‘Bildung’ from Pages to Screen: The Artist Figures in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Alan Parker’s The Wall

Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion of the term Bildungsroman signifies “the image of man in the process of becoming” (Bakhtin 1986, 19). In general terms, the Bildungsroman is a novel of “building” or growth and development. In his well-known novel “A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man”, Joyce portrays the growth of the novel’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus that leads him to become an artist. Likewise, Pink as the protagonist in the famous movie and album “The Wall”, reflects the same development as Stephen Dedalus, but ends with the destruction of the artist himself both physically and psychologically. For example, the director Alan Parker focuses entirely on the character’s devastating side, whereas James Joyce only deals with his flawed aspects, and ends his novel with the constructive feature of mental and physical separation from Irish society. Taking the definition of Bildung as the theoretical background, the heroes of both works of art will be compared and contrasted in terms of their “Bildung” process. With this, it will also be illustrated how literature and media address the process of “Bildung” in terms of their own style of narration.