Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: the Contemporary Artist's Novel

Catalog description

The story of an artist’s development is a classic inspiration for the novel—one that has often been exemplified by works by male writers, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship or James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In recent years, however, the Künstlerroman, or “artist’s novel,” has seen a marked resurgence among female writers, telling the stories of young women seeking their artistic destinies. This course will examine narratives of artistic development in fiction, film, and television from the last ten years. What concerns do these texts share? How are the paths to artistic fulfillment that they sketch out determined by race, class, and geography? Why is the female Künstlerroman one of the defining forms of the twenty-first century so far? Does the term “autofiction” mean anything? Texts may include readings by by Raven Leilani, Mieko Kawakami, Elena Ferrante, Sheila Heti, Yiyun Li, Alyssa Songsiridej, Elif Batuman, Olivia Laing, and Sally Rooney; film/television viewings by Céline Sciamma, Joanna Hogg, and Michaela Coel.