| The youth worship, or the cult of youth, has a history which can be traced back to the 18th century in Europe. Early in 1802, William Wordsworth wrote: "The child is father of the man," which entrenches childhood in a key position of man's development. It seems to be a response to the nineteenth-century belief in the importance of conditioning of childhood and the interest in the psychology of the child that led to the popularity of Bildungsroman, the story of youths struggling for identity, maturation, and a place in society. But the Bildungsroman as a genre originated in Germany, marked and highlighted especially by the publication of Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-96). It is regarded as the prototype of the genre today. Perhaps because Americans think of themselves as a youthful nation, their fiction has dealt preponderantly with youth, too. But if a cult of youth characterizes the nineteenth-century European fiction, America's own cult of youth extends into our own era. And if most traditional novels labeled as Bildungsroman consider an accommodation between the individual and the society an essential characteristic of the genre, many American apprenticeship novels doubt or deny the possibility of achieving a gratifying result. The story of a child's initiation into adulthood obviously has a large place in American fiction, but often, and just as obviously, something goes wrong; the initiation fails to take place. Perhaps transforming and reworking traditional forms characterizes part of the genius of the "modernist" writing of each age in general. One of the great strengths of American writers of the Bildungsroman such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner and J. D. Salinger is their ability to breathe new life into stock fictional forms. The ways in which the artists adhere to or depart from the Bildungsroman conventions generate our interest in the genre. This dissertation is meant to be an artistic and cultural critique of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner's "The Bear" and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and accordingly a formulation of the main features of the American Bildungsroman. The research starts with the reflection on the following questions:Are the American novels of this kind the appropriations of the Bildungsroman tradition? If so, how do we account for Huckleberry Finn's refusal to be accepted into the society, the impotent career of Isaac McCaslin, who seems to have learned something essential in the woods but fails in the society, or the tragedy of Holden Caulfield, who undergoes heartbreaking experiences in his wandering around New York but refuses to draw any conclusion? The answers to these questions entail an exploration of the relationship and the differences between the classical Bildungsroman and its American counterpart. But the answers, instead of bringing any conclusive end, will trigger off other questions: what is the social and historical milieu of the evolution of the genre and what are the cultural implications in the American Bildungsroman?This study will wrestle with these questions, and, perhaps, may point to some possible answers. In so doing, I will examine the origin and evolution of the genre and approach the three works in terms of the modes and features of Bildungsroman. In addition, I will draw upon cultural and psychoanalytical theories, bearing in mind that a fictional character is more or less a case history, and that literature is to a certain extent the reflection of the culture and society from which it results, in the hope of enriching our understanding of the American apprenticeship novel and American society. The dissertation attempts to bring together literary analysis and cultural observation. In accordance with the main features of Bildungsroman as a peculiar novel genre, the dissertation analyses the three novels in great details concerning the theme, structure and characterization, etc. and makes clear the subtle differences among them.
|
PDF Full Text Request