Female Bildungsroman

Este artículo plantea que The Tombs of Atuan es una novela de formación femenina que se aparta de los códigos tradicionales de la variante realista y hegemónica del subgénero. Esto debido a que presenta dos elementos no miméticos: un laberinto subterráneo como morada de dioses y la aparición de un mago. Ambos complejizan el proceso de crecimiento de la joven Tenar, su protagonista, e inciden en que su destino al final de la novela, pese a no culminar en una madurez plena, sí se abra a posibilidades alentadoras, distintas a las resoluciones fatalistas de la novela de formación femenina realista. Palabras clave: novela de formación femenina, literatura de fantasía, magia, laberinto, individuación.

This paper seeks to study the relationship between the mother-daughter in two of her earliest novels; The Grass is Singing and Martha Quest, employing the ideas regarding this relationship discussed by Nancy Chodorow in her book The Reproduction of Mothering and argues that the protagonists of these two early novels by Lessing are essentially " matrophobic ". Their matrophobia, however, does not prevent them from being victims of the same fate as their mothers before them, particularly in the kind of lives they choose to lead and the marriages which trap the protagonists of both the novels.

El trabajo plantea la pregunta sobre la
identidad y los procesos de concienciación en tres
generaciones de mujeres que reciben el nombre de
Mariana, durante buena parte del siglo XX en eje
cafetero colombiano, generaciones de mujeres inmersas
y la vez, transgresoras de múltiples cautiverios dados
por el orden simbólico patriarcal. Así, el lenguaje se
constituirá en escenario de las voces de estos personajes
que, a través de una Bildungsroman femenina, lograrán
romper el espejo patriarcal como cura y proceso de
concienciación frente a temas como la sexualidad, la
religión, el matrimonio y los acontecimientos políticos y
sociales de la época.

"Ruth Hall" by Fanny Fern is different from other novels written by and addressed to women: its plot, protagonist, and style prove that Fern’s book is an unconventional female Bildungsroman. To prove this statement, this paper will compare Fern’s novel to the two most famous bestsellers of the period: "The Wide, Wide World" by Susan Warner and "The Lamplighter" by Maria Cummins.

La critica letteraria ha codificato come Bildungsroman la forma narrativa con cui il romanzo di formazione delinea il percorso con cui un giovane uomo giunge alla maturità. Dove si collocano le donne e le scrittrici che le raccontano in questo scenario? Il volume effettua un'ampia ricognizione della letteratura tra Otto e Novecento riformulando radicalmente possibili altre definizioni del romanzo di formazione.

Cilj ovog rada je da ponudi čitanje romana Biljane Jovanović, Pada Avala (1978), kao jednog od prvih primera ženske proze u jugoslovenskoj/srpskoj književnosti. Uz to, ukazuje se i na mogućnosti tumačenja ovog romana kao ženskog obrazovnog romana. Nekoliko je aspekata tumačenja koji se lako mogu prevideti ukoliko se roman ne čita kao primer dva navedena žanra. Prvi problem odnosi se na zanemarivanje konteksta socijalističke Jugoslavije, karakteristikȃ sedamdesetih godina i pozicije mladih u takvom društvu. Tome treba dodati i da su dosadašnji tumači često previđali činjenicu da je glavna junakinja adolescentkinja koja putem (pre)ispitivanja i narušavanja društvenih normi pokušava da otkrije svoje mesto u svetu. Konvencije kvaziautobiografskog pisanja upućuju na ambivalentan i relativan odnos autorke prema događajima u romanu, stoga je čitateljki ostavljena mogućnost da u svoje tumačenje upisuje i činjenice iz autorkinog života, kao i specifičnosti vremena u kom je delo nastalo. U tom smislu, ovaj rad posebno uzima u obzir kontekst 1978. godine kada je u Beogradu održana prva međunarodna konferencija o feminizmu na prostoru Istočne Evrope.

