Why the Bildungsroman no longer works
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5726159 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nancy Armstrong (0000-0001-5452-799X, Duke University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 12 |
| Pages | 2091-2111 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Textual Practice (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-236X • E-ISSN: 1470-1308 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0950236x.2020.1834691 |
| OpenAlex | W3103404327 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Why are “flat” protagonists, in increasing numbers, displacing the well-rounded and internally fraught individuals that pulled their personal experiences together as a progressive narrative for readers of the Bildungsroman? Why have today's novels turned against that form, broken up that individual, and dispersed its component parts in a discontinuous sequence of singular characters capable of taking part in the rapidly fluctuating social clusters of their kind, a narrative form that cinematic and television serials readers have been streaming these days? It could well be that reading these novels requires us to imagine ourselves as participants in a world where work no longer consists of managing production, much less of producing things. The work both of and in the novel consists instead of around-theclock, machine-assisted extraction and repackaging of feelings, thoughts, and fantasies as marketable information, the result of which is flatness
Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Comics and Graphic Narratives · History · Literacy, Media, and Education · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2023 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |