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Abstract
The Bildungsroman has come to be defined as many things: the coming of age novel; the novel of development; or novel of self-cultivation. The only consensus seems to be that “there is no consensus”; it is a “phantom” genre, an indestructible literary entity. This generic uncertainty is all the more true of the American case. By looking at the three major regions of American literary production – Chicago, New York, and the South – my thesis discusses various ways in which authors used the genre to respond to historical, economic, sociopolitical, and regional realities, and how these forces in turn molded the genre into near unrecognizable shapes.
This thesis therefore analyzes ten outlying texts within these regions, following the prismatic, dialectical schema of Walter Benjamin: “A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it,” he once determined; “and the perfect work will do both.” The Chicago chapter disseminates the diverse methods through which the three texts respond to the Entwicklungsroman subgenre, which I redefine in line with the nature of Chicago’s highly industrialized economy as a novel of ‘limitless’ becoming or growth. The New York chapter assesses the impact of celebrity culture and the artist’s roman à clef upon the narrative of individual development by analyzing the aesthetic and stylistic developments of the Künstlerroman (development of the artist novel); this includes the growth of the theatrical, balletic, cinematic, and musical imagination in these works. In the final chapter on the South, I consider the significance of what I call the plantation fringe Bildungsroman. I trace the complications for authors approaching the individualistic coming of age novel as it imports and challenges the social hierarchies of the atavistic Plantation structure in an unevenly modernizing South. A historicized, regionalist approach enables this thesis to construct a discursive laboratory for approaching the unvanquishable American Bildungsroman as a conversation beyond these presupposed borders and temporalities, where the specificities of each case study ultimately factor into that larger constellation of meaning that Bakhtin calls the unvanquishable “creative memory” of genre.