Why the Bildungsroman no longer works. Issue 12 (1st December 2020) - Armstrong, Nancy
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.