LITERARY TERMINOLOGY #8

ENG200.001 -- Introduction to Literary Study

Prof. Eileen Joy

Spring 2005

BILDUNGSROMAN: a novel that recounts the the development (psychological and sometimes spiritual) of an individual from childhood to maturity, to the point at which the protagonist recognizes his or her place and role in the world. Also called an apprenticeship novel or novel of formation (which is what bildungsroman literally means). Such a work is often autobiographical, but doesn't have to be. The genre was heavily influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796), and the genre's examples include Dickens's Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Dickens's Great Expectations is one of Jonathan Lethem's favorite books, by the way, and he modeled the Isabel Vendle character on Dickens's Miss Havisham.

MAGIC REALISM: from the German magischer Realismus, a phrase used in 1925 by Franz Roh to describe the quasi-surrealistic work of a group of German painters in the 1920s. Over time, the term has come to be applied to fictional prose works that are characterized by a mixture of realistic and fantastic elements. Realistic details and esoteric knowledge are intertwined with dreamlike sequences, abrupt chronological shifts, and complex, tangled plots. Magic realists also incorporate fairy tales and myths into their work. Although the term has most often been applied to Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novelists such as Italo Calvino, John Fowles, Gunter Grass, and Salman Rushdie have also been called magic realists, as has Banana Yashimoto, who combines magic realism with postmodernist attitudes and styles. If you saw the 2001 film Amelie, it contained many elements of magic realism: talking lamps, a winking statue, and protagonist who literally melts when her love interest leaves the restaurant in which she works without asking her for a date. The cult classic, Donnie Darko, also combines realist and fantastic elements to create a surrealist effect.

NOVEL: most simply put, a lengthy fictional prose narrative (with "novel" also meaning: a "new" kind of story). The novel is distinguished from the novella, a shorter fictional prose work that ranges from roughly fifty to one hundred pages in length, from which many scholars have argued the novel developed. The greater length of the novel allows authors to extensively develop one or more characters, to establish their motivations in psychological depth, and to construct intricate plots. The novel quite possibly has its roots on classical Greece (in long verse narratives such as The Iliad) and in ancient Japanese stories such as The Tale of the Genji (c. A.D. 1000), but whatever its historical origins, the novel became definitively established in early eighteenth century England with the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Traditionally, literary historians have distinguished between two overarching categories of novelistic prose fiction: the realistic novel (sometimes called the novel proper) and the romance novel. Realistic novels (such as Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude) seek to attain versimilitude in their depictions of ordinary characters, situations, and settings; in other words, they seek to construct believable, plausible stories. Romance novelists, on the other hand, make little claim to versimilitude. Instead, their novels generally focus on adventures, involve heroes or villains who are larger than life, and often feature improbable, though imaginative, situations. [You might think, for a moment, about the ways in which Lethem's novel combines elements of both the realistic and romance novel genres.]

The definitions above have been partly pilfered from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd edition). Other additions are the work of the fevered mind of Prof. Joy.