A new kind of coming out: Queerness, conflict, and the postmodern bildungsroman

This project highlights the relationship between queerness and conflict in postmodern articulations of the classical coming-of-age narrative or bildungsroman. Although manifestations of conflict can be argued as constitutive factors in the formation of any personal identity, A New Kind of Coming Out particularizes patterns of struggle in which, I argue, postmodern authors are especially invested in drawing queer characters. Both the erotic and more generally non-normative uses of the term "queer" are considered here. Using canonical theory from thinkers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and more contemporary queer criticism from writers such as Judith Butler and Heather Love, this project takes up the fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Jeffery Eugenides as particularly useful examples of an emergent trend in queer literary theory: the turn away from overly-triumphalist narratives to ones in which the consequences of conflict, grief, and loss clearly inflect the "queerness" of a text.