Weltschmerz used to be a commonly used word meaning pessimism,hopelessness and depression. I have not seen it for quite a while.

you want weltschmerz? read some Thomas Pynchon, or Umberto Eco, or JL Borges -- their stuff not only drips with world wearniness, but I'm sure I've seen the word itself somewhere in there.

Ach! Dr. Bill...bist du eine grosse Weldschmerzer? Das ist aber shade!

There was a term for a literary genre :Sturm und Drang" that I haven't seen for a long time.
Also and literary genre "Biedermeier". Best thing I remember about them is a number of pictures showing animals defecating. That's where Freud got some of his ideas.

I searched for "Biedermeier" and found a half dozen sites selling Biedermeier furniture. No pictures, but I guarantee it is big, heavy, unattractive except for much attention to comfort and durability.

perhaps we have enough literary ferment without resorting to that style.

more literary terms: bildungsroman and entwicklungsroman

Which term would best describe Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Since the book covers the range from infancy to young adult life, maybe entwicklungsroman would apply better...

DubDub

wordsworth,

these are almost interchangeable; you will find the ensuing discussion to be of some interest, in that it has an oblique answer to your question:

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/?date=19970825

p.s. - yes, I guess I would be one of the "hardcore types" mentioned. oh well.

Well, this is certainly worth pasting:

The other variant worth consideration is the Künstlerroman, or 'artist novel', which is a Bildungsroman in which the protagonist becomes an artist, musician, or poet. Important examples are Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.

Entwicklungsroman has some slight fame for being the longest word in English (it is found in a few English dictionaries) having each of the five vowels once and only once.

from you link, tsuwm (and many thanks for it):

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/?date=19970825

So Portrait... is in a special category beyond the bildungsroman and entwicklungsroman...

Das ist gut! (Forgive this little German, but I do make a heckuva sauerbraten!)

Now, to imagine the Scrabble board arrangement in which you could actually build entwicklungsroman with seven letters... Is roman a word, I wonder?

DubbleDub

>Is roman a word, I wonder?

assuming that you mean in the Scrabble® sense, yes. it is defined in the OSPD as "a metrical narrative of medieval France" -- how *do they choose which definition to go with?

according to _Word Freak_ (ycliu), they don't use the OSPD per se for competitive Scrabble, the definitions just get in the way. they simply have an official word list.

A romance; a novel. Esp. in phrases: roman à clef, a novel in which actual persons are introduced under fictitious names; roman à thèse, a novel that seeks to further a viewpoint or expound a theory; roman d'aventure = romance n. 2; roman de geste = chanson de geste; roman expérimental, a realistic novel based upon deterministic theories of human nature of an alleged scientific character; also fig.; roman fleuve, a sequence of self-contained novels; roman noir, a Gothic novel, a shocker, a thriller; roman policier, a story of police detection.

Can't believe I'd forgotten the literary roman à clef...thanks tsuwm!

Well, I can't make entwicklungsroman with seven letters, but only six instead:

You'd have to have "en" in the same row with "lung" and a space before"roman." You'd play your "s" between lung and roman, and your "twick" before "lung," given the five spaces needed after "en."

Well, pretty stunning play, but it would have been by far better to have used seven letters--there's no common noun twi, nor is there a common noun for oman. Drat! I was so in hopes that in Oman there was at least one bit of brick-a-brack known as the oman that tourists brought back home.