Phantom Formations
Aesthetic Ideology and the "Bildungsroman"
Published on 14. November 1996
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-0-8014-3236-1 (ISBN)
Description
Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.
Reviews / Votes
A thoughtful, complex book that integrates aesthetic philosophy, close textual readings, and literary theories, all of which eventually make a leap to talk about what we mean by culture, history, and humanity, what we do when we read or teach literature, and why the twentieth-century institutionalization of literature has generated the curious phenomenon of 'literary theory'.- Lorely French (European Romantic Review)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paper over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
907 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8014-3236-1 (9780801432361)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2018
Cornell University Press
€4.49
Available for download
Person
Marc Redfield is Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of English, and Chair of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror, and Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America.