
 Divergence (difference)
traces of the repressed memories
return of the repressed
(23-23)
IV. Knots of Subjectivity
Feminism
Poststructuralism
Essentialism
Constructionism
“Woman”: Innate essence
“Woman”: Social construction
A unitary self
Individual agency
A
dispersed/fragmentary
subject
Social forces
Authority of
experience
Identity as
positionality
Conflicts resolved
 Feminism + Poststructuralism
→ “The personal is the political.” (28)
→ “the experiential realm of a woman
of color is always already a meeting
place of various, often contradictory,
‘discourses’ that need continual
negotiation” (29)
Feminism vs. Psychoanalysis
 Psychoanalysis is inadequate in
handling class and racial issues (30):
 Racial differences do not exist in
psychoanalysis.
 Slave children belonged to their mother’s
race instead of their father’s. (30)
 Where psychoanalysis is helpful:
 The theory of “return of the repressed”
V. Breaking Silence
 The history of women’s struggle for
self-determination has been muffled in
silence over and over.
 The sanity and survival of an
oppressed woman of color depend on
speech. If she remain silent, her story
and voice are likely to be appropriated
by the oppressors and she is further
oppressed and silenced. (32)
VI. Revising the Bildungsroman:
Morrison and Kingston
 1. They underline the importance
of recovering repressed memory in
the Bildungsroman of ethnic
women.
 2. They juxtapose Bildungsroman
along with anti-Bildungsroman to
undrescore the multiple jeopardy
faced by women of color. (36)
VI. Revising the Bildungsroman:
Morrison and Kingston (2)
 3. Both stress the importance of the
process instead of the product of
Bildung in their novels.
 4. They transform a traditionally
personal and privatized genre into a
political one and provide a
postmodern interpretation of the
axiom “the personal is political.” (36)
The End