Growing Pains: A Study Of Bildungsroman In Germany

The young need explore both inner and outside world during the process of obtaining maturity. During this period, individual constantly experiences conflicts, even crises, to bear various contradictions and pains. Especially, the one who at the turning point between the old era and the new era, will be involved in more pains. Bildungsroman depicts the the journey of protagonist's growing up, showing the hard process of young people looking for identity in the world. Bildungsroman stem from Germany in the 18th century, not only formed a unique literary style in the German literature history, but also has a close relationship with the concept of Bildung. This thesis brings this literary style into education research field to study the process of the young'growing up. Based on Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, this thesis emphasises the pains suffered by the young man, thus analyses the pedagogy of the "pains".The thesis is made up of four parts:Chapter one introduces the background of the research question and proves the research rationality of the method, pointing out the basic relation between "education" and "growing up"Chapter two presents the concept of Bildungsroman and the cultural background of it's emergence, focusing on analyzing the concept of "Bildung".Chapter three is the main part of the thesis, taking the classical work of Bildungsroman--Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as the case, to analyze the journey of the protagonist's growing up and to obtain the inspiration in the pedagogy.Chapter four putting Ni huan-zhi as the comparation analyzes the failure to grow up, then shows the appropriate education we need to adopt to guide the young's gowing up.