(…) Encouraged by the internal logic of the school — where the outside world disappears, while grades overdevelop the sense of the slightest age difference — youth looks now for its meaning within itself: gravitating further and further away from adult age, and more and more toward adolescence,…

Very worth a read in its entirety, this post detailing the ways in which the anti-Bildungsroman, the dramatization of regression to childhood, represents the move from the individual as individual to the individual as member of the masses.

In taking Franco Moretti’s thesis (one I only understand from this single quotation here) to heart, I can’t help wondering: what would this last decade’s obsession with Boy-Men (viz. Judd Apatow’s movies and influence) mean in terms of politics? After all, the Boy-Man is basically an anti-Bildungsroman with a perfunctory and only slightly credible Bildungsroman twist at the end.

Is the belief in maturity on the cheap the ultimate form of narcissism? Give me maturity and wisdom, but not yet?

• Tags
• literature
• age