|
The Transcendental novel: the Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode. The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode turns the transcendental postulate of a pre-established harmony between the ego and the world into (fictional) reality, i.e. it provides symbolic images and a symbolical from for a re-enchanted universe. The Characteristics of the Transcendental novel 1) Anti-mimetic 2) The open forms freely employing various types of writings. 3) Self-reflexivity 4) In their narration, their symbols, and their symbolical form, these novels present a symbolic picture of the universe, which is the exact antithesis to a mechanical and "disenchanted" view of the world. With poetic means only...these novels try to re-build the symbolic view of the world which the Enlightenment and natural science had destroyed: a world, in which subject and object, man and nature, soul and body, natural and human history, are "related" in an emphatic sense of the world and in which their relationship does not rest on strife and the domination of one part by the other but on consubstantiality and mutual affinity. Character formation is thus but a metonymy of all forms of natural formation and of natural and human history as a whole. Quite often, it is modelled on the triadic scheme of paradise/fall/redemption, or of unity, division, unity regained at a higher level(Manfrend Engel, "Variants of the Romantic Bildungsroman" 276-77)
 
|
