German Quarterly, October 1st, 2000
Redfield, Marc. Phantom Formations. Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. 220pp. $35.00 hardcover.
For Redfield the Bildungsroman has an exemplary status in exhibiting-and thus exposing-the claim to a referential basis of literature. For insofar as the content of a narrative is taken to be Bildung-"the formation of the human" (42)-this very idea is derived from the form that the narrative as text, as aesthetic construct, provides. Robert Musil succinctly formulated the paradox: "with every true experience a cultured man educates himself. This is the organic plast...
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