The Bildungsroman

“The term Bildungsroman was introduced to the critical vocabulary by the German philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1941)” (Boes 2006, 231). But his academic writings “were not translated into English until the 1950s but the word itself made its way across the Channel as part of the lexical infusion that arose from Edwardian interests in the writings of German thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel” (Boes 2006, 231). Apart from the basic definition in “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Susanne Howe’s “Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen”, has been considered as the first academic work on the subject, which was published in 1930. For the last several decades, however, “the primary reference to the British novel

This transition is accomplished in him and through him… It is as though the very foundations of the world are changing, and man must change along with them” (Bakhtin 1986, 23-4).

In more general terms, the Bildungsroman is a novel of “building” or growth and development. In his well-known novel “A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man”, James Joyce portrays the specific process of the novel’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus that leads to his becoming (in Bakhtinian terms) a writer/artist. Likewise, Pink as the protagonist in the movie/documentary “The Wall” reflects the same development as that of Stephen Dedalus, however, it ends with the vanishing of the artist both physically and psychologically. For example, the director Alan Parker focuses entirely on his hero’s destructive side, while James Joyce highlights his character’s constructive side in the separation from society. Through this primary difference, this study aims to compare and contrast Stephen and Pink as “developing” characters and with this, the attempt is also made to illustrated how the literate and the media show the process of ‘bildung’ in terms of their own narrative