Title: History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in the Contemporary American Historical Novel
Abstract:Author(s): Gordon, Zachary David | Advisor(s): Hale, Dorothy | Abstract: My dissertation, History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in Contemporary American Historical Novel, analyzes what I...Author(s): Gordon, Zachary David | Advisor(s): Hale, Dorothy | Abstract: My dissertation, History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in Contemporary American Historical Novel, analyzes what I argue are traces of historical referents, specifically minds of historical figures, in works of Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. project critiques postmodern theories of narrative that, citing their equivalence as texts, attempt to undo distinction between histories and fictions. While such claims are predicated on assumed irrecoverability of historical referents, I argue that we can only account for a network of stylistic peculiarities in these authors' works as disruptions created by such referents. My first chapter, `Strange Even to Himself': Characterization, and Absence of Interiority in Libra, accounts for a self-alienation unique to historical figures in DeLillo's novel. I argue that DeLillo skirts epistemological limit posed by minds of historical figures by folding that limit into his characterizations; that is, unlike novel's purely fictional creations, his versions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby lack access to their own interiorities. Failing to identify with a text that does not correspond to their referential selves, they register their own fictionality as a result. My second chapter, The Devil's in Details: Mundane Symbols of Executioner's Song, combines theories of description with recent work in thing theory to show how recalcitrant materiality of story's details undercuts any symbolic reading of text. Mailer's presentation of his material certainly begs for such readings at moments; even Hugