SELFHOOD AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

 John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952) 

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When Steinbeck described coming--of-age as "an aching kind of growing," he keyed into a delicate phenomenon of life: adolescence. The moment when children stumble into adulthood is a moment of self-discovery and growth. Representations of growing up in literature, film, and music resonate with universal themes of defining one's self. This year's conference explores gender, cultural identity, and societal pressures in a diverse span of coming-of-age stories.