Globalization, Postmodernity, and the Bildungsroman: Tracing Narratives of Development in Three Versions of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” Story

Abstract

This thesis traces the history of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” story across three iterations and three decades of world development—the “Enders Game” novella (1977), the Ender’s Game novel (1985) and the subsequent “parallax” version, Ender’s Shadow (1999)—to consider what happens to the form after modernism’s dissipation and question whether or not the contemporary Bildungsroman still serves the historico-philsophical function of its 19th-mid-20th century precursors. By analyzing of three parallel narratives of development through Card’s literary work—that of Ender Wiggin, that of the Ender’s Game narrative, and that of the Bildungsroman genre—this essay extends and modifies the work of Franco Moretti and Jed Esty by demonstrating how the Bildungsroman reacts as the global economy transitions from monopoly capitalism to multinationalism. Taken together, Card’s three narratives tell the developmental story of the genre itself and culminate with Ender’s Shadow, a newly figured Bildungsroman that appears within the realm of science fiction and emerges as a formal response to the Young Adult novel of the postmodern era. As such, Ender’s Shadow exposes the negative effects of late capitalism while at the same time offering a narrative of alterity.