Convergences between Unreliable Narrative and the Bildungsroman in Recent Genre Theory

Ned Curthoys, University of Western Australia

This paper draws on my forthcoming monograph The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age (Bloomsbury 2024), to suggest that reading practices more commonly associated with interpreting unreliable narrative including inference of states of mind and the detection of tensions between story and discourse, appearance and reality, can now be fruitfully applied to historical and more recent instances of the Bildungsroman, coming of age narratives focused on the independent self formation or coming of age of a mostly younger protagonist. There are a number of reasons for the increasing convergence of these two protagonists, I will suggest, including an underappreciated aspect of the Bildungsroman which is its emphasis on the importance of retentive memory in critiquing or ‘arresting’ certain socially acceptable models of development and maturation. That means the narrative time of the Bildungsroman is increasingly centred on memory and retrospective meditation, focalizing the attempt by a protagonist to understand and enact the uncertain and shifting meaning of the past in the present as they face various testing ordeals. As such, readers of contemporary Bildungsromane need not be singularly focused on the protagonist’s ascendant journey towards achieving social status but attentive to the manner in which their memories and experiences both impinge upon and tentatively assist their ethical growth.

Ned Curthoys is a Senior Lecturer in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia. He is the author of The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (Berghahn 2013), eds. with Isabelle Hesse Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict After the Second Intifada (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2024).

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