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The successful participant will have: *acquired a thorough knowledge of the field and of the important topics and issues in the study of educational literature, in particular the Bildungsroman, its inflection by gender, and the relation between individual and history in creative narratives focusing on self-development in the long eighteenth century. *S/he will be able analyse the work canonical writers of such novels, Goethe, Scott, and Austen in partiicular, in a contextualised manner. *S/he will also be able to make analytic links to the global diversity and metamorphoses of the Bildungsroman.
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This course will consider key European fictions of education, with a focus on Britain and France, during a period when Enlightenment and Romantic philosophy and poetics manifested in exciting fictions focusing on the growth and development of modern selves, male and female,charting their paths through a period of socio-economic and cultural transformation. We shall approach the category of the bildungsroman critically and analytically, seeking to understand the complex dynamics between the evolving self and actually existing society in our texts. Paying close attention both to the narratological and the political aspects of education, we shall combine close reading with critical tools honed by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Juergen Habermas to understand the public sphere in which these fictions circulated, and the ideological contours of the selves they plotted.
Key texts will be Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96), Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), and Jane Austen's Emma (1816).
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