Module description
This module explores why it is that the coming of age narrative is such an enduring form in US culture. It covers a range of different modes, including autobiography, fiction, film, and music and crosses over the past two centuries to capture the varied historical experience of entering into adulthood within the United States. It has a particular interest in identities, selves, and experiences whose testimonies are antagonistic to the developmental objectives of the genre in its most canonical renderings. Accordingly, it will explore writing by those whose gender, sexuality, race, and/or disability has forced them to question the imperatives of the form they find themselves using. The stakes of the genre are at their highest here for what these texts explore is nothing less than the validity, or otherwise, of the writer to exist. Students will also be encouraged to reflect on their own experience at university—their own coming of age tale—in order to elucidate and theorise the central critical issues of the module. These include: selfhood and individualism; the socio-political meanings of youth, maturation, and age; how the genre intersects with the demands of citizenship; the demands of progress, development, and knowledge; the deep sociological and psychoanalytic roots of the genre; and, the recurrent mass cultural appeal of the genre and its versatility.
Assessment details
5 x 200 word reader response forum entries (15%) and 1 x 3000 word essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
- To explore the twinned narratives of the United States and the bildungsroman, especially pertaining to selfhood, citizenship, and US political self-realisation
- To analyse socio-political import of imaginative representations of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood
- To interrogate the crisis points in the genre as it intersects with sexuality, gender, disability, class, and race
- To learn of the high stakes of the bildungsroman in relation to philosophical and political questions of individuality and selfhood
- To develop formalist understanding of the genre through concentrating on continuities and discontinuities in form over time
- To construct theoretical frameworks for making sense of the coming of age narrative and its recurrence
- To encourage students to self-reflect on own university experience and demands made of coming-of-age today
Learning outcomes
- Ability to analyse the embedded socio-politics of the coming of age narrative in the United States
- Capacity to explore the pre-eminent narrative gestures, tropes, and figurations of the coming of age narrative
- A developed understanding of the demands of different demographics on the coming of age narrative
- A knowledge of the best theoretical lenses to bring the genre into intellectual focus for them
- An understanding of why individuals have had consistent recourse to the coming of age narrative and the stakes of it
- A deeper and more developed sense of their own coming-of-age in their time at university
Teaching pattern
One 2-hour seminar, weekly