The rise of the comics künstlerroman, or, the limits of comics acceptance: the depiction of comics creators in the work of Michael Chabon and Emily St. John Mandel

The künstlerroman is a genre with a long and celebrated past. From Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005) to John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), the genre has occupied a prominent place in bestseller lists and awards shortlists. The enduring popularity and continued critical celebration of the künstlerroman makes it all the more striking that, since the turn of the millennium a new kind of author-protagonist has emerged — the graphic-novelist-protagonist. This move not only inducts graphic novelists into this existing — and prestigious — literary genre, it also draws them into the same struggle for recognition in which other novelist-protagonists have long been involved. Drawing on the recent examples of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), in this article I argue that there is a clear move toward the serious discussion of comics and comics creators in contemporary literature, an increasing willingness to talk about comics and their makers that is marked by a surprising faith in the fitness of comics as a mode of self-expression and a recognition of the clear kinship between prose authors and graphic novelists.N/

Little women becoming writers: female künstlerroman in Alcott’s little women and Ferrante’s neapolitan series

O presente trabalho traz uma análise das obras Mulherzinhas (1868), de Louisa May Alcott e A Amiga Genial (2015) e História do Novo Sobrenome (2016) – os romances iniciais da Série Napolitana de Elena Ferrante – enquanto Künstlerromane, ou seja, romances de artista. Para tanto, serão comparadas as trajetórias das personagens femininas Jo, em Mulherzinhas, e Lila e Lenù, nos dois primeiros livros da série, a partir de conceitualizações apresentadas por Lago (2017) – mais especificamente com respeito ao Künstlerroman Feminino – acrescidas de contribuições de Langston (2004), Muiño (2017) e Baerdemaeker (2011). O ponto de encontro entre as obras é o fato de as protagonistas da Série Napolitana, de Ferrante, se encantarem com o mundo das letras após a leitura de Mulherzinhas, de Alcott, quando passam a sonhar com o dia em que se tornarão escritoras. Explorando os caminhos de autodescoberta que as três personagens perpassam, na posição de jovens/meninas que desejam se tornar escritoras, examinaremos também questões referentes à escrita e autoria feminina. O objetivo da pesquisa é investigar a construção das obras escolhidas enquanto romances de artista femininos, atentando para os contextos históricos conflituosos nos quais se desenrolam as histórias: em Mulherzinhas, a Guerra Civil Americana; e nos livros de Ferrante, a Itália do Pós-guerra, nas décadas de 50 e 60. Enfim, este trabalho se destina a investigar a representação da mulher artista na literatura de Alcott e Ferrante, visando contribuir para os estudos do gênero Künstlerroman.The present work purposes an analysis of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and My Brilliant Friend (2012) and The Story of a New Name (2013) – the first and second novels of the Neapolitan Series, by Elena Ferrante – as Künstlerromane, in other words, artist novels. In order to do so, the trajectories of the female characters will be contrasted (Jo, in Little Women, and Lila and Lenù, in the two first volumes of Neapolitan series) with the contributions of Lago (2019), concerning the concept of Künstlerroman, Muiño (2017) and Baerdemaeker’s (2011) regarding the Female Künstlerroman. There is an interesting link between the works: the protagonists of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series feel amused with the world of writing after they read Little Women, from then on they dream of the day they will become writers. Through exploring the characters’ path of self-discovery, as young girls who pursue the goal of becoming writers, questions related to writing and female authorship are also taken into account. This research aims to investigate the constitution of the chosen works, as novels which portray the women artists, also observing details such as the conflictual historical context, in which the stories occur: American Civil War in Little Women and Post-War Italy in Ferrante’s books (especially the 50’s and 60’s). Finally, this work targets at discussing the representation of the woman artist in the literature made by Alcott and Ferrante, aiming at contributing for studies of Künstlerroman as a genre

Innocent Artists: Creativity and Growing Up in Literatures of Maturation, 1850-1920

