Title:

Life Histories: Ontogeny, Phylogeny and Narrative Structure in the Modernist Bildungsroman

Advisor: Schmitt, Cannon
Department: English
Issue Date: Nov-2013
Abstract (summary): This thesis offers new perspectives on the modernist bildungsroman, a genre currently enjoying much attention in Modernist Studies. Though modernist deformations of the Bildung plot are typically read symptomatically, I propose that in several cases these deformations are structural innovations reflecting contemporary discoveries in embryology, genetics and evolutionary theory. These discoveries offered models for exposing and subverting the bildungsroman’s historical (aesthetic, political, scientific, ideological) association with recapitulation—the theory that an individual’s development (ontogeny) replays the evolution of its species (phylogeny). Chapter One reads Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a clear example of a Bildung plot in which the traditional parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny is broken: Stephen Dedalus’s artistic maturation is obstructed by repeated returns to the personal, national, mythical and prehistoric past. Chapter Two considers Forster’s Howards End as a bildungsroman stretched beyond the realm of Bildung into that of genetic transmission. Exploiting Mendelism’s naturalization of atavism, Forster counters the genre’s inherited associations with recapitulation, progressivism and entropy. Chapter Three examines Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, a bildungsroman remarkable for its extreme anachronies. Huxley’s rewriting of the Bildung plot is informed by research, by his brother Julian and others, on the possibility of inducing metamorphosis in a strange amphibian, the axolotl, which usually fails to reach morphological adulthood. Chapter Four proposes Woolf’s Orlando as a missing link between the seemingly esoteric biological engagements of the three aforementioned novels and the organicist aesthetics that characterize modernist theories of the novel. Relating Orlando’s metafictionality to criticism by Henry James, Forster and others, I corroborate current attempts in Modernist Studies that read the bildungsroman as a privileged testing ground for modernist aesthetics, ethics, politics and historiography. Connecting the four chapters is the common strategy of decoupling individual development from historical change and celebrating some kind of anti-chronology that I call reversion; informed by new biological theories of growth and evolution, reversion is enacted formally through manipulations of temporal structure. Thus the modernist bildungsroman enlarges, with help from biology, the range of possible and acceptable developmental trajectories.
Content Type: Thesis

Permanent link

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/70116

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