The Modernist Bildungsroman (MSA 17 Boston, Nov 19-22, 2015)
In Unseasonable Youth (2011), Jed Esty suggests that the "modernist pressure on bildungsroman conventions goes beyond raising the possibility that the genre can no longer serve those functions" of representing modernity and middle-class identity: "it also raises the possibility that it never did." Esty's claim (and other related recent work) challenges us to reexamine the modernist engagement with the tradition of the bildungsroman genre—and to ask just how revolutionary that engagement really was.