Why the Bildungsroman no longer works. Issue 12 (1st December 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Armstrong, Nancy
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 12(2020)
• Page Start: 2091
• Page End: 2111
• Publication Date: 2020-12-01
• Subjects: Charles Dickens -- Tom McCarthy -- flat characters -- service work -- bricolage -- seriality; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1834691
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: 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.