"One foot in this world and one foot in that": Woman Hollering Creek and the bildungscomposite

Abstract

In this thesis I discuss the genre of Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek. I argue that the book is what I here call a bildungscomposite," that is, a hybrid genre with elements from both the Bildungsroman and the short story composite. The 22 texts the book consists of are autonomous texts, and at the same time connected in a way that allows us to read the book as a unified whole. I believe that reading Woman Hollering as a bildungscomposite offers a fuller understanding of the book than if the stories were to be read separately and isolated from the rest of the texts. As my discussion will hopefully show, this generic hybrid, the bildungscomposite, is the result of literary transculturation.