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This study explores the difference between the African American and the European Bildungsroman . Theoretical and textual, it focuses on issues of subjectivity, gender, and history in maturation stories by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Charles Johnson, and Sherley Anne Williams. The comparative discussion of the African American tradition of self-representation, the European tradition of the Bildungsroman , and postmodernist notions of subjectivity elucidates fundamental traits of the African narrative of Bildung .
About the author
The Author: Gunilla Theander Kester came to America from Sweden as a Fulbright Scholar and received an M.A. in English at the Pennsylvania State University in 1985. She completed her Ph.D. in 1992 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a double degree in English and Comparative Literature. While in Chapel Hill she received a fellowship from the Scandinavia-America Foundation. She got interested in African American literature because she realized that, without an understanding of racial issues, she would never comprehend America. Her publications include articles on the blues and cultural representation, August Wilson's poetics of memory, and the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Bible, Milton and Gayl Jones'
Eva's Man. Dr. Kester lives with her husband and two daughters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.
Report
"Dr. Kester brings a wholly new perspective to bear on the African American narrative of 'Bildung'. Drawing on her wide knowledge of European literature, she at once relates and distinguishes African American writing from its literary antecedents in such a way as to bring out its particular features. She has produced a highly original, provocative study, remarkable for both its theoretical sophistication and its subtle close readings". (Lilian R. Furst, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
"This study of selected black feminist and black masculinist novels surely will become a foundation on which other critical inquiries into subject formation in the African-American novelistic tradition will build. Dr. Kester's theoretical and critical examination of black subjectivity and fictive worlds of these texts is incisive, engaging and provoctive. This is sound scholarship". (J. Lee Greene, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
