Contemporary Narratives of Bildung: New Directions*

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue “Contemporary Narratives of Bildung: New Directions” by distinguishing “narratives of Bildung” from alternate terms such as Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age stories. It does so to recognize Bildung as the core element of a genre that is now widely found across media and to reflect the diversity of its present-day iterations. This introduction also traces the paradigm shifts (most prominently “critical multilingualism”) and the scholarly landmarks that have allowed for the increasingly thorough examination of the globalization and diversification of the Bildung genre over the past decades. It argues that, as they attend to the poetics of plurality and difference in their primary texts, the articles included in this special issue open up new ways of conceptualizing the intersections of Bildung and linguistic diversity, hybridity, mobility, inbetweenness, and feminist interventions. These new directions delineate emerging sub-genres that respond to the changing social demands and norms that shape contemporary narratives of Bildung.