Moretti, Wilson

Here are some links on the critical texts we talked about in today's seminar. First, here's the Google books version of Franco Moretti's Way of the World: the Bildungsroman and European Culture (1987; English translation Verso 2000); you can read a good proportion of it there. It's a much fuller, and more complex text than I was, perhaps, giving the impression when we discussed it, but its core thesis -- that the Bildungsroman is essentially the narrative of youth -- is certainly relevant for David Copperfield:

Achilles, Hector, Ulysses: the hero of the classical epic is a maure man, an adult. Aeneas, carrying away a father by now too old, and a son too young, is the perfect embodiment of the symbolic relevance of the 'middle' stage of life ... but with the first enigmatic hero of modern times, it falls apart. According to the text Hamlet is thirty years old: far from young by Renaissance standards. But our culture, in choosing Hamlet as its first symbolic hero, has 'forgotten' his age, or rather has had to alter it, and picture the Prince of Denmark as a young man

Twelve, I think, was Michael's judgement in class today. Moretti goes on to talk more specifically about the novel as a mode:

The decisive thrust in this sense was made by Goethe, and it takes new shape, symptomatically, precisely in the work that codifies the new paradigm and sees youth as the most meaningful part of life: Wilhelm Meister. This novel was simultaneously the birth of the Bildungsroman (the form which will dominate or, more precisely, make possible the Golden Century of Western narrative) and of a new hero: Wilhelm Meister, followed by Elizabeth Bennet and Julien Sorel, Rastignac and Frederic Moreau and Bel-Ami, Waverley and David Copperfield ... [p.3]

There's our boy. The 'Golden Century of Western narrative' is the nineteenth-century, of course; Moretti has a theory that the Bildungsroman faltered after the first-world war, although I don't think that's right, personally. Check out the link on Wilhelm Meister if you're interested in those novels.

We also discussed Edmund Wilson's long essay 'Dickens: the Two Scrooges', which is definitely worth a browse. This doesn't seem to be online anywhere, but you'll find it in the library; it was collected in a volume called The Wound and the Bow.