This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting in a narrative and in a developmental outcome that reflects the changing historical plot of childhood itself. When the recognition of adolescence as a developmental stage interrupts the linear historical plot of maturation at the beginning of the twentieth century, so too does creativity’s disruption of fictional plots of maturation increase, causing a shift from the social integration of the Bildungsroman to the artistic triumph of the Künstlerroman. This study is organized by gender and time because these two contexts greatly affect patterns of maturation. The four major chapters of Innocent Artists read a Bildungsroman or a Künstlerroman and a work of children’s literature that fall between, or right outside of the dates 1850-1920. Each combined reading shows how the necessity of social maturation suppresses the child’s creativity or how the child flees the social in pursuit of artistic maturation. Addressing the centrality of the creative child and the process of growing up in literatures of maturation reveals how changing historical plots of childhood reorganize literary genres and how the creative child’s liberation from narratives of social integration and from adulthood itself is crucial for the formation of the Künstlerroman

Фигура коллекционера как творческого субъекта в немецком и русском романе после 1980

В статье на примере постмодернистских романов рассматривается центральная фигура коллекционера, представлены разные стратегии коллекционирования и разные модели маргинального художника

"RITE OF PASSAGE IN DIASPORA: JAMAICA KINCAID'S LUCY AS A POSTCOLONIAL KÜNSTLERROMAN"

Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy (1990) is a coming-of-age story, or a Künstlerroman to be more specific in the tradition of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), that simply revolves around a young woman artist, who learns much from the school of life and personal experiences other than from ordinary education at academic institutions. The eponymous protagonist breaks away from such forces as colonial and patriarchal mores, which eventually contributes to her construction of her own hybrid identity and inaugurates her maturity. This struggle is established perfectly well through her apparent resistance to the constraints primarily imposed on her race and gender by both the Eurocentric society, which she has just left behind at home, and the androcentric society she encounters in diaspora. Surprisingly enough, Lucy, who is chastened towards the end of the book, creates her rite of passage towards development and independence through her valiant efforts to overcome such confines at any cost. The aim of the present article is to analyse the young artist's character formation and growth both at home and in diaspora from a postcolonial perspective. This way, it intertwines discussions of transition from innocence to experience along with such elements as androcentrism, colonial and postcolonial rebellion, and questions of identity, hybridity, diaspora and cultural displacement, which are all inextricably linked with the postcolonial discourse

Winterwood: A Portrait of the Artist as a Postmodern Pariah

Postmodernism is often seen as following sequentially from modernism but I would agree with Lyotard’s contention that postmodernism is actually ‘a part of the modern.’ Lyotard goes on to state that a work ‘can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but the nascent state, and this state is constant.’ So with these interlacings in mind, I would like to look at the two novels and begin with the issue of the speaking subject in each book – Stephen Dedalus and Redmond Hatch.Ye

Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction

In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success. In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled with the very real necessity of marriage for financial and social stability, so she finds that her artistic desires are incompatible with her station. Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers promote the importance of self-making for becoming a scholar or artist. Her heroines all yearn to be legible as American, and Yezierska’s unique take on the künstlerroman requires community engagement in order for inspiration to strike. In Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz, Alabama Beggs presents a proto-feminist slant on artistic development. In the fact of stringent opposition by her peers and her artist husband, Alabama decides to fail spectacularly both as a dancer and as a wife and mother, thus asserting her agency and defying social strictures that would attempt to determine her behavior. Powell’s Ebie Vane swings between high and low culture in Angels on Toast, ultimately finding that modernity’s promises to woman are a lie: Ebie can choose neither love nor career without making distasteful sacrifices, and she certainly can’t have both. Key to all of these artist-heroines’ journeys is failure. These modern künstlerromane dramatize the difficulty of women attempting to enter the public sphere as artists when they are not recognized as autonomous individuals or are instead consumed as art objects