MFS Modern Fiction Studies

In recent years, Bildung and the Bildungsroman genre have attracted considerable attention, especially in modernist and postcolonial studies, which have re-evaluated the former’s conceptual relevance and the latter’s formal efficacy. In postcolonial fiction, the fissure, or contradiction, in classical Bildung and modernity itself becomes the source of new forms of identity and community. Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet explores alternative means of achieving cultural and aesthetic wholeness through new modes of auto/biographical writing. In her nonlinear, polyvocal, and syncopated narratives, we find instead alternatives to conventional Bildung that are more adaptable to non-Western modes of social belonging.