Erzählen und Reisen als Bildungskategorien: Felicitas Hoppes Johanna und Hoppe

Abstract

Hoppe’s literary work is based on themes such as travelling and storytelling. The characters of her fiction represent a struggle between attitudes of self-development and refusal of traditional patterns of behaviour, constantly questioning the concept of Bildung as a process of self-fulfilment. Both Johanna (2006), a novel about the French national heroine Joan of Arc, and Hoppe (2012) are not Bildungsromane in the traditional sense of the genre, but rather narrative texts that, focusing on a hybridization of genres (travel novel, historical novel, female Bildungsroman, autofiction), deal with the theme of individual development, reflect on the possibilities of human becoming and repeatedly consider storytelling as an opportunity for one’s own determination. Hoppe’s dealing with the concept of Bildung and with the genre of Bildungsroman comes through mainly in three ways: 1) in the thematization of the journey as a path to education and identity; 2) in the attempt to activate the reader again and again and also to reconceptualize the notion of education through an intertextual dialogical structure and an episodic composition; 3) in the examination of female characters, especially young women, and their phases of development. This paper aims, on the one hand, at considering the different modalities of the representation of Bildung based on the protagonists of both novels and, on the other hand, at exploring the (im)possibilities of ascribing Hoppe’s works to the genre “Bildungsroman”.