De-formation as existence: The educational value of crisis In wu ming 1’s bildungsroman

Abstract

The traditional Bildungsroman (Castle, 2006) conveyed a model of individual formation consistent with the demands of bourgeois modernity: a “living compromise” between interiority and social mobility, in which youth represents the symbolic season of self-construction (Cambi, 2012). 

The novel thus aligns with what McWilliams has described as a “contested and renegotiated Bildungsroman,” one capable of “exposing rather than sustaining conventional models of growth and development” (McWilliams, 2009, p. vii). The pedagogical device of the narrative operates not by forming but by transforming: it generates subjectivities that refuse to identify with a linear destiny and instead question themselves within disorder.

Gli uomini pesce subverts this calm: it introduces into the novel a disquieting effect, it unsettles, it demands a “reading on the alert.” Its extroverted narration—one that lives outside itself—traces a liminal pedagogical space in which formation is not the transmission of values but a critical gesture, a passage through trauma, a possibility of amphibious thought between land and water, body and territory, history and memory. In an era dominated by brief, algorithmic narrative fragments, Gli uomini pesce demands time, attention, and resistance.