The aim of this article is to offer a reading of the novel Avala Falling (1978), by Biljana Jovanović, as one of the first examples of the women centered narratives in Yugoslav/Serbian literature. The article also points to a possibility of interpreting the novel as a female Bildungsroman. There are several aspect of analysis that can easily  be overlooked if the novel is not read as an example of these two genres. First, ignoring the context of the socialist Yugoslavia in 1970s, and positioning of the youth in the society. Moreover, most interpretations up until today overlooked the fact that the protagonist is a young woman who tries to find her place in a society by challenging various societal/cultural norms. Conventions of quasi-autobiographical writing here also indicate author’s relative relationship with events in the novel, which leaves the reader a possibility of inscribing some facts from the author’s life, as well as specificities from the time the novel was written. In that sense, this article takes into consideration the context of the year 1978, when the first feminist international conference in Eastern Europe was organized in Belgrade.

(A World of Euphemism: Representations of Macao in the Work of Austin Coates: City of Broken Promises as Historical Novel and Female Bildungsroman (Lisbon: FCT and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009)

Abstract
Although the first depiction of Macao in English literature dates from the
16th century, it appeared more widely in English novels after Hong Kong was founded in 1841. The little studied works of Austin Coates (1922-1997) allow an analysis within the field of Anglo-Portuguese studies. More particularly, his work focuses on the enclave’s image through the unpublished poem “Macao” (1950) and the novel City of Broken Promises (1967), which I would classify as both a historical novel and a female Bildungsroman. The realistic images of the City of the Holy Name of God of
Macao shown in these works, and in English literature in general, are similar to extratextual references that the informed reader will recognise as specific to that historical location. This will be demonstrated through analysis of documents from the East India Company (1600-1793) and countless travel reports, used to study the fictionalisation of Anglo-Portuguese relations and the English presence in Southern China in the
17th and 18th centuries, and the relations interrelating History and Literature in the work of Austin Coates. The aim of this work is to study the history of the British presence in Macao (1635‑1793) and the representation of Macao in the literary work of Coates by comparing it with his historiographic studies on the territory, cross-referencing Portuguese, English and Chinese sources and adopting a multidisciplinary approach
(embracing Literary Studies, History, Anthropology, Urban Studies and Sociolinguistics), as required by the hybrid nature of the text as a historical novel. The portrayal of the historical city in City of Broken Promises is achieved by using literary themes and strategies such as: the (fictional) diary of Thomas Van Mierop, the description of the context of the action (historical and symbolic time and space) and of the process of the personal development (Bildung) of Martha da Silva Van Mierop, a historical
character who is portrayed in the novel; the place-names; the historical figures; the archival sources; the use of intertextuality; the ethno-historical and exotic aspect of the urban chronotope; the female condition and experience and the relationships involving class, gender and ethnicity. This study also considers the reception of the novel in Macao and in the Anglophone space in general. The structure of the historical city is linked to the process of Martha’s development, as the domestic and public spheres open up throughout the process of the character’s socialisation. The personal, local and national history and the young woman’s memory and development combine to produce a description of 18th century Macao, a city that is in turn depicted as timeless in the poem “Macao”.
While the poem refers to the Portuguese discoveries and the Luso-Chinese nature of the enclave, City of Broken Promises appears as an innovative novel in that it represents the period when the supercargoes from the East India Company were in Macao during the time between the Cantonese trading seasons in the second half of the 18th century. The former is the first English fictional narrative that deals with the British presence in the Portuguese-ruled territory. The study of this theme allows us to contextualise the realistic portrayal of the city in Anglophone literature and especially in Coates’ work, where the enclave is depicted both as a historical and symbolic place for the long-established links between the Portuguese, Chinese and British in the Far East.

Abstract
This essay examines Irmgard Keun's novelDas kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) against the backdrop of Weimar-era discourses on the emancipatory potential of vision. While the narrative's thematization of vision has been productively analyzed from the perspective of feminist and film theory, less attention has been paid to its ties to contemporary discourses concerned with retooling a vision enhanced by new technologies like film into an instrument of emancipatory self-fashioning. As the article shows, Keun's novel reflects critically on these discourses by casting its heroine's sentimental journey in terms of an education in vision that leads to acknowledging the distance between the visual as a mode of inscription and the visible as a domain of perception. In so doing the novel delivers a critical commentary on contemporary discourses that located agency in a conquest of the visible attained by manipulating the visual.

XVIII. yüzyılda Alman edebiyatında belirleyici özelliklerini kazanan Bildungsroman, bireyin çeşitli aşamalardan geçerek edindiği gelişimi, olgunlaşmayı konu edinen bir roman türüdür. Tür, zaman içerisinde bir takım değişikliklere uğrayarak devam etmiş ve XX. yüzyılda kadın hareketlerinin ön plana çıkmasıyla birlikte kadın kahramanları incelemesi açısından önem kazanmıştır. Bu çalışmada amaçlanan ise bu roman türünün İspanya İç Savaş sonrası dönemde yazılan Nada (1944) adlı eser aracılığıyla devam edip etmediği sorusuna yanıt bulmak ve nedenlerini saptamaktır.

A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form. From the despondent endings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the suicide of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré and the demise of Eliot’s Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman offers narratives of failure, paralysis, and destruction: goals cannot be achieved, identities are impossible to forge, and the narrative of socialization routinely crumbles. Examining the novels of Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Samuel Butler, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, Falling Short reveals not only a crisis of character development but also a crisis of plotting and narrative structure.

From the inception of literary realism in the 1830s to the height of modernism a century later, the bildungsroman presents itself as a key symptom of modern Europe’s inability to envision either coherent subjectivity or successful socialization. Rather than articulating an arc of personal development, Stević argues, the bildungsroman tends to condemn its heroes to failure because our modern understanding of both individual subjectivity and social success remains riddled with contradictions. Placing primary texts in conversation with the central historical debates of their time, Falling Short offers a revisionist history of the realist and modernist bildungsroman, unearthing the neglected role of defeat in the history of the genre.

ROMANI NAĐE TESIĆ: AUTOFIKCIJA, ROD I FILM

U radu nastojimo da predstavimo dela autorke Nađe Tešić (1939, Užice – 2014, Njujork) pozicionirajući ih u kontekst književnosti imigranata koju su autori srpskog porekla pisali na engleskom jeziku. Nađa Tešić je bila jedina upečatljiva ženska spisateljica među svojim kolegama Čarlsom Simićem i Stivom Tešićem. Rad se dalje bavi tekstovima Borac u senci (1989) i Umreti u Čikagu (2010), koji su okarakterisani kao autobiografski romani. Analiza ovih dela potcrtava sledeće teme: autofikciju, rod i film. Tekst nastoji da pokaže kako se ova dva romana objavljuju kao autofikcija, kako se brojna pitanja koja se tiču roda, a koja su implicitna u narativu, slivaju u portret umetnice kao mlade žene, kao i da identifikuje brojne funkcije filma kao autoreferentne vrednosti autorkinog stila.

This paper analyses Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage as a female Bildungsroman. Firstly, the role of education is addressed. A journey, in the physical and spiritual sense, is discussed in the third part. Marriage and motherhood are likewise relevant and the fourth section is focused on these elements. Finally, having compared the developmental paths of male and female characters in the traditional and contemporary female Bildungsroman, we arrive at the conclusion that this genre is flexible enough to allow for a transposition into modern times and into a different cultural environment.

O Bildungsroman surge na Alemanha, no final do século XVIII, tendo Goethe como um de seus principais expoentes. Pertencem a este gênero romances nos quais são retratados os processos de formação e amadurecimento do protagonista, diante de situações de confronto com os acontecimentos do mundo, da sociedade. Nesses romances, é destacada a prioridade da subjetividade mediante os valores sociais da época em que estão situados. Entretanto, a tradição desse tipo de romance estendeu-se para além dos limites do período e de sua nacionalidade. Este era considerado um gênero literário exclusivamente masculino, pelo fato de que "às mulheres não era, na época, possível a liberdade de movimentos que permite ao herói o contato com múltiplas experiências sociais decisivas no percurso de autoconhecimento" (FLORA, 2009). Contudo, sua temática se tornou popular na literatura produzida por mulheres na Inglaterra do século XIX. Os Bildungsromane femininos podem ser considerados como uma transgressão ou reinvenção do gênero tradicional. Tendo isso em vista, o presente trabalho teve como objetivos: compreender o Bildungsroman feminino do século XIX; investigar o projeto romântico na era vitoriana presente nas obras; e comparar a representação da subjetividade feminina, mediante os valores sociais da época, nas protagonistas. Quanto à sua metodologia: ela é bibliográfica, de cunho sociológico, possuindo caráter explicativo.

