Status Updates From The Way of the World: The B...

The Bildungsroman has a very interesting relationship with grief. It's almost entirely absent, even though it is an extremely formative affective agent. I wonder how this inability to confront mourning with literature in the 19th century affected society. Ancient Greece, for example, had entire genres (elegy is the most famous) dedicated to lamenting. HMMMM.

The Bildungsroman could not have existed in its traditional form if it were not for the massive socio-political destabilization across Europe. The genre became both a representation of and a cure to the identity fracture resulting from 1789.

Moretti is a dense writer but everything he's saying is brilliant, so....I guess it's alright?

If one wonders about the disappearance of the novel of youth, then, the youth of 1919—maimed, shocked, speechless, decimated—provide quite a clear answer... If history can make cultural forms necessary, it can make them impossible as well, and this is what the war did to the bildungsroman.