Not Promising: An Extract from a Novel With an Exegesis on Debt and the Bildungsroman
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(Library staff access only.)
(Library staff access only.)
Date
2023
Authors
Sutcliffe, Alex William
Editors
Advisors
Flanery, Patrick
Murphet, Julian
Murphet, Julian
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
The creative artefact of this thesis comprises an extract from the novel, Not Promising. The novel follows two friends, neither of whom is particularly adept at or interested in being in their world, as they try to convince a third friend that she does want to stay in the world. Their world comprises the psychiatric and educational institutions, hotels and share-houses of Adelaide. A provincial capital, the city is both a microcosm of deindustrialising economies and a particular place that begets its own mass neurosis or spirit. The novel participates in the tradition of the Bildungsroman; the imperatives to self-formation and social integration are troubled by the same socioeconomic structures that demand them (Stević 14–15)—but also by how the protagonists set about fulfilling them. The extract comprises the first part of the novel. It introduces characters at impasses that, in other conditions, may have been the fulfilment of their maturity (graduation, home-ownership) and develops the narrative consciousness generated by the belatedness and irony of this impasse. The extract brings the narrative to a point at which the protagonists make the promises on which, mistakenly or not, they stake their place in the world. The exegesis, Crises of Maturity, reads the relation between structural debt and the Bildungsroman. Chapter One briefly surveys the literature on the genre. The criticism disagrees on whether the Bildungsroman is in crisis because of crises of social integration or if it is a genre about those crises. Given the sustained desire of protagonists and readers for social integration and selfformation, the chapter develops a theory of how promises operate in the genre even when social integration is in crisis in order to account for the sustained appeal (and possibility) of the Bildungsroman. Structural debt, because it at once demands and troubles socioeconomic integration, causes a crisis for the genre. The chapter concludes by exploring how debt permeates and precludes other promises on which the genre is premised. Chapter Two reads two recent Australian Bildungsromane, Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992) and Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea (2020). The possibilities for their respective narrators’ Bildung are conditioned by the development of the debt economy in Australia in the generation between them. Their narrative techniques both function and fail under structural debt, so the concluding chapter speculates on what forms of social integration—and thus what forms of the Bildungsroman—are possible under structural debt. It aims to show the troubled phase of development from which my creative work emerges. The exegesis also aims to locate these recent Australian grunge (and post-grunge) fictions in the lineage of the Bildungsroman. As a whole, the thesis analyses and aestheticises the contradictions of Bildung under the conditions in which it was written. It cannot, as yet, resolve those contradictions (even aesthetically), but the Bildungsroman teaches us that the only promises we can keep are those that account for the tensions that might break them.
School/Discipline
School of Humanities : English, Creative Writing and Film
Dissertation Note
Thesis (MPhil.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities : English, Creative Writing and Film, 2024
Provenance
This thesis is currently under embargo and not available.
Description
Vol 1. "Not Promising : An Extract" : Novel -- Vol. 2 Debt and the Bildungsroman : Exegesis