Bildungs Roman in Avni Doshi’s ‘Girl in White Cotton”

The term “Bildungsroman” is a literary genre. The German word Bildungsroman means “novel of education” or “novel of formation”. It deals with the particular person‟s intellectual and ethical growth from the childhood to adulthood. Avni Doshi „s „Girl in White Cotton”relates the growing up or “coming of age” of a protagonist. Bildungsroman also deals with the conflict between the main character and society, where the protagonist tend to accept the social value. This paper brings out the Bildungsroman based novel.

Poéticas do deslocamento: O Bildungsroman de autoria feminina contemporânea

The novel as a great socio-literary institution, which projects the ideals of bourgeois class, becomes the maximum expression of modernity from the 18th century on. The genre, characterized by its malleability and ambivalence, reflects an individualistic and innovative orientation. In this sense, the novels of characters originate subtypes, as the Bildungsroman, whose paradigmatic model would be Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since the novel is a genre in constant becoming, the concept of Bildungsroman undergoes problematizations and revisions and, today, it is possible to consider a novel of formation which includes ethnic, racial and sexual minorities. Some important steps in male Bildungsroman, such as fulfillment in love from several experiences and the discovery of a professional vocation and a philosophy of life, are still problematic in female novels of formation along the 20th century, due to the small space dedicated to woman in society, making her formative experiences more subjective, and culminating, in most cases, in the failed end of characters who cannot escape the webs of social oppresion. In this book I try to show that there is a process of subjectification of the female characters, in which the formative experiences occur through spatial and identity displacements, characteristic of modern times. Thus in the novels of formation from the 21th century – such as Pérolas Absolutas (2003), by Heloísa Seixas, Algum Lugar (2009), by Paloma Vidal, and Azul-corvo (2010), by Adriana Lisboa, – amid globalization and the dismantling of great utopias and truths, they experience other conflicts and problems resulting from the fluidity of human relations in modern times.

Female Theology Meets Poietic Writing: Michela Murgia’s L’incontro (2012)

One of the most acclaimed (female) voices of contemporary Sardinian and Italian literature, Michela Murgia offers in her short novel L’incontro a powerful expression of poietic writing. Writing as poiēsis, as creative force capable of shaping reality through theoretical reflection, expresses itself in the in-between space of literal and metaphorical orders. In particular, L’incontro represents an expression of poietic writing in its combination of female theology and community activism. This contribution reads L’incontro, a novel of formation unfolding along the preparations for the traditional Sardinian Easter ritual of S’incontru, through the lens of feminist theology and within the theoretical framework provided by the theorization of sexual difference. Marina Warner’s (1976) and Virginia Ramsey Mollenkott’s (1983) feminist biblical exegesis, in conversation with the “teologia al femminile” elaborated by Marinella Perroni and Cristina Simonelli, connect Murgia’s L’incontro to her theological essay, Ave Mary: E la Chiesa inventò la donna (2011). In this context Murgia’s writing articulates a concept of poiēsis that intertwines thinking and doing, transcendence and immanence while shaping a more open and inclusive community.