Subject Formation In Space: A Spatial Approach To The American-jewish Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman, in a word, is the story of the characters’ growing up andmaturing in the mind and intelligence. Bildung, growing-up or formation, presents thecommon life experience of mankind with different initiation patterns for differentgender, class, race and culture in different times and regions. As a special genre of theBildungsroman, American-Jewish Bildungsroman shares the common ground with theclassical Bildungsroman, distinctiveness with the ethnic Bildungsroman and moderncharacteristics with the American Bildungsroman. Jewish people are a race of spatialwanderers, and its frequent spatial movement endows the subject in literature with astrong sense of space and feeling of battered culture. This kind of spatialized subjectwith fragmented Jewish culture has to adjust himself to the norms of the frequentlychanging spaces and to disciplining himself to the dominant culture. Accordingly, thisdissertation is an attempt to make an investigation into the process from the individualto the subject formed in the space in the American-Jewish Bildungsroman through thelens of spatial theories based on Lefebvre’s triadic process of space and other relatedspatial concepts.Growing-up is the process of the individual growing into the subject in time andspace. The basic proposition of bildung in light of Lefebvre’s theory of “theproduction of space” is that man grows up in the space, and meanwhile produces thespace of growing-up.” The spatial subject is different from the autobiographic andcoherent temporal subject. It is a mobile, changeable and inconsistent subject in theconflict and combination of space and memory, and interweaves the more complexconcepts of time from the aspects of society and culture. Spatiality of the bodypremises the spatial subject. The interrelation between the body and the spacecontains not only the phenomenological relations, that is, man with normal organsstretches his bodily posture in the abstract space without social conditions, but alsothe impact of spatial conditions ruled by social orders on the bodily behavior patternsand the reflection of the body to the changeable social conditions. Such a body expresses the subject’s inner desire as well as mirrors the real outer spatial conditions.In this sense, spatial subject is the production of the complicated social relationsthrough bodily social activities. Textually, in the American-Jewish Bildungsromanthere are mainly three models of subject formation, which include “gendered subjectthrough performing in spatial shift,”“raced subject through passing in spatialexpansion,” and “self-formation through release of psychological space.”For the Jewish protagonists, the spatial shift, on the one hand, means to escapefrom the Old Europe and intrude into the New America, and on the other hand, fromJewish family and into the urban space. The spatial transformation and conflictbetween the “feminized” Jewish ghetto in the Old Europe and the “heroized” space inAmerica result in the protagonists’ escape from the traditional Jewish family. Sexualsubject is often heralded through the sexual performance of masculinity in the processof subject formation in the heterotopic space. Sexual subject, as the beginning of theprotagonists’ growing up of along with assimilation, is often interwoven with theracial subject, who demonstrates that, with the stretching of the subject’s spatialactivities, the growing subject does his utmost to pass him off as a “white” into theAmerican “white” space to break the boundary of identity marks. The process offormation of the sexual and racial subject is also one of the private space beingnibbled by the social space. Only when the spatial anxiety of being nibbled isself-justified and self-released can the individual grow up into the subject. The newlyformed subject is unstable, which embodies the uncertainty of the Jewish identity inAmerican society and the fragmentation and incoherence of the modern space.The process of the spatial production of the subject demonstrates Lefebvre’striadic process of “spatial practice,”“representations of space,” and “representationalspaces,” which forms the spatial logic of subject formation.“Spatial practice,” inLefebvre’s term, as the process of producing the material form of social spatiality, isthus presented as both medium and outcome of human activity, behavior, andexperience (Soja), which, in the American-Jewish Bildungsroman, is embodied by“spatial behavior logic of escape and intrusion.” The “real” space in the novel, whichis the artistic representation of the realistic space, forms the “representations of space,” which, in the American-Jewish Bildungsroman, mainly include the ghetto, theJewish family or school, and the urban space, which metaphorize or symbolize the“representational spaces.” Ghetto, as the open and exclusive space of heterotopia,constructs such marginal spaces as race, gender or sex, etc. The ethics evolved fromJewish religion and complied by in the Jewish family or schools yoke spatially thesubject on the road of the subject’s growing up. With the expansion of the space forthe subject’s growing up, the disciplining discourses between the spaces of the familyand the mainstream society call for the re-direction of the subject’s bildung andstipulate the formation of the subject. The urban space provides the subject with thecomparatively free and open space, which is the representation of carnival space forthe subject’s bodily free performance, the extent to which the urban space is not thebackground for the subject’s activities, but participates in the subject’s growing-up.The American-Jewish Bildungsroman explains, to a degree, the dialecticrelationships between ethnicity, bildung and space. The spatiality of the Jewishindividual’s growing up is, to a large degree, a representation of the existence of theJewish people. The universality and specialty of the Jewish individual growing intothe subject gives the complicatedness, uniqueness and multifariousness to the bildungof American minorities in the multi-cultural space of America, and presents it with amulti-dimensional world.