Mis(s)Education: Feminist Undoings of the Bildungsroman

Catalog description

Declared central to Western history and culture by Freud, the Oedipal complex survived in manifold literary reiterations– particularly the Bildungsroman, which privileges the father as primary educator and eventual adversary. This course challenges the genre’s patriarchal premise by shifting focus to female representations, in order to reconsider the traditionally ‘masculine’ discourse on Bildung. As a dynamic construct, femininity allows to dispute the historically patriarchal paradigm of knowledge acquisition and the precarious position of woman beyond psychoanalysis. Departing from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, we will open the genre’s paternal margins toward works such as Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Satrapi’s Persepolis.