Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age

Ned Curthoys is Associate Professor in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (2013).

• Acknowledgments1. Memory as reinvention in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day2. Visionary disenchantment: Accessing second sight in The Kindly Ones3. An exemplary Bildungsheld: Bringing diaspora home in Daniel Stein Interpreter4. Unofficial education and the promotion of active readership in two Holocaust themed novels for children: Hitler’s Daughter and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas5. The Counterfeiters as Bildungsfilm: Allegorizing Jewish history6. A protagonist for dark times: Repurposing memory and the future of civil courage in Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age brings fresh and insightful approaches to contemporary fictional and cinematic texts, combining astute close readings alongside a range of theoretical prisms. Revisited as a highly mobile, fluid, multifaceted genre, the Bildungsroman – in adult and children’s fiction alike – is persuasively showcased as a pedagogical “off-piste” roadmap to equip readers, including fledgling future citizens, with the wherewithal to challenge the reductive rigidity of homogenizing dominant hegemonies. This book regards Bildung as vital questing counter-narratives of cosmopolitan “ethical awakening” that seek to dismantle patriarchy’s stranglehold on historical, religiocultural and familialmatrices, and remap the trajectory of humanity’s formation.