Plenary Speaker Dr. Stephanie Hershinow talks “Barbie” and Bildungsroman at English Conference

Jannette Emmerick

Oct. 19 marked UWG’s and LURe Journal’s annual English Undergraduate Research Conference. With panels presenting student papers on Irish studies, humor theory and early American literature compared to contemporary works among many other topics that highlighted broader social observations through various essays.

At noon, the conference featured plenary speaker Dr. Stephanie Insley Hershinow, an Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, who encapsulated an overarching concept of the “Bildungsroman” in current literature particularly with the Barbie Movie.

“[Bildungsroman] comes from German and it refers to this kind of story of maturing and growing or changing and so pretty famously, many people have thought about how in the history of the novel,” said Hershinow. “And it’s something I talk about a lot in my first book that came out a few years ago.”

Published in 2019, “Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel” focuses largely on studying the phenomenon of traits in coming-of-age early literature.

“Early novels don’t really follow that kind of plot of the characters growing and changing, so a lot of them focus on young people, like teenagers for example, ” said Hershinow. “But I think most of us are used to stories of teenagers being about them growing up and becoming adults. One of the things I was drawn to in these early novels is how so many of these characters, even though they age, they stay stubbornly stupid sometimes, even just naive.

“Those authors are kind of highlighting that as potentially a good thing,” continued Hershinow. “That we might have that kind of fresh perspective on the world that isn’t just like jaded and world weary and ‘I’ve seen it all,’ that kind of thing.”

Conversely, the modern Bildungsroman requires growth of character in its resolution, much like the Barbie movie. However, unlike many common tellings of the coming-of-age story, “Barbie” focuses primarily on the growth of an adult, as opposed to an adolescent into adulthood. Furthermore, the movie also dips into surrealism rather than the slice-of-life genre.

“The Bildungsroman is a realist genre, it’s about having characters in a literary text that operate in a way that we recognize as familiar to how real people encounter the world,” said Hershinow. “One of my questions is whether we can apply that kind of term to something like [Barbie] that subverts a lot of realist expectations that we might have for it.”

Hershinow also underscores the director, Greta Gerwig’s, common interest in telling stories related to women adolescence, including the 2019 production of “Little Women” and “Lady Bird.”

“Once you write a paper, that doesn’t mean you stop thinking about the thing that you wrote about.” said Hershinow. “And the same is true for a book. Even though [my book] came out just before the pandemic, it’s something that still had resents for me. So when i see a movie like Barbie, I’m like ‘ugh, I wish I could have written about Barbie.’”

While “Barbie” is one film that resembles the Bildungsroman, there are plenty more both modern and early works of literature that fit the overarching theme.

“One of the things I was thinking about a lot in my book was this phrase that keeps getting used in 18th century novels which is ‘entering the world,’” said Hershinow.

The Bildungsroman is not just about entering the world as an adult, but also navigating socially.

“We have a big, very popular business school, and I have a lot of students that think ‘yes, I’d like to go work in finance because I want to make money and I want to help my family’ and you know, they have a lot of pressures guiding them in that direction,” said Hershinow. “But they also often do express in class anxiety about becoming a kind of corporate drone, saying, ‘I don’t want to just go live/work in a faceless highrise where I don’t get to know anyone’ even though they’re 18, 19, or 20.”

In a way, every individual is living their own Bildungsroman. Ideally learning and growing no matter their stage in life, trying to find their own balance and connecting with literature that expresses their struggles and experiences.

For more on Hershinow’s research, her book is available on amazon or can be purchased here: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11986/born-yesterday