Word: bildungsroman
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What keeps the book from being no more than a series of alphabetically arranged humor columns is the leitmotif of becoming a man: Jacobs somehow turns the effort of reading 33,000 pages into the world's most passive Bildungsroman. The project, it seems, springs less from an urge to soak up information than from a desire to confront his Oedipus complex. His brilliant lawyer father, who is so competitive that he holds the record for most footnotes in a legal article, once attempted to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica but quit in the B's. But even more important...
...India's film industry, which each year churns out close to 1,000 films, virtually all weepy melodramas staged as singing, dancing, multiple-costume-changing revues. Three years ago, fate brought Lloyd Webber and celebrated Indian composer A.R. Rahman together, and so was born Bombay Dreams, a campy bildungsroman that follows young hero Akaash along a morally perilous path from the slums to Bollywood stardom. Having played on London's West End since June 2002, Bombay Dreams is set to open on Broadway next April...
...Indeed, this is basically a buddy-buddy, up-to-the-movie-moment story with dashes of the traditional coming-of-age bildungsroman tossed in. More Tom Sawyer than Huckleberry Finn, with the accent on a soft center rather than on gritty harder edges, the formerly "re-educated" Dai Sijie's first novel?a best seller in France?is still a diverting bagatelle abounding in gentle humor, warm bonhomie and appealing charm. No small triumph for a tale set in that unhappy era not too long ago when "every nook and cranny of the land came under the all-seeing...
...undergraduate novel of self-discovery and education, or Bildungsroman. I suppose it is possible to retain this tradition by writing the autobiography of a life parked before a computer screen. But how much flavor would be missing without the scene of the hero walking across campus alone on a winter night, his head uncovered, his jacket collar drawn tight about his neck, alone, hearing a violin play You'll Never Walk Alone in a practice room somewhere, alone, in the snow that turns to rain...
When beautician Polly Tishun (Michael Kennedy '99) blooms from her stuttering shy-girl cocoon and becomes a sexy, successful presidential candidate, we not only see gender-bending acquire an occupational valence but also a post-feminist re-telling of the American teenager's Bildungsroman, embedded in a politicized pulp paradigm that we have not seen since the 60s (aka Celine Dion). Kennedy is fully aware of all the dimensions of his character but still manages to add symbolic layers even as he sheds tactile ones...