Bildungsroman - Become Enlightened

REYRGVMJTERY
 

In light of JD Salinger's death, I thought I would touch on the story he wrote - The Catcher In The Rye. It's a Bildungsroman. I had to look that up...so here's what I found out.

A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age kind of novel. It arose during the German Enlightenment. In it, the author presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a character, usually the protagonist. The term Bildungsroman was coined by Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern.

The bildungsroman generally takes the following course:

• The protagonist grows from child to adult.
• The protagonist has a reason to embark upon his or her journey. A loss or some discontent must, at an early stage, jar him or her away from the home or family setting.
• The process of maturation is long, arduous and gradual, involving repeated clashes between the hero's (protagonist's) needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. This conflict bears some similarity to Sigmund Freud's concept of the pleasure principle versus the reality principle.

Within the broader genre, an entwicklungsroman is a story of general growth rather than self-culture; an erziehungsroman focuses on training and formal education; and a künstlerroman is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.

Many genres other than the bildungsroman can include elements of it as prominent parts of their story lines. For example, a military story might show a raw recruit receiving a baptism by fire and becoming a battle-hardened soldier, while a high-fantasy quest story may show a transformation from an adolescent protagonist into an adult who is aware of his or her lineage or powers. Neither of those genres or stories, however, corresponds exactly to the bildungsroman.

This is an incomplete chronological list of Bildungsroman works that are widely acknowledged to be representative of the genre.

• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (1850)
• Green Henry, by Gottfried Keller (1855)
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1860–61)
• Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert (1869)
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1881-82)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884)
• Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling (1897)
• A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
• Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908)
• Martin Eden, by Jack London (1909)
• Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (1914–15)
• Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham (1915)
• The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (1915)
• Demian, by Hermann Hesse (1919)
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
• Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924)
• All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque (1928)
• Pather Panchali, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1929)
• Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1931)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin (1953)
• Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein (1953)
• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (1955)
• The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass (1959)
• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (1959)
• Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (1959)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
• Davy by Edgar Pangborn (1964)
• Out of the Shelter by David Lodge (1970)
• My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok (1972)
• Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (1972)
• Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Lanark: A Life in Four Books, by Alasdair Gray (1981)
• Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson (1985)^[12]
• The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay (1989)
• The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi (1990)
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (1995)
• The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)
• Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell (author) (2006)

 Source: Wikipedia