Konstruktion als Bildung

This essay juxtaposes the understanding of Konstruktion developed within German Constructivism to the humanist notion of Bildung that framed debates on the Bildungsroman and the novel at the beginning of the twentieth century. Far from refuting the project of Bildung, Konstruktion actualizes some of its central tenets while grappling with the questions of temporality and futurity that bedeviled the idea of Bildung. After tracing the ways in which Bildung and Konstruktion played out discursively in the early twentieth century, I examine how the two tropes are productively unfolded in One-Way Street (1928), Walter Benjamin's endeavor at grounding and enacting an activist model of literature. At issue is the possibility of grasping literature as a realm for the performative construction of the human outside the historical teleology that rendered Bildung unacceptable

Bildung · Constructivism (international relations · Performative utterance · Realm · Temporality · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Literature and Cultural Memory · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation