Abstracts

Katrien Vloeberghs
Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen
Abstract:"growing up (post)modern"

In the contemporary European context, criticism of youth literature inclines towards a narrow conception of growing up. This tendency becomes particularly obvious in the analysis of a successfully re-emerging section of youth literature, young adult novels of initiation, dealing with maturation in all its aspects. Two prominent literary critics from the Dutchspeaking area, Marita de Sterck and Peter van Hoven are paradigmatic examples of this phenomenon in contemporary criticism of youth literature. According to their theory of initiation, these novels guide the young
reader to existential maturity by telling the protagonist's process of transition to adulthood.

By claiming that successful initiation of the protagonist on the textual level entails or facilitates the initiation and socialization of the adolescent reader, literary critics today reanimate the anachronistic paradigm of the nineteenth Century bourgeois Bildungsroman. Although these critics make use of elements belonging to an emancipatory discourse, such as search for identity, development and progress, they nevertheless fall
back into the defense of conservative values, when they put these vague conceptions into concrete terms. The very notion of initiation stems from cultural anthropology where it embraces heterogeneous and even contradictory aspects, such as individual autonomy and participation in collective ritual. Contemporary criticism of youth literature mentioned above however neglects significant aspects of the notion of initiation in order to fit it into their conception of growing up. It nearly exclusively focuses on the conservation and affirmation of traditional values and cultural conventions. Literature of initiation is then praised for countering and overcoming chaotic and arbitrary postmodernity and for celebrating the natural and unchangeable cyclicity of life. Disorientation and revolt are regarded both as impotent and as the cause of suffering.

Unlike some of its critics, authors of adolescent literature of initiation are aware of the anachronism of both the reading mechanism of identification and the validity of the paradigm of archaic "rites de passage", bringing youth back into the safe enclosure of society. In my paper I will show that the frame of interpretation as it is used by the literary critics mentioned above does not apply to the literature in case. In a first step, I would like to argue that the conservative, mimetic reading paradigm of "Bildungsroman" does injustice to those elements in the novels of initiation that come closer to strategies of the modern anti-bildungsroman, such as the unreliability of the narrator which causes resistance against straight identification with the protagonist. In a second step, I will show how conflicting stages and emotions that are part of the process of initiation are confronted in the novels themselves. The contradictions that inhere in the notion of initiation are neither avoided nor are they decided in one sense or the other. Essential in these novels is the conflict between attitudes of collectivity and living up to expectations on the one hand and desire for individuality, creativity and revolt on the other hand. The novels&rsquo ending do not necessarily demonstrate and celebrate the victory of the "natural order", which not coincidently turns out to be the prevailing order. On the contrary, this literature seems to emphasize the possibility of creativity, risk and play, set free by the situation of initiation. In my paper, I will show how youth
authors today both subtly and radically transform the traditional motives and stages of the "rites de passage" through ironic inversion and suspension of a satisfying outcome.

A one-sided vision of the phenomenon of initiation and the use of a clearly organicist and essentialist discourse are dubious tendencies in this section of literary criticism in Europe today. It is therefore worthwhile exploring the ways in which it recuperates these recent novels through smoothing out the complexity in their discourses of initiation. It would also be interesting to look at the actual situation in the United States, where the tradition of novels of initiation is much more established.