#  The Bildungsroman Around the World (undergrad common ground course) 

 





 Semester:   Fall 

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 Year offered:  2011 

 

 

 

Established by Goethe at the end of the eighteenth century, the genre of the *Bildungsroman* (or novel of education) has since travelled around the world. This course will explore its appearance in Victorian Britain, in the mid-twentieth-century United States, and in post-independence Africa, focusing on the new forms that the genre takes as it enters new cultures and interacts with their existing literary traditions. The course will conclude with a look at the *Bildungsroman* of the present day.

Novels to include: Adichie's *Half of a Yellow Son*, Brontë's *Jane Eyre*, Cather's *My Antonia*, Dengaremba's *Nervous Conditions*, Dickens's *Great Expectations*, Ellison's *Invisible Man*, Ishiguro's *Never Let Me Go*, Kunkel's *Indecision*, and Ngugi's *Weep Not, Child*.