This seminar will be held on Zoom. Please contact the seminar convenor Monique Rooney Monique.Rooney@anu.edu.au for the Zoom link.

The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age: Ned Curthoys and Joseph Steinberg in conversation

The opening gambit of Ned Curthoys' The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age (2024) is to assert that the titular genre is now an intermedial form, encompassing both print and audiovisual works, and that its structural features have been adapted for the purposes of historical fiction. What defines the Bildungsroman today? What does it mean when this form's protagonists perpetrate, are implicated in, or are otherwise complicit with historical injustices? What relations do exemplars of this form construe between their protagonists' journeys and the larger historical canvas? How ought we to read their urgent framing of the problem of historical understanding?

Join Joseph Steinberg in conversation with Ned Curthoys via Zoom, for a discussion of these and other questions.

Ned Curthoys is a senior lecturer in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia and associate editor of the journal Arendt Studies. He recently published his second monograph The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age (Bloomsbury, 2024) which explores intersections between the Bildungsroman and the witnessing imperatives of historical fiction.

Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. His articles, reviews and interviews have appeared in Australian Literary Studies, JASAL, The Cambridge Quarterly, AHR, The Sydney Review of Books and The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel.