On the Contemporary Novel of Formation and a Proposal for an Allegorical Reading

Abstract

This article departs from the growing proliferation of apprenticeship narratives in recent decades to discuss the critical uses of the Bildungsroman framework and the apprenticeship novel to refer to such narratives. On the one hand, it delimits the influence of a novel like Goethe's Wilhelm Meister Lehjahre (1795-1796) in the emergence of the novel of European formation and also as an equivocal critical model of the recent rewritings of said narrative genre. On the other, it points out the political edges that the novel of formation assumes from its origins to defend the need to recover said horizon in the reading of recent novels. The analysis of the novel Simón by the Spanish writer Miqui Otero (2020) is presented as an example of the vindication of a complex allegorical reading that allows embedding the individual formative path of the protagonist in a collective historical narrative that condenses and, at the same time, questions the political evolution of the community.