“Youth is, so to speak, modernity's ‘essence’, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past”, says Franco Moretti as he dissects the genre of bildungsroman. Youth, he decidedly notes, is  at the heart of the genre, owing to the mobility and interiority that it facilitates, and  its characterisation as dynamic and unstable, yet transient and impermanent. Critics such as Barbra Whitman trace the genre as far back as Homer’s Iliad (8th century BCE) and evolving to include an array of narratives and characters, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1623) to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795-95).

With the emergence of fiction set in high school, such as The Fault in our Stars (2012) by John Green, the genre has found great success in popular culture. The long running series, The Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2007 onwards), has left a deep impact on a generation of young students in the 21st century. Interestingly, however, though every title in the series begins with a new chapter in the main character’s life, Greg Heffley does not age at any point throughout the series. This prompts one to ask: to what extent is the age and aging of the main character central to bildungsroman?

The memoir form adds another dimension to the genre. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) traces the coming of age of a young woman in circumstances of unrivalled difficulty, delineating her most intimate thoughts and delicate desires as she is growing up amidst the Holocaust. Similarly, the form of the personal essay foregrounds texts such as Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All” (1967), where the writer explores her affection for, and eventual disillusionment with, the life she created in New York. Malala Yousafzai’s harrowing account I Am Malala (2013), too, traces her life in the conflict-ridden Swat Valley, culminating in a bullet in her shoulder for the fight for education. Resilience and protest, bubbling with the energies of youth, thus become other key characteristics of the bildungsroman genre. 

Furthermore, Dalit feminist texts such as Bama’s haunting Karukku (1992), and Mallika Amar Sheikh’s confessional I Want to Destroy Myself (1984)coincide with the coming of age of the Dalit feminist movement from the 1980s onwards, creating a rich literary history to canonise their protest. It may be argued, then, that these texts create a twofold coming of age, transgressing and transcending the boundaries of the personal and the political. Another perspective on the same comes from queer artists, who describe the way politics is etched onto their very bodies. ANOHNI’s 2005 album, I Am a Bird Now, describes her journey as she comes into herself as a transwoman, as a bird girl, and finds a community she so acutely lacked. The young adult novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012) too traces the coming of age of two young Mexican American boys, and follows their struggle with questions of sexuality, love, family, race, and war. 

Beyond Anglophone fiction, shoujo and shounen, genres in anime and manga, have recently become major global phenomena. Shoujo manga and anime, such as Sailor Moon (1991-97) and Banana Fish (1985-1994) are explicitly marketed towards adolescent girls, and shounen anime and manga, such as Naruto (1999-2014) and Haikyuu!! (2012-2020) towards adolescent boys. This brings an explicit gendered dimension to the bildungsroman. 

Today, the genre is expanding in the digital space. Bildungsroman now manifests itself in new channels and communities, such as BookTok, video games, online discussion forums, and social networking sites. Video games such as Oxenfree depict experiences of growing older and wiser while working through daily struggles of anxiety and societal pressures. The unique ways in which social media facilitates acts of grappling with identity fashioning and community building for an increasingly younger audience calls for investigation. It is also worthwhile to ask how relatively younger online queer communities affect their older, off-screen counterparts.

Because of the intricacies encapsulated within the genre, one is forced to question Moretti’s initial proposition that youth is central to the bildungsroman. Can this youth belong not just to one person but to a community?  What is the importance of the ideas of development and narrative movement within the genre? Can interiority be argued for as a defining characteristic at all? 

Following these lines of interrogation, Trivium: The English Society of Shiv Nadar University Delhi-NCR, invites original research papers from undergraduate students across colleges and universities in Delhi-NCR.

Possible broad topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Queer identity as a coming-of-age dynamic.

• The coming-of-age of the individual as opposed to the coming-of-age of a group or movement

• Coming of age in diaspora narratives

• Identity creation as coming of age in online spaces

• The ‘essence’ or major characteristics of bildungsroman

• Constructions of gender/class/caste/race/creed in coming-of-age narratives

• Common coming-of-age tropes in popular media and culture

• Coming-of-age narratives in music, graphic novels, films, video games, and art

•  Bildungsroman narratives in myth and folklore

• Memory, and altered self-perceptions in bildungsroman narratives

• Temporality and transitions in bildungsroman narratives

• Coming of age in a postcolonial context

• Intergenerational relations in bildungsroman narratives

Submission Guidelines

• The conference is only open to undergraduate students. 

• An abstract of no more than 300 words and a bionote of no more than 50 words need to be submitted via email to: trivium@snu.edu.in with ‘Abstract_[Submitter’s Name]’ as the file title and subject line.

• Participants will not be mandated to send in their full-length papers. They will be required to present their work (preferably in the form of a PowerPoint/Canva presentation) at the in-person conference.

• Travel to and from Shiv Nadar University will be arranged via shuttle for participants from multiple convenient points in Delhi-NCR.

• All submissions will be subject to strict plagiarism checks.

Important Deadlines

• Abstract Submission: 21st of February, 2025

• Selection of abstracts and sending out of acceptances: 28th of February, 2025

• Date of conference: 7th of March, 2025