Abstract

Juvenalia or Birdsong for Sheyne Meydelech, a collection of short stories, is a new existentialist riff on the complexities of the feminine coming-of-age in a postmodern society. These stories explore the tradition of the Bildungsroman in a postmodernist context. The coming-of-age experience in the twenty-first century is innately fragmented. Childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and past, present, and future are weakly linked by memories of before and after: before the internet, before phones, before dating apps, before COVID, before hook-up culture, before this. My collection is an exploration of the experience of contemporaneity through the eyes of a young woman. The stories are unified by their treatment of alienation. My collection identifies alienation as the primary effect of the rapid evolution of technology and its equally rapid integration into our lives.

In tone, the stories are rosy and sad, cynical but earnest; tragicomedy is the only mode through which I might dutifully reproduce my experience of postmodern life. These stories are concerned with plot, particularly its capacity to serve as a microcosm for the competing forces of self-determination and destiny. I enact metafiction as a tool to argue against the existence of free will as a factor in the life of the twenty-first century woman. Technology has proliferated in such a way that life now holds an infinitude of possibilities and appears as infinitely fragmented. Furthermore, absurdism and surrealism emerge as the only lenses through which a young woman might perceive a world still replete with wonder and the hope for narrative coherence.

Just as the collection’s fragmented world precludes its narrative cohesion, so too does the routine immersion of our consciousness into the internet preclude the possibility of an exclusively realist mode. As such, the collection operates predominantly through realist narratives which invariably branch into softly magic realism, surrealism, or fantasy. At their heart, these stories boil down to the problem of alienation and the desire for connection; they are informed by pain but reach for levity.