Word: bildungsroman
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...love him, he aspires merely to their tolerance. Trusting and giving, guided by a "lasting conviction that women were a congenial and compassionate sex," he embarks on a quixotic quest for female companionship, only to experience shattering disappointment at the hands of those he seeks to love. Lewis' Bildungsroman is an ironic twist on the 19th century romantic novels he studies in his library carrel. This hero struggles for placid domesticity; it is the women who behave like cads...
...boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets Nathan and Sophie, obsessive lovers, Olympic sexual athletes, and partners in mental disease. In its particulars, Sophie's Choice evokes Styron's own experience as a young writer struggling with hisfirst novel; in its overall scheme, it is Stingo's Bildungsroman, the story of a young man travelling north and discovering the nature of evil...
...that country music doesn't have to be slick to get unsentimental, doesn't have to bluster to hang tough. An album full of sur prises: some topnotch Cash originals; a country cover of the Stones' No Expectations; a little lyrical autobiography; and a 3%-min. Bildungsroman called The Gambler, in which the worldly title character hands down a little useful guidance to the youthful narrator: "Every hand's a winner/ Just like every hand's a loser/ And the best that you can hope for/ Is to die in your sleep...
...every classically shaped woman there may be a ballooning romantic waiting to get out. She is also a useful vehicle for a meditation on the possibilities of modern fiction. In unobtrusive layers of allusion, Atwood pays homage to earlier forms of the novel - the picaresque, the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman and Victorian saga. She tries to shoehorn her heroine's life into the coherent contours of those forms, but Joan Foster won't sit still for the fitting. Even the baggiest literary shapes require a greater certainty about life than heroine - or author - can muster. "It did make...
...same consuming unhappiness as Dangerfield. The tone of the whole book, in fact, is unlike that of The Ginger Man: Balthazar B is a wistful tale, and though lightened by brilliant flashes of humor, it always maintains an essentially sorrowful vision of life. Written in the traditional mode of bildungsroman, a story of youthful education, it is nevertheless not a picaresque rogue story. Rather, Balthazar B resembles in theme the modern novel of disenchantment and alienation, suffused as it is with a sense of futility, loss and thwarted love, in which comedy is a grace, though hardly saving...