Post-Bildungsroman

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo is Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College.

Every so often, a scholarly work shatters tired and misaligned coordinates, forcing a radical recalibration of how we map the architecture of narrative worlds. The Post-Bildungsroman does exactly that. In Growing Up in the Gutter, Quintana-Vallejo cracked open the stale Euro-Enlightenment mold. Now, alongside a visionary crew of critical thinkers, he redraws the literary periodic table from the ground up. They don’t just critique the Euro-bildungsroman—they alchemically conjure its transformation. They surface a long-buried element: the global, decolonial multiplicities of youth self-making pulsing through literature, comics, video games, multimediated narratives, and beyond. Brazen. Brilliant. Boundary-breaking!

• List of FiguresAbout the ContributorsComing of Age at the Margins of Literature and Western Modernity: An IntroductionRicardo Quintana-Vallejo (Rhode Island College)Part I: Coming-of-age in Experimental Text-Based Media: Comics and Narratives1. Coming of Age in/between Fragments: Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom’s Palimpsest Documents from a Korean AdoptionLan Dong (University of Illinois Springfield)2. Gay. Muslim. Terrorist?: Avin Ahmadi’s How It All Blew Up and The Age of TerrorJay N. Shelat (Ursinus College)3. Superpowers, Race, and the Peter Parker Trope in Visual MediaAkash Belsare (University of Illinois Springfield)4. Black Boyhoods Yet to Come: Reimagining Race, Gender, and Black Childhood in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of SpiritsKevin A. Blanks (George Washington University)5. Coming-of-age Outside the Settler State: Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe and Native SovereigntyLaura Soderberg (University of Southern Indiana)Part II: Coming-of-age in Visual Media: Film and Videogames6. Digital Migrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep DealerCara Anne Kinnally (Purdue University)7. Gaming the Bildungsroman: Participatory Richness and Player-Character Intimacy in Persona VEvan Chaloupka (Franklin University)8. And Will She Not Come Again: Unbecoming Ophelia in ElsinoreJennifer Holl (Rhode Island College)9. Quoting from the Classics: Alice Wu’s The Half of It and the Queer Coming-of-Age FilmRosalind Sibielski (Rhode Island College)10. A Theory of Coming-of-Age Videogames Using The Last of Us as Case StudyRicardo Quintana-Vallejo (Rhode Island College)