Place-Based Learning in Three Bildungsromane: To Kill a Mockingbird; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; and Under the Feet of Jesus

Why should my generation be left to clean up the mistakes of our parents and grandparents? Weren't children instructed, over and over, by their elders to pick up their toys and to clean their room? Those lessons came from some deep-seated impulse of taking responsibility for messes and spills.

—James Orbesen (58)

When Bill McKibben argued in The End of Nature (1989) that humans had come to impact every aspect of the earth, changing the very meaning of concepts such as nature, James Orbesen, like many of the writers in Julie Dunlap and Susan Cohen's Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet (2016), was not yet born. The collection brings together voices from "the first generation to grapple throughout their lives with these altered realities," in what some have named "the climate change generation" (Dunlap and Cohen xii). Coming of age has always meant a shifting relationship to authority as young people develop their understanding of the world, but perhaps the irresponsibility of adults has never been as sweeping as it is today. As Orbesen points out in his essay, while adults demanded that he clean up his messes when he was growing up, they were busy ignoring their own. Yet Orbesen believed in the goodwill of adults: "I trusted that older generations would have our best interests in mind. I heard the chorus 'The children are our future' often enough growing up. I bought it. Deforestation, pollution, species extinction, and global warming—it all would be taken care of. Why? Because I would still be here" (58). For Orbesen, as for many of the "climate generation," coming of age means coming to realize that adults have failed spectacularly in acting as guardians of the earth and, at the same time, as guardians of their own children.

Of course, this vexed relationship between youth and the business-as-usual society in which they find themselves is not new. It is foundational to the coming-of-age genre, or the bildungsroman, which was born in the late eighteenth century during the German Enlightenment. Within the European tradition of the bildungsroman, the protagonist typically learns to assimilate, ultimately accepting the terms of mainstream society. Franco Moretti has famously argued that the rise of the European bildungsroman coincided with rapid societal change and helped readers at that time reconcile, as the characters do, their role in the new modern world order. Because the genre historically has been used as a means for training readers in the status quo, many have taken it to task, as one critic writes, for its "often unapologetic investment in masculine, bourgeois ideologies" (McWilliams 9).

However, Sarah Graham demarcates a difference between the European and American traditions in the genre's capacity for social critique. This distinction is perhaps unsurprising for a nation that imagines itself as "the rebellious teenager, impatient with the authority of its European parents and eager to create its own character founded on a different set of values and priorities," as Kenneth Millard explains in his study of the American bildungsroman as a genre of nation-building that emerges in the mid-nineteenth century (5). One strand of the American bildungsroman does indeed celebrate the nation's founding principles, such as the exemplar Ragged Dick (1868) by Horatio Alger. Graham argues that there is another, more contemporary strand: one that reveals that these same principles—including the promise of life, liberty, and happiness—are withheld from many people ("American" 142). Stella Bolaki adds to the case for the genre's subversive power by focusing on American bildungsromane by ethnic and postcolonial women writers that "collide with normative conventions of the genre and grate against its naturalised assumptions" (11). These texts, she argues, problematize dominant American cultural narratives and resist the assimilating force of the genre itself (21).

Despite a growing critical conversation that examines how the bildungsroman has been redeployed to critique national narratives, particularly by women writers and writers from ethnic minorities, little attention...