J[oanne] K. Rowling's Harry Potter franchise set a powerful new distribution model for cross-marketing cultural content spanning a variety of age, race, and gender demographics. Hot across Potter's jugular, the coming-of-age novel series Twilight 1 continues to drive the young adult market, selling a combined total of just under 26.5 million copies in 2009. 2 The first book alone has sold 25 million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-seven languages. 3 The Twilight Saga, a series of film adaptations of the novels, earns loyal fans and revenue returns totaling $389 million so far for just the first three films. 4 While the sales and earnings do not come close to the Potter empire, 5 they are remarkable insofar as girls drive the Twilight phenomenon, a demographic once ignored as mere sidekick to the primacy of the men-in-training youth market. 6 The consumption of Twilight on such a huge scale and the zeitgeist of girl desire articulated through hundreds of pages catapult it to the top of the contemporary bil-dungsroman for girls, offering plot cues and character subreferences that permeate girl culture and popular culture at large. While Twilight is notable for making novel reading trendy among girl nonreaders and readers alike, its most significant effect lies in the proliferation of fan texts, taking reader response to a whole new level of self-actualization. Girl prosumers (producers/consumers) deploy technological savvy and critical aesthetic acumen to generate a host of responses to Twilight, which they then publish on the Internet. The key difference for the Twilight phenomenon is that the bildungsroman as enculturation narrative now requires the production of new texts—texts based upon the original but that operate outside the purview of previous reader/text response. The prosumption of Twilight illustrates one of a number of vectors through which girls enculture and produce one another, actualizing one or any number of selves online.

The paper discusses the beginning of female bildungsroman in the Czech culture between the 1860s and 1870s and recognises the process of establishing its main hermeneutic codes concerning gender, nation, and class. Firstly, I investigate the historical substantiation of conduct fiction for the women as embedded into the literary culture of Czech nationalism and the early stages of establishing systematic education for the girls. Then I explore the continuum of conduct fiction published in the journal for girls «Zlaté klásy» between 1867 and 1875 as a moral campaign aimed at recruiting the girls into new practices such as educating at the Czech schools, practising Czech identity including speaking Czech language, and marrying the Czech men exceptionally.

Eine Buchbesprechung des Essayromans „Europas längster Sommer“ von Maxi Obexer, die unternommen aus der Perspektive eines Oberschlesiers aufzuweisen versucht, dass Literatur anderer Grenzgebiete, durch ein Potenzial von analogen Erfahrungen der schwierigen Vergangenheit, zu einem besseren Verstehen des Eigenen und des Fremdsein-Gefühls außerhalb der eigenen Heimat in der Gegenwart beisteuern kann. Die dabei ausgelösten Reflexionen verdeutlichen die Bedeutung einzelner Bestandteile beim Sozialisierungsprozess (wie Bildung in der Muttersprache oder kulturelles Umfeld) von Grenzlandmenschen. Im Buch wird ebenso Kritik an der gegenwärtig sich verbreitenden rechtspopulistisch-nationalistischen Trends in Europa geübt. Darüber hinaus zeigt der Essayroman das länderübergreifende Verständigungspotenzial von Literatur als solcher auf, in dem Fall am Beispiel der Grenzlandliteratur.

The Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s initiated a strong political consciousness amongst Mexican-Americans, turned the previously derogatory terms ‘Chicano’ and ‘Chicana’ into assertions of ethnic pride, and sparked the creation of a vast body of literature by writers of Mexican descent.
We will begin our survey of Chicano and Chicana literature with Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s famous epic poem “I am Joaquin” in which the speaker voices the social inequalities in the United States at the time of the Movement. Joaquin’s struggle to fashion an identity in the push-and-pull of American, Mexican, and indigenous cultures and traditions will become a recurring issue in this class when we probe stories and poems set in the Southwest border region or the Latino neighborhoods of American metropolises. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poetry, Sandra Cisneros’s coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street and Luis Rodriguez’s narratives of a gang-plagued East L.A., narrators and characters cross borders, negotiate generational conflicts, and attempt to straddle the perceived divide between community and individuality. In our readings of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek” we will encounter the weeping women, patron saints and indigenous healers of Mexican folklore, as well as La Malinche, the highly contested and iconic woman who – legend has it – was involved in the Spanish conquest. We will analyze their literary representations and study their re-writes and re-appropriations in view of gender roles in Mexican-American culture.

BILGEN AKMAN: Female Lead Characters as examples of Bildungsroman heroines in L’Amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar and Les Yeux baissés by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Under the direction of Dr. Hassan Melehy) This thesis presents two Maghrebian novels written in French that share aspects of the Bildungsroman tradition. This reading via the lens of the Bildungsroman underscores the importance of the choice of a young female central character. The novels are subjected to a close reading that focuses on the female characters as they journey towards adulthood. The first novel, Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, chronicles the story of Djebar’s upbringing interspersed with stories depicting Algeria’s colonial history. The second novel, Les Yeux baissés by Tahar Ben Jelloun, focuses on a young female immigrant coming-of-age while coping with the inbetweenness created by her migration. These contemporary novels are shown to be examples of an evolved genre that utilizes elements of the Bildungsrom...

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG WOMEN
WHO DOES (NOT) COME OF AGE:
THE TEMPORALITY OF INTERRUPTED GROWING UP
IN THE ADOLESCENT NOVEL OF VESNA ALEKSIĆ
Summary
This paper analyzes several adolescent novels of Vesna
Aleksić in order to point out to the motives and narrative
strategies whose unity rests on the overlapping of the specific elements of three genres: the genre of the female novel of development, the genre of the adolescent novel and the genre of children’s literature. The focus of this analysis are novels whose narrator is a female adolescent who reveals her artistic vocation. The theoretical framework on
which the analysis of the novels Marija Modiljani, Wind
Bidding, The Constellation Violin relies is the tradition of
semiotic analysis of children’s literature (Maria Nikolajeva,
Clementine Beauvais), as well as feminist approaches to the
genre of the female novel of development and feminist approaches to children’s literature. As the motif of the artist’s
development is related to the metaphor of war or the war
trauma which interrupts normal growing up both in the author’s adolescent and children’s novels, the aim of this paper is twofold: to examine how the conventions of various genres inform the imagination of childhood and growing up in Vesna Aleksić’s adolescent novels. Also, the paper explores to which extent this imagery deviates from the ideology of childhood in children’s novels and stories of the
same author. After all, bearing in mind that the voice of a
girl / female adolescent / woman is the dominant narrative
voice in the works of Vesna Aleksić, this paper seeks to examine the links between female subjectivity, female friendship, on the one hand, and the creation of an artist’s identity, on the other hand, within the genre of the adolescent novel.
Keywords: female novel of development, young adult literature,  Vesna Aleksić, aetonormativity, female characters

El presente comentario crítico pretende exponer cómo la
novela Colombina y el pez azul (2008) basa su narrativa en
las características esenciales del Bildungsroman, en
particular en su manifestación femenina y en su vinculación
con la literatura para adolescentes y jóvenes. El análisis
buscará ahondar críticamente en el crecimiento emocional
de la protagonista a partir de la aceptación de la muerte de
su madre, su enfrentamiento a los poderes autoritarios y su
reinserción en órdenes socioculturales (familiares y
religiosos) antes desafiados a través de una reinterpretación
del sentido de la religión como expresión de empatía y
entrega a otros.

