THE EVOLUTION OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN AS A DISTINCT LITERARY GENRE

INTRODUCTION
The main target of this paper is to show the importance of this kind of novel along time and to present the development of the characters and writing techniques. While analysing the word Bildung I found out that it has multiple meaning as both a process of free formation and a product modelled upon a prior form. This problematic raises some questions about Bildungsroman. The first question is how exactly a literary genre can reflect the evolution of a human being? The second question is how the characters are presented during the whole novel, are they free or their lives are continuously shaped by the author? The last question is how Bildungsroman manages to be as popular today as in the moment of its first release? In the first part I will define the Bildungsroman and render some important characteristics and particularities of it. I will expose the way this species entered in the peoples life and the way they react seeing a work in which the action is presented chronologically, resembling a human beings life. I will speak about the authors who gave birth to this novel and also about the ones who continued and improved the writing method and the way the characters were presented during the novel. In the second part I will speak about the Bildungsroman from a different perspective: presenting the way this novel is still present today, but not only in written form.

PART I: THE BILDUNGSROMAN, A NEW LITERARY GENRE

The Bildungsroman is a class of novel that deals with the formative years of the main character, whose moral and psychological development is depicted. It is a novel that traces the development of a character from childhood to adulthood, through a quest of identity that leads him or her to maturity. This literary work is to be placed in relation with the German tradition, the birth of the Bildungsroman being dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1795. This work was a great success not only in Germany, it influenced Europe and then the whole world. While critics like Franco Moretti (1987) have argued that the Bildungsroman genre enjoyed only a brief flowering before it fell into desuetude or others like Todd Kontje (1992) have argued that the Bildungsroman is a genre that readers now engage with incredulity, astonished by its outmoded philosophy and poetics. Now lets analyse the factors that made this work so popular. First of all we need to tell that the idea of Bildung was differently understood by the masses. The German tended to focus attention on the individuals cultivation, while neglecting responsibility for the national culture. The English tried to be attentive toward both, and the American was struck somewhere between the German and the English. People all over the world enjoyed this work anyway. It had been translated into various languages, so that was the starting point for another authors such as: Charlotte Bront, Henry Fielding, Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and many others. The structure of a Bildungsroman is not very different from a novel, here we can also find the introduction, the intrigue, the plot and the ending. But lets not focus on the moments of subject, lets focus on the development and evolution of the characters. In Bildungsroman we can divide this evolution into three major moments: first is the one of the childhood, where we can find a presentation of the characters and how they manage to interact with the surroundings. This moment is not present in all of the novels, some of them starting with the second moment: adulthood. This second moment is the most important of them all because here the characters are facing the real world. They are unexperienced and they are tempted to do all kind of delirious things. Some of them cannot adapt to the environment and cannot interact properly with other people when they need to describe their feelings. Here we can mention The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, written by Henry Fielding, novel in which Tom even if he was a kind-hearted youth, is as a bastard which causes Sophias father and Allworthy to oppose their love. The last stage of evolution is the stage when the characters

find their own path, being completely prepared physically and emotionally to confront the hostilities of life. If we were to make a description of the typical character from a novel of formation he or she would be poor person, trying to face the difficulties of life alone, having numerous adventures and quests in order to gain experience and to succeed in a hostile world. This was in fact the key, the success of this genre relied on the presentation of real life of that time. Readers were fascinated about how a novel can include a humans life and they were sometimes confounding with a character. They were enjoying the fact that the characters were free, the author being implied only to create a succession of ideas and not being interested to decorate neither a place nor a character. A paradoxical thing is that in some novels of this kind, the main character is not the most important person during the plot. For example in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman written by Laurence Sterne, the main character: Tristram, is an episodic character even if the title anticipates a typical Bildungsroman. This is not a violation of a rule and it can be read in one of the Schillers letters, in which the author describes Wilhelm Meister: Wilhelm Meister is the most necessary character, but not the most important Everything takes place around him, but not because of him: precisely because the things which surround him represent and express energies, and he instead pliability, his relationships with the other characters had to be different from those of the heroes of other novels.

PART II: THE OTHER PERSPECTIVE

In the first part we presented the Bildungsroman, its major characteristics and authors. Now we would like to speak about what happened to this genre today, when reading a book is not as popular as watching a movie or a clip. Today there are numerous authors writing this genre, but they are underestimated by the society, a society in which the stages of life are passing very fast, and people are not interested in time lasting activities anymore. The solution was very simple, some authors who wanted to promote their work, simply had to make a movie after the book. Today there are a lot of movies that are created from a novel, but lets not forget the Bildungsroman, a genre that is preferred nowadays. Many people dont know that some well-known movies are in fact a Bildungsroman but presented with the help of technology. Harry Potter, for example is a book and also a movie which is in fact nothing else than a novel of formation. If we look at it closely, we can see

some similarities with other works: Harry is presented as a child who evolves into an experienced wizard during the story. He gets through various quests to achieve his goals, as a typical Bildungsroman character. But here we find a lot of new things, such as witchery. This is a sign that the novel of formation has evolved since the time it first appeared. Another Bildungsroman is Never let me go written by Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel which is also a movie and in which the main theme is also to present the life of a little girl who is orphane and shes grown in order to be useful when other persons want transplants. The presentation of her evolution since she was a child has a strong emotional impact, the audience being attached to her until she leaves this world. It is to be noted that even today most of the characterisics are still preserved, but there are also some exceptions. Have you ever asked yourself how was it to be born old? Now we will present another Buildungsroman, but a very special one: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This is not a proper novel, it is a movie which also shows the development of a character but viewed from another perspective. Here the evolution is in fact an involution because the main character was born old and he transforms into a child. He starts to forget all he had learnt during his life, the moment of climax being the middle of his life, moment when he has enough experience to live on his own. This movie respects the Bildungsroman characteristics and opens new and unknown paths to other generations which are still interested in this genre.

CONCLUSION
I created this work in order to present the importance of Bildungsroman in our lives and to show the transition between the old times and the contemporary times. As you can notice there are some differences and similarities, but this is not so important. All you need to know is that you must realise the value of this writing technique and that you have to be able to find if a novel or a movie is based on a Bildungsroman or not. The most important thing is that a Bildungsroman will never remain an obsolete work, being a genre which can always surprise you.

BIBIOGRAPHY:
Franco, Moretti The way of the world: the Bildungsroman in European culture Thomas L. Jeffers Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana

Giovanna Summerfield; Lisa Downward New perspectives on the European Bildungsroman