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Revolutionary Subjects:A Radical History of the Bildungsroman
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A literary history spanning borders and centuries to explore radicalization as portrayed in fiction
Tracing the evolution of socialist world literature from the nineteenth century to the present, Benjamin Kohlmann uncovers the formal repertoires through which a set of political ideals found aesthetic expression. At the heart of this study is the radical bildungsroman, a genre that subverts dominant narratives of individual formation. Broad in scope, Revolutionary Subjects explores the work of Balestrini, Chernyshevsky, Ding Ling, Lessing, Nizan, Sartre, Weiss, Wright, and many others. These novels challenge conventional ideas of selfhood and belonging, presenting new ways to imagine the self in relation to collective struggle and global solidarity.
Reviews
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Seen, for once, from a radically global perspective, as Kohlmann allows us to see it, the bildungsroman reveals a genuinely radical counter-tradition. A source of much-needed cultural sustenance in hard times.
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Everyone in novel studies needs to read this book! Kohlmann uncovers a counter-tradition to the traditional bildungsroman plot—the radical left bildungsroman—which is formally experimental and committed to the collective and transnational work of living and making worlds together. With bravura new readings of a vast range of novelists, from Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Nanni Balestrini to Ding Ling, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and Doris Lessing, this is a magisterial work of criticism.
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We are accustomed to viewing the Bildungsroman as the realm of bourgeois consciousness, by ignoring or neglecting its dialectic complement: a radical Bildungsroman that, from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, is shaped by class struggle, socialism, decolonization, and revolutions. Navigating masterfully between novels, philosophy, and politics, Benjamin Kohlmann leads us both to discover an unknown aesthetic continent and to reinterpret many loved left-wing writers. An admirable accomplishment in theory and literary criticism.