Postadolescent Novels in Contemporary German and Canadian Literature: Defining Features and Character Development of In Plüschgewittern’s and The Flying Troutmans’ Protagonists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Postadolescence is a relatively new sociological and psychological phenomenon. While previous research has primarily read the postadolescent novel as an adolescent novel, this thesis seeks to contribute to existing scholarship by broadening the scope of analysis; it will remove the postadolescent novel from its limited confinement within the genre of adolescent fiction and examine it from the lens of the novel of formation instead. This is not to say, however, that the postadolescent novel should be read as a Bildungsroman; this term merely serves as a tool for interpreting novels of postadolescence with emphasis on their protagonists’ crucial life stages. This thesis also considers postmodernism as a key concept to the emergence of postadolescence and proposes that there is indeed a critical need for a perspective that examines cultural and literary studies as well as sociological and psychological approaches in order to more fully comprehend this term. Sociological postadolescents have largely completed the development of their social, emotional, intellectual and physical faculties, but refuse or are unable to integrate themselves into society’s institutional structure. Therefore, they are not, as sometimes suggested, legal adults who behave and live like adolescents. A narrow focus on such psychological and sociological developmental traits can be widened through an analysis of the specific characteristics that postadolescents display in fictional works, such as postmaterial values, a high regard for self-actualization, and the lasting possibility of personal development as well as a change of direction of that development. This thesis thus applies postadolescent theory to fiction in order to identify postadolescent protagonists, distinguish them from adolescent characters, and situate them in relation to their personal development throughout the novel. Miriam Toews’ novel The Flying Troutmans and Wolfgang Herrndorf’s In Plüschgewittern will serve as examples for texts centered on the life stage of postadolescence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".