The Gang's All Here: Re-Reading Contemporary American Situation
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THE GANG’S ALL HERE: RE-READING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SITUATION COMEDIES AS DELAYED, AMBIVALENT BILDUNGSROMAN A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English By Caitlin Jordan, B.A. Washington, D.C. March 20th, 2020 Copyright 2020 by Caitlin Jordan All Rights Reserved ii THE GANG’S ALL HERE: RE-READING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SITUATION COMEDIES AS DELAYED, AMBIVALENT BILDUNGSROMAN Caitlin Jordan, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Sherry Linkon, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This thesis explores how contemporary situation comedies, Friends and Will & Grace in particular, can be read as bildungsroman texts. I posit that Friends and Will & Grace function as current bildungsroman works because they foreground narratives of character change, and like the canonical bildungsroman, they possess pedagogical potential for their viewers. Friends and Will & Grace, in part because of their character-centered narratives and open-ended finales, remain associated with cultural images that continually attract younger audiences. Both series traverse generational lines, and they remain culturally relevant with millennial viewers. This thesis poses a reparative reading of contemporary situation comedies; it argues that mass entertainment is capable of conducting productive and powerful cultural work. Chapter I explores the various ways in which the relative histories of the German bildungsroman and the American situation comedy genres work in dialogue with one another. Both forms have demonstrated incredible propensity for development and adaptability in spite of criticisms that they are formulaic and stagnant. Chapter I also discusses that though both the sitcom and the bildungsroman are bourgeois mediums, they have subversive potential that dates back to their relative archetypal texts, I Love Lucy and Wilhelm Meister. Chapter II then transitions to explore the meaningful ways in which contemporary situation comedies align with the bildungsroman form. As an evolution from their sitcom predecessors, both Friends and Will & Grace have nuanced narrative structures that foreground character development throughout iii the duration of both series. However, both series also maintain a balance of traditional sitcom formal elements that open them to pedagogical potential because they remain inherently familiar and relatable to audiences. In a turn, Chapter III highlights the means in which Friends and Will & Grace make adaptations to the bildungsroman form; these adaptations are significant because they help regenerate the bildungsroman form. Important departures that contemporary sitcoms make is that the protagonists are decidedly older than those represented in the canonical bildungsroman, and these characters, because of ensemble casting, pose more opportunities for the future than what was previously depicted in literary bildungsroman. Friends and Will & Grace create new potentialities in terms of gendered and queer representations, and unlike the canonical form, both have endings that are decidedly more open and resistant to closure. Clearly, the formula for both of these series was a successful and impactful one for audiences. I close with a discussion about how reading the sitcom as a bildungsroman is regenerative for both the sitcom and the bildungsroman, and I comment upon how the bildungsroman can continue to develop into the twenty-first century. iv The research and writing of this thesis is dedicated to many. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Sherry Linkon: thank you for your incredible patience, your guidance, and your support. I’d also like to extend my gratitude to Caetlin Benson-Allott. If I hadn’t taken your class in the Fall of 2018, I wouldn’t have been inspired in the slightest to write about media texts. Thank you for always being such an excellent listener and humoring my long-winded conversations. I’d also like to thank my family, especially my sister. Thank you for allowing books to cover the floors, tables, and countertops for many months. I couldn’t have completed this without your persistent patience and support. Thank you, Caitlin v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I ........................................................................................................................................ 18 Shared Criticisms ............................................................................................................... 19 Bourgeois Mediums with Subversive Potential ................................................................ 22 Shared Propensities for Bildung ........................................................................................ 35 Chapter II. ..................................................................................................................................... 42 Characterological Emphasis .............................................................................................. 43 “Pseudoclosures” and Character Bildung .......................................................................... 47 Balancing Nuanced Narrative with a Familiar Form ........................................................ 57 Chapter III ..................................................................................................................................... 68 Ensemble Casting .............................................................................................................. 68 Inversions of Traditional Exemplarity ............................................................................... 75 Delayed Bildungsheld(s) ................................................................................................... 89 Queer Visibility ................................................................................................................. 99 Ambivalent and Resistant Finales ................................................................................... 106 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 115 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 118 vi INTRODUCTION From a cursory glance, the literary bildungsroman and the television situation comedy do not appear to have much in common. However, both forms, in their relative contexts of the eighteenth and mid-twentieth century respectively, were quietly revolutionary. Thomas Jeffers notes that the bildungsroman, or the “novel of formation,” came to fruition within the Enlightenment, and more particularly as a result of the “event-wracked revolutionary years” of the mid to late eighteenth century.12 Literature was in dialogue with this tumultuous cultural moment, and the bildungsroman, as both a literary phenomenon and theoretical framework, broke from established norms.3 Set against the Enlightenment cultural landscape that celebrated human rationality and choice, and set it free from oppressive hegemonic bonds, European readers were ready for literary characters to reflect such radical changes in thought and conceptions of personal development. As opposed to other, established literary formats that were driven by plot (such as the ordeal, family, or biographical novel), bildungsroman was unassumingly revolutionary in its depiction of a central character who was open to change, a hero who was not “ready-made.”4 Television made its debut a couple of centuries after the bildungsroman, and the public reception that television generated was vastly different than the eighteenth-century literary genre. When television made its American commercial debut in 1948, audiences responded with ambivalence because of its inherent “strangeness” in post-World War II America.5 Consumers, in 1 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 19. 2 Thomas Jeffers, Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2. 3 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 2. 4 Jeffers, Apprenticeships, 2. 5 I posit 1948 as a tentative “start date” for television, but the medium certainly did not have a singular debut. Television’s history dates back to the 1920s when radio behemoth RCA began investing in the development of television as a new way to deliver its programs to audiences. 1 the wake of the horrific Second World War, were wary of the new technology and were unsure of its potential impact on culture. American consumers were attempting to culturally re-center around the nuclear family, and they were uncertain whether television would bring families together or alienate disparate generations due to the television’s newness.6 Importantly, situation comedies naturalized television in its burgeoning years by making audiences feel at home while watching from their homes.7 Though mid-twentieth century America was not marked by the same outward revolutionary character of the European Enlightenment, the post-war period was rife with an underlying cultural tension marked by a desire to return to some presupposed American cultural