Growing Up Globally

Abstract

The scholarship surrounding the anglophone Bildungsroman has been to this point largely divided by national and periodized boundaries. This approach to the coming-of-age novel highlights tightly-knit clusters of texts that share geospatial contexts but precludes the possibility that texts from outside these demarcated groupings share essential features that might transcend the borders of nations and literary periods. In the supposed age of literary cosmopolitanism, it is perhaps time for a new approach to the Bildungsroman. I contest that, by approaching various Bildungsromane on the level of their form and structure, new constellations of texts emerge that bring forth new questions and challenges to the conventional narrative of the rise and fall of the Bildungsroman throughout the long history of the novel globally. Each of the texts I discuss fuses a common literary form–the oral tale, the Gothic, literary naturalism, the national allegory–with the coming-of-age novel which inflects and informs its familiar plot, creating cross-cultural and cross-temporal patterns as practitioners of the genre take it up in vastly different circumstances and contexts.  Each manifestation of these hybrid Bildungsromane represents new fields on which the experimental potentialities for individual subjectivity and agency in modernity might ensue, from the early 1840s to the turn of the twenty-first century. In texts which incorporate the chronotope of the oral tale, I argue that authors use the genre to create space for individual agency in a globalizing world. In the inclusion of the Gothic, I suggest, the Bildungsroman resituates the human on the periphery of the text, thrumming with increasingly animate places and things that crowd the individual subject out of her own development. I then question the entropy spirals present in literary naturalism as they temper and trouble the linear development plot, and offer insights into texts that use this fused form to preclude Bildung and texts that use the forces of naturalism to create subterranean structural narratives that reassert its latent potential. I then take the national allegory, a genre with a complex relationship to the Bildungsroman, and argue that the individual subject comes to hold an almost mythic position which comes to be either dissolved or monstrously reasserted in dark reflections of late colonial and postcolonial national imaginations. Finally, I argue that through fantastical realism, a utopian formal play emerges in the narration of the Bildungsroman that creates the narrative space for unique representations of multilayered, open-ended identities at the end of the text.