Handbook

What do you want to be when you grow up? At some point during the eighteenth century, this question went from being more or less meaningless to one of the central preoccupations of Western literature and culture: the driving principle of countless—if not most—classic novels, and the occasion for many canonical works in other genres and media. The idea that the shape of an individual life follows a basic pattern of development, leading from the open-ended possibility of youth to the stable identity of adulthood, seems self-evident to us, but this idea has a history: it has been figured, configured and reconfigured in many different ways over the past 250 years, and continues to mutate and develop under our eyes today. The aim of this course is to track the related ideas of youth, adulthood and development over this period, as they are represented in key works of literature and cinema, and especially within the genre of the Bildungsroman. Our inquiry will be guided by the assumption that narratives of development, in prose, poetry and film, are not only passive reflections of reality, but rather that these literary and film representations are essential tools for making sense of our time-bound lives. Accordingly, your engagement with these questions will take the form of class discussion and a traditional essay, but also an original narrative in which you implement your understanding of the genre. The course is designed as a history of ideas and representations, but also as a toolkit, which will help us think about what it means to come of age in our own society and how best to approach the problem of education.