Afterword: Situating the Bildungsroman’s Transnational Afterlives

Summary

This book's guiding theme has been the evolving role that the regional imaginary played in the American Bildungsroman—defined as the novel of uneven development—up until the mid-twentieth century, as the cultural expression and symbolic form of the asymmetrical, rapidly changing dimensions of the United States during that period. As the concluding discussions of the Southwestern Bildungsroman have already indicated, that region is an ideal launchpad for briefly contemplating what “happened” to the Bildungsroman at the turn toward the current post-nationalist stage in American culture—while simultaneously suggesting the limits, real and imagined, of the historical and geographical stakes this argument entailed. As the aesthetic hyperreality of late capitalism distorted the allegory of youth's transformation, region's function in the genre's geographical logic became unstable. The temporal limits of this map end at the onset of the 1960s, when the Bildungsroman was increasingly engaged in the representational dilemma of depicting development in post-industrial, post-nationalist, and postmodernist space—as the United States shifted into what Giles demarcates as the “transnational era,” defined by “the necessarily reciprocal position of the U.S. within global networks of exchange” and deterritorialization (12). The dialectic between the search for authentic places in a world of simulacra and the uncertainty of postmodernity's boundless spaces correlated to the elongation of the passage from young adulthood to maturity in countless post-WWII antidevelopment narratives, which threatened simultaneously to immortalize and dissolve the coming-of-age paradigm in the satiric excesses of postmodern pastiche—literary or otherwise, in films, games, advertising, and television.

And yet, like the perennial unfixed figure of youth, the symbol of the dialectic between tradition and change, the local and the universal, or between situatedness and mobility, has nevertheless continued to form an important apparatus for earnest contemplations of how affective and local affiliations are intercut with other loyalties and identities. Numerous volumes about American identity politics and the Bildungsroman attest to that genre's continuing appeal, its depiction of social development rendering it ideal for delivering on pluralist politics. Since the mid-twentieth century, many authors have utilized the Bildungsroman to foreground ethnic minority groups in America's literary canon, by adopting similar representational strategies to the political geography of that earlier period—a tendency still prevalent in contemporary literature, as scholarship investigating America's multiethnic literatures continues to insist.