The Critical Speaking Series Presents: Jennifer Fleissner (Talk)

“Vitalizing the Bildungsroman”
When: November 14th, 2019 3:30 PM
Where: Toy Lounge, Dey Hall

Abstract:
The novelistic Bildungsroman is most often understood to narrate an individual’s initiation into social life, but this talk, instead, recovers the form’s roots in eighteenth-century vitalist theories of animal and plant development. The talk will explore conflicting strands within these theories and their relevance for contemporary “neovitalisms” in theory today, before briefly considering as a test case of a “vitalist Bildungsroman” the New England writer Elizabeth Stoddard’s brilliant and underread 1862 novel The Morgesons.”

Professor Fleissner is a scholar of 19th and 20th-century American literature with a special interest in the turn of the 20th-century and the rise of American modernity. She is a professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington.