Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman by Tobias Boes (review)

The history of the Bildungsroman, we often hear, is intimately connected to the history of German idealism in whose original context the Bildungsroman emerged. More specifically, Tobies Boes argues in Formative Fictions, the Bildungsroman as a genre is often described as constitutively wedded to the “normative strain” of German idealism inasmuch as the education and development of the individual protagonist at every moment points toward a universal ideal (18). Much modern Bildungsroman theory that derives from this understanding, Boes continues, can be further divided into two camps: an “essentialist” camp that “believes that…novels of formation…reveal something specific about the character of the German nation” (19) on the one hand, and a universalist camp that understands the Bildungsroman as a genre that “aim[s] to theorize the nation as such, rather than in its particularized German expression” (23) on the other. What is more, Boes argues, regardless of the particular camp from which individual theorizations of the Bildungsroman emerge, all of them privilege form over content and thus define the genre via its ultimate telos (21). And since there is much at stake from the very beginning in such examinations—direct engagements with the vicissitudes of German national identity or with the ontology and function of the modern nation state itself whose rise the Bildungsroman is frequently said to parallel—the history of theories of the novel of formation does not lack grand if not grandiose claims. Critics such as Fredric Jameson and Jed Esty famously understand the Bildungsroman as a fundamentally allegorical genre (a “national allegory” for Jameson and a “soul-nation allegory” for Esty) (20), Franco Moretti traces in the Bildungsroman “the symbolic form of modernity” (22), Joseph R. Slaughter understands it as illustrating human rights law (24), and Michael Beddow and Marc Red-field “link the novel of formation to the production of ‘humanity’ as such” (24). But the problem with all of these claims, Boes shows convincingly and in impressive detail throughout the book, is that they do not quite seem to match up with the empirical evidence, with the historical, philosophical, and socio-political context out of which the Bildungsroman emerged, nor does it correspond with the logic of the foundational literary texts of the genre. “It is surprisingly hard to discover novels that fulfill the strictures of Bildung, teleology, and normativity demanded by the idealist understanding of Bildung,” for instance, Boes remarks, which raises the question how it is ultimately possible to read the genre as a matter of normative ideals that ought to stand at its beginning but that are lacking in both history and literary production. This question, then, marks the starting point for Boes’s project that provides us with nothing less than a new methodological framework for understanding the history and internal heterogeneity of the novel of formation.

Boes indeed takes this question as an occasion to begin his examination of the Bildungsroman from a different starting point. Instead of beginning in Berlin, Jena, or Weimar, cities that more readily come to mind when contemplating matters of the early German nation state with which the Bildungsroman is said to be connected, Boes takes us back to Dorpat (now Taru in Estonia). There, in 1812, Karl Morgenstern coined the term Bildungsroman in the context of his lectures on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. The context of the term’s origin sets much in motion for Boes’s examination and ultimately for the alternate system of understanding the genre his book proposes, though it must be said from the outset that we are not simply presented with an alternative taxonomy of the genre. In fact, it is precisely the taxonomic logic and the temporally paternalistic logic of lineage that Boes’s examination probes and ultimately refuses, in part through a detailed examination of the discontinuous, asynchronous temporality of the genre that Boes traces in relation to the history of historicist thought. For Morgenstern’s own situation—that of a German expatriate intellectual “lecturing on the...