Novels rejecting bildungsroman and romance conventions without compensation read as rule-breaking

Evidence

From a formal perspective, I prefer to attribute the peculiar tensions engendered by aspects of Minaret to two sources: first, readers’ discomfort in the mismatch between their expectations of the genres of which this novel partakes—the bildungsroman and the romance—and the plot resolution; and, second, the novel’s refusal to take on the challenge of finding an alternative to prosaic realism as a vehicle for espousing transcendental belief. In the Western tradition, the bildungsroman has usually been defined in relation to active self-realization through material or social integration and reward or, conversely, through rejection of such goals. The development of the self is commensurate with a “coming in” to the bosom of society in the classic realist novel. Conversely, within literary modernism these comforts may ultimately be rejected, but they are rejected by the heroic will of agents who prefer isolation or even death to social conformity. In the romance, the main narrative energies are directed toward emotional and erotic fulfillment. A novel such as Minaret that deliberately rejects both models, without any compensatory material advancement or sense of secular gender solidarity, seems to transgress some of the basic “rules” of literature as it is understood to have developed. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 476

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out what the bildungsroman and romance genres structurally promise, so the transgression can be named precisely.
• XREF: A formal template for testing whether Hamid’s or Naqvi’s novels refuse or satisfy genre expectations as evidence of contesting conventions. — connects to: Puzzling fictions work by violating self-imposed rules, not by ignoring them. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 517
• QUESTION: Does the mismatch itself, or the prose realism, do more of the destabilizing work for readers? Morey leaves their relative weight vague here.