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From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic Jarad Heath Fennell University of South Florida, [email protected]

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From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic Jarad Heath Fennell University of South Florida, Jfennel2@Mail.Usf.Edu University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 11-16-2016 The on-IN dentical Anglophone Bildungsroman: From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic Jarad Heath Fennell University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the African Languages and Societies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Other History Commons Scholar Commons Citation Fennell, Jarad Heath, "The on-IN dentical Anglophone Bildungsroman: From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic" (2016). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6500 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman: From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic by Jarad Fennell A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Hunt Hawkins, Ph.D. Marty Gould, Ph.D. Gurleen Grewal, Ph.D. Ylce Irizarry, Ph.D. Date of Approval: October 25, 2016 Keywords: post-colonial, British, African, African-American, feminist Copyright © 2016, Jarad Fennell DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Cheryl Fennell-Konyha, my wife, Elizabeth Valle, and my children, Carmen Fennell and Isaac Fennell, who continue to inspire me every day. I would also like to dedicate this work to my father, Joseph Fennell, and my stepfather and stepmother, John Konya and Susan Fennell, who were integral to my own development over the years. Thank you for believing in me. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Numerous people, mentors, friends, and colleagues have given me feedback and advice during the work on this dissertation. Dr. Shirley Toland-Dix was one of my earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. My friends Ronn Alford, Fellina Grosse, Lisa Hoffman, Marisa Iglesias, Eloy Lasanta, Ryan Marsh, and Adam Pridemore encouraged me to continue working when my focus wavered. The members of my committee, Dr. Marty Gould, Dr. Gurleen Grewal, and Dr. Ylce Irizarry, provided cogent suggestions when I needed direction, and my committee chair, Dr. Hunt Hawkins, was an invaluable resource whenever I had questions. I am indebted to Dr. Frederick Steier for acting as chairperson during my defense. I am incredibly grateful to each of you. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Introduction: Subjectivity and Narrative .........................................................................................1 Modern Philosophical Theories of Subjectivity ..................................................................3 Critical History of the Bildungsroman ...............................................................................10 Critical Methodology: The Nineteenth-Century British Subject .......................................13 Critical Methodology: The Post-Colonial Subject .............................................................24 Outline of the Dissertation .................................................................................................26 Chapter One: Late Nineteenth-Century British Subjects ...............................................................28 Chapter Two: Colonized Bildungsromane of Nigeria and Kenya .................................................57 Chapter Three: Feminist Bildungsromane in Zimbabwe and Nigeria ...........................................81 Chapter Four: The Modern African-American Bildungsroman ..................................................110 Chapter Five: Feminist African-American Bildungsromane .......................................................149 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................173 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................178 i ABSTRACT My goal with this dissertation was to discover more about how the Bildungsroman genre or the coming-of-age story in English became a staple of post-colonial and ethnic minority writing. I grew up reading novels like these and feel a great deal of affection for them, and I wanted to understand how authors writing in these other traditions represented a broader response to colonialist Western culture. My method was to survey philosophical approaches to subjectivity and subject-formation, read a wide variety of texts I understood as engaging with the Bildung tradition, and examine how they represented subject-formation. While I originally saw the appropriation of the genre as a revolutionary act that fundamentally changed the nature of the Bildungsroman, I found that the Bildungsroman contained a germ of this oppositional, in Theodor Adorno’s terminology non-identical, subjectivity throughout its existence as a type in English literature. The opposition of writers of Bildung to heteronormative, racist, and sexist discourse is what brought out this non-identical strain more forcefully and ultimately culminated in contemporary manifestations of the Bildungsroman that rejected essentialism and represented subjectivity as strategic, hyphenated, and positioned against a centered, stable identity. The positive significance of studying these texts as featuring a de-centering literary subject is that it demonstrates how this mode of writing, including a future anterior narrator that reflects on his or her past experiences as usable material for fashioning a durable but adaptive self, empowers subjects to exert greater control over their own self-fashioning. Students learn ii sufficient empathy and agency from witnessing the struggles of these protagonists in order to tell, and retell, their own stories. iii INTRODUCTION SUBJECTIVITY AND NARRATIVE People create stories create people. -Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments The word schema comes from the Greek word for shape or plan, and in cognitive theory, it refers to a representation that describes the connections between ideas or prescribes certain patterns of behavior. A visual analog for the schema is the map, and a textual analog for this kind of representation might be genre. A plan for the creation of the individual subject in literature, and the relationship of that subject to his or her world, has been laid out in, mapped, and in some cases shaped by, the genre of the Bildungsroman. Over the last two and a half centuries, English literature has broadcast the humanistic subject across the globe; the emerging de-centering and multi-voiced subject of recent coming-of-age stories generated abroad and written back to the metropolitan center is the harvest. To put it as succinctly as possible, I characterize Bildung as a mode in contemporary literature that involves the marginalization of the subject from ideological constructions of the self. The narrator of these novels also exhibits a marked awareness of his or her own life experiences as the raw material, through reflection and creativity, for building a non-identical self that can withstand the imposition of power from without itself. The fundamental difference between autobiography and Bildung is the author’s express acknowledgement of the protagonist’s self-construction as a fictive act. In the hands of post- colonial and minority writers, this fictive act becomes of political and creative resistance, what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism” (The Spivak Reader 214). 1 John Frow ends his book Genre by describing a debate between critics and proponents of genre literacy over whether genres should be taught as models, norms that future writers should mimic, or whether teachers should avoid genre in order to emphasize the flexibility and fluidity of the text. He argues that this is a false dichotomy based on the assumption that textuality and structure are opposing principles. Frow further cites Terry Threadgold as suggesting that the interrelationships between texts can be thought of as a dialectical exchange between individual texts and the characteristics of a genre as it exists in a particular context. In other words, the study of genre can act as a kind of map that allows the reader to examine a topography that depicts the contextual differences between unique texts by allowing him or her to see how the symbols of genre construct relationships between different subjects, regions, and themes. By visualizing genre as a map uniting distant lands in a common visual representation, one can imagine changes in the context of generic symbols as a journey from one land to another or from one text to another. The journey of a genre such as the Bildungsroman from a limited cultural context in England to a global stage illustrates not only how literature communicates ideology between different cultural milieus, but also how this transition changes the ideology. The subject of the Anglophone Bildungsroman, the Bildungsheld, to borrow the German word for the protagonist of these
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