Wiesel, Elie (Vol. 165) - David L. Vanderwerken (essay date 1990)

David L. Vanderwerken (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Vanderwerken, David L. “Wiesel's Night as Anti-Bildungsroman.” Modern Jewish Studies 7, no. 4 (1990): 57-63.

[In the following essay, Vanderwerken argues that Night is an example of the bildungsroman genre, reversed and “turned inside out.”]

One of our most familiar fictional forms is the story of a young person's initiation into adulthood. That the form remains rich, inexhaustible, and compelling can be confirmed by pointing to the success of The World According to Garp, for one. Although specifically coined to describe a certain tradition of German novel deriving from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, “Bildungsroman”—while untranslateable into English—has become our flexible label for hundreds of works that treat a youth's apprenticeship to life. As Martin Swales has shown in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse,...

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