My study examines contemporary Asian American narratives of subject formation through the theoretical lens of the Bildungsroman. A European genre originating in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteen-century Germany, the conventional Bildungsroman is a literary tool whose main objective is to depict an idealized subject's modern socialization. As Franco Moretti nicely captures in his study of the Bildungsroman, The Way of the World, the genre's significance is, above all, its successful representation of a reconciliation of an individual's revolting desires and society's regulatory demands. While highlighting a harmonious convergence of an individual and society, Moretti points to a white European subject's becoming a normative citizen in the rise of bourgeois capitalism. American writers of Asian descent have both utilized and transformed the conventional Bildungsroman form to describe their particular subject formation in the United States. The Asian American Bildungsroman differs from the white American as well as the European Bildungsroman, both formally and thematically, mainly because the racial group's social, political, and economic conditions have been marked by the U.S. exclusion of Asians. Asian American writers' generic interventions of the Bildungsroman thus exhibit their distinctive formal interventions and textual strategies to respond to legal and social exclusions of Asians in this country. In reading four Asian American narratives of subject formation, either novelistic or (auto)biographical in form, I argue the writers invented new versions of the genre, including the communal, the assimilative, the deconstructive, and the competitive Bildungsromane. This dissertation examines how conditions of textual expressions of the contemporary Asian American Bildungsroman have been not only predominantly marked by race but also further affected by class. The significance of the Asian American Bildungsroman is at once its interrogation of the contradiction within the American ideals and its construction of Asian American subjecthood.

Submitted by Fabiano Vassallo (fabianovassallo2127@gmail.com) on 2017-05-03T17:37:52Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Cássia Farias - Narrativas de Amadurecimento.pdf: 1353681 bytes, checksum: eabe941ec96720314f60253d3d4d4217 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-05-09T16:06:54Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Cássia Farias - Narrativas de Amadurecimento.pdf: 1353681 bytes, checksum: eabe941ec96720314f60253d3d4d4217 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-09T16:06:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Cássia Farias - Narrativas de Amadurecimento.pdf: 1353681 bytes, checksum: eabe941ec96720314f60253d3d4d4217 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Na presente dissertação, serão abordadas as relações entre o romance de formação e a literatura juvenil nas literaturas de língua inglesa. Apesar de suas particularidades, os dois gêneros têm em comum o fato de apresentarem contornos pouco definidos. Sendo assim, serão discutidas questões teóricas pertinentes a cada um deles a fim de chegar ao ponto central do trabalho: descrever e caracterizar o que seria o Bildungsroman juvenil. Três obras foram escolhidas para análise, Grandes esperanças (1860), de Charles Dickens, O apanhador no campo de centeio (1951), de J.D. Salinger – que serão usados para falar da tradição do romance de formação e da sua evolução – e Bateria, garotas e a torta perigosa (2004), de Jordan Sonnenblick, escolhido como exemplo paradigmático da manifestação desse gênero na literatura juvenil / This thesis will discuss the relationship between the coming of age novel and young-adult literature in English-language literature. Although each of the two genres has its own peculiarities, neither of them has well-defined contours. Therefore, relevant theoretical aspects of each genre will be examined in order to reach the main goal of this work: to describe and characterize the young-adult Bildungsroman. Three novels were selected for analysis: Great Expectations (1860), by Charles Dickens, The Catcher in The Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger – both of which will be used to outline the tradition of the coming of age novel and its evolution – and Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pies (2004), by Jordan Sonnenblick, a paradigmatic example of the manifestation of the genre in young-adult literature