The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

by Franco Moretti, Albert Sbragia

Wilhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julien Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke ... the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective youth. It is problematic and restless youth—“strange” characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to “read”, and to accept, as if it were a novel.

The Way of the World , with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman  as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman  in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for modernist experiments), and a new preface in which the author looks back at The Way of the World  in the light of his more recent work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Academic, Lit Crit, Academia, History, Literature

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Franco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He has written five books, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy, quantitative methods from the social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Moretti has recently edited a five-volume encyclopedia of the novel, entitled Il Romanzo (2004), featuring articles by a wide range of experts on the genre from around the world. It is available in a two-volume English language edition (Princeton UP, 2006).

Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the University of Rome in 1972, graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University. There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based group of radical intellectuals. He is also a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research.

Reviews

[Rocío G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moretti's caffeinated prose makes the perusal of The Way of the World a highly enjoyable affair. A mix between theory of the novel and social history, it tackles the cultural significance of the great nineteenth-century novel: the Bildungsroman. Thoroughly wide-reaching and thought provoking.

My one gripe is that I found Moretti too inclined to look down on the pre-Eliot English Bildungsroman in relation to its continental counterpart. He is perhaps too eager to ignore the ethical and narrative complexity of Dickens, Fielding and Charlotte Brontë in order to declare George Eliot the single good English artist that engaged with the form (perhaps with the exception of Jane Austen).

[Danica Colnarić · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was not sure what the author's plan had been: to provide a theoretical framework, or to analyse some of the famous Bildungsromane. Further on, I believe he stepped into the field of philosophy too much: I foundmyself reading the same segment for a couple of times trying to grasp what he had wanted to express.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty compelling, tbh! Charts how the genre narrates a particular acculturation and socialization of the self — and a particular prescriptive usage of the “I” into a generalized community subjectivity — and how in modernity / postmodern lit that’s not possible (think here of Ulysses and the fractured social voice; something that Jameson discusses in his book on Lewis and modernist fascism but I digress). Above all this made me want to re-read some Goethe, wasn’t sure that day would ever come

[Simón Núñez · Rating 4 out of 5]

La escritura de Moretti es clara y tiene una inquietud y movilidad que cuesta encontrar en libros especializados sobre historia y estudios literarios.
Me enfoqué en los capítulos iniciales que introducen el tema del libro —la así llamada "novela de formación" europea del siglo XIX— y también leí el capítulo final sobre la ramificación de este género en lo que Moretti llama "novela de formación tardía y modernista".
La tesis central del libro es que la novela de formación decimonónica (que en alemán se llama bildungsroman) sintetizó en la figura de los jóvenes la capacidad de las sociedades capitalistas para "fundir" de forma armónica los deseos de autodeterminación de los jóvenes junto con la necesidad igual de imperiosa de estos individuos por integrar la sociabilidad de un mundo cuya demanda de consensos y acuerdos al mismo tiempo restringía esos deseos de realización personal. La novela de formación tardía, por su lado, emerge a principios del siglo XX, en otro momento histórico, y habría mostrado a diferencia del género clásico, la imposibilidad de fusionar los polos de autodeterminación y sociabilidad que Moretti describe como facetas contradictorias constitutivas de la modernidad occidental.
The Way of the World porque está en inglés es un desafío para quienes nos manejamos ahí no más con el idioma y tenemos que estar yendo al diccionario constantemente, pero Moretti es ágil y sus ideas apasionan así que vale el esfuerzo (en mi caso para tres o cuatro capítulos largos).

[Paolo D'Amelio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eccoci qua...Prima o poi tutti si devono confrontare con Franco Moretti, questa sorta di "Don Giovanni" della critica letteraria, sogno proibito di ogni professoressa di letteratura inglese (si scherza, eh, non se la prendano...). La sua trattazione nel campo a sè stante del Bildungroman sembra oramai assurta al canone di classico ma...non è il caso che qualche giovane dottore si cimenti nel rivedere qualche definizione che il Moretti con la nonchalance dell'istrione lascia inaccuratamente cadere sui lettori, come quella che la bildung femminile sia uguale nella struttura a Cenerentola...? Insomma la Charlotte Bronte ha fatto tanto per emancipare Jane Eyre e tu me la riduci a Cenerentola...?!!
Moretti, Moretti !!! (queste ultime due parole sono da pronunciare come fanno gli inviati di "Striscia la notizia").

[Jacques le fataliste et son maître · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sono senza parole: questo libro non solo delinea con una ricchezza di particolari inaudita il romanzo di formazione; fornisce anche una visione in profondità dell’Ottocento. La scrittura, poi, è esemplare per chiarezza (e piacevolmente ironica).

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendamente mais interessante do que os mais recentes, estes em torno do estudo da literatura versão Big Data: diante da sua própria bifurcação como crítico, Moretti devia mesmo é ter ficado do lado de cá.

[Frida Demant · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got what I needed from it, but the language was very dull and I do disagree with him on several observations.

[Ilaria Lupacchini · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this for German Literature I in university and let me tell you, i’ve never been more compelled by a non fictional book in my life. Heck, there are numerous fictional books that had me less hooked than this book, and i’m very much a fiction kinda person. Thank you Moretti 🫶🏻

[Rachel Vincenzi · Rating 1 out of 5]

i could not finish this book.

[Bruno Leite · Rating 4 out of 5]

o melhor desse livro foi conversar com o terry depois e ver que estamos sim certos

[A L]

The sequence of the bourgeois social novel is driven by the contradiction between the autonomous individual and the socialization necessary to maintain a modern bourgeois state, which then propagates the value of individual freedom. On the continent, these novels articulate a seamless unity between becoming oneself and becoming a productive citizen, making the revolution of '89 unnecessary; but after 1815 this ideology becomes unworkable. In Britain, the logic of the fairy tale is enough to enshrine the ideology of English common law. The whole sequence comes to an end when the European novel of the ego confronts the unconscious.