Un’autopsia senza cadavere, questo è l’inusuale incarico che Arianna D., anatomopatologa alle soglie della pensione vede affidarsi da Giovanna Docra, antropologa di 47 anni, trasferitasi a Stoccolma, con marito e due figli gemelli, in cerca di realizzazione professionale. Si tratta d’indagare quel “qualcosa” che Giovanna sente sia morto a causa di una mancata storia d’amore con un giovane svedese, innesco della propria crisi esistenziale. L’autopsia è svolta con strumenti della biblioteca anziché con quelli consueti del gabinetto medico legale.
In un doppio io narrante, è di Giovanna la cronaca dei fatti amorosi che Arianna mette a verbale mentre è quest’ultima che racconta la relazione che si sviluppa tra le due donne.
La dettagliata ricostruzione delle vicende impone alla verbalizzante la stessa discesa agli inferi e spasmodica risalita vissute da Giovanna, come in un vero e proprio rito iniziatico. Le 15 settimane di ascolto sempre più partecipato sfociano in una sorellanza grazie alla quale Arianna individua il bandolo della matassa che le consentirà di stendere il rapporto autoptico finale. Identità della vittima, circostanze e cause della morte - in un colpo di scena - trasformano l’autopsia in una sorta di manovra ostetrica aprendo a una rinascita.
È un romanzo che parla d’amore e di come la nostra civiltà abbia preteso di normarlo. Parla di lingua e linguaggi, di confini e sconfinamento tra nazioni, culture, età, convenzioni sociali e stagioni della vita. Ma anche tra razionalità e follia.

Šioje recenzijoje Viktorijos Daujotytės romaną "Juozapa ir jos seserys" aptariu moterų bildungsromanų kontekste. Lietuvių literatūros tradicijoje jis daugiausia sąsajų turi su Šatrijos Raganos apysaka "Viktutė", kurioje pirmą kartą mūsų literatūrinėje tradicijoje moters brandą lemia meilės išgyvenimai. Šio kūrinio bendrumas su šiuolaikiniais moterų romanais atsiskleidžia per moters raidos naratyvą,  seksualumo traktuotę, savitą santykį su istoriniais įvykiais.

ResumenEste artículo plantea que The Tombs of Atuan es una novela de formación femenina que se aparta de los códigos tradicionales de la variante realista y hegemónica del subgénero. Esto debido a que presenta dos elementos no miméticos: un laberinto subterráneo como morada de dioses y la aparición de un mago. Ambos complejizan el proceso de crecimiento de la joven Tenar, su protagonista, e inciden en que su destino al final de la novela, pese a no culminar en una madurez plena, sí se abra a posibilidades alentadoras, distintas a las resoluciones fatalistas de la novela de formación femenina realista.This article proposes that The Tombs of Atuan is a feminine coming of age novel that departs from the conventional codes of its hegemonic version, the realistic one. This derives from the presence of two non-mimetic elements: an underground labyrinth as gods’ dwelling and the appearance of a wizard. Both elements complicate the growth process of young Tenar, the protagonist, and influen...

У раду се кроз анализу наративних иновација у два романа
Милице Јанковић, Пре среће (1924) и Мутна и крвава (1932), указује на два књижевна поља из којих такви приповедачки поступци произилазе: (европска) авангардна књижевност и (српска) женска књижевна традиција. Поигравање идејом главног лика у ова два романа сагледава се, наиме, као 1) вид авангардистичког огољавања поступка, присутног и у ранијој прози Милице Јанковић, али и као 2) поступак у обликовању женског Bildungsromanа у тренутку његове нужне еволуције унутар
традиције српске женске књижевности. Као додатни теоријски ослонац у објашњењу датих појава послужили су концепти прерасподеле ликова и наративног простора у роману. Циљ овога рада је да кроз описану перспективу предочи узајамну условљеност еволуције поетичке, родне и класне (само)свести у прози Милице Јанковић, односно да укаже на место ове прозе у еволутивним токовима српске авангардне и женске књижевности.
Кључне речи: Милица Јанковић, главни лик, лик и наративни просто

La critica letteraria ha codificato come Bildungsroman la forma narrativa con cui il romanzo di formazione delinea il percorso con cui un giovane uomo giunge alla maturità. Dove si collocano le donne e le scrittrici che le raccontano in questo scenario? Il volume effettua un'ampia ricognizione della letteratura tra Otto e Novecento riformulando radicalmente possibili altre definizioni del romanzo di formazione.