Radical Bildung, Revolutionary Pedagogy, and Left Weltliteratur (Goethe, Nizan, Ding, Godard)

This essay recovers a neglected variant of the bildungsroman genre, what one might call the radical bildungsroman. The literary history of the radical bildungsroman extends across nearly two hundred years, from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. The essay begins by mapping out the genre’s origins in the German utopian-socialist milieu of the 1830s and 1840s before turning to a selection of works from the mid-twentieth century that exemplify the genre’s understanding of bildung as a future-oriented, active, and collective endeavor. Departing from the nineteenth-century bildungsroman’s hardwired commitment to individual self-actualization, these works (notably by Ding Ling and Jean-Luc Godard) reimagine bildung as a participatory process that must be undertaken collectively rather than individually and that involves the recognition of shared needs and the forging of new solidarities.