This course will focus on two big questions: (1) How free are children to choose the kind of adults they become? and (2) Why should we care about literary depictions of growing up? We will look to four novels to explore these questions and discover what works of fiction can tell us about how children actually grow up and might grow up.

The texts in this course are modern versions of a literary genre that emerged in eighteenth-century Germany, the Bildungsroman, which follows a character’s self-development from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. We’ll move backwards in time, from the 21st century to the 19th, beginning with a contemporary novel (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) in which the protagonist remembers a childhood that at first seems romantic, then… well, you’ll see. For our second novel, we’ll turn to the late 20th-century American White Boy Shuffle, which is both hilarious and deeply sad. Next, we’ll read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, which was published in 1920 when the author himself was barely an adult (23 years old), and we will conclude with the oft-banned classic story of an American boy’s maturation, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

This course aims to help you become a better, more sophisticated reader of literature. whether you’re in the habit of reading novels or not. As we read, we will pay attention to obvious elements of a novel, such as character, setting, plot, and point of view, and to more subtle ones, such as tone, word play, sarcasm, and irony. I will ask you to write regularly and mostly informally, though I’ll also guide you through two formal writing assignments, a short paper on one novel and a comparative paper that analyzes two of the novels we have read.