CFP: Prospects of Bildung, C19 Conference Berkeley, CA, April 12-15, 2012

full name / name of organization: 
C19; The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
contact email: 

CFP: Prospects of Bildung @C19

C19 Conference, Berkeley, CA, April 12-15, 2012

Developmental Narratives, Transnational Childhoods, and National Culture

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts. – Emerson, Chapter I: "Nature" in Nature (1836)

It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind. / So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. – Emerson, Chapter VIII: "Prospects" in Nature (1836)

Emerson's universalist rhetoric about what we will see with our "new eyes" belies his engagement with Romantic discourses of primitivism and historically contingent theories about the ways each individual life recapitulates the history of human development. American nineteenth-century anxieties about the future of the young nation were expressed through the manipulation of literary, visual, cultural, legal, socio-political, educational and scientific narratives of development, all of which were intertwined with, and in tension with, discourses of child development and human bildung.

The focus of our proposed panel is the search for what we might call a national bildungsroman in the nineteenth century. This search evokes the stories of the many Americans denied an adulthood and a fulfilling future and calls attention to the exclusivities and particularities that adhere in definitions of an ideal citizen for an ideal state. Articulating attempts at a national bildungsroman also involves looking beyond national and hemispheric borders for points of comparison and distinction. We are particularly interested in transatlantic and transnational approaches to the question of a national subjectivity and its narrative of emplotment.

Please send one-page proposals and brief bios to Lucia Hodgson (luciahodgson@tamu.edu) and Anna Mae Duane (amduane1@gmail.com) by September 15. Inquiries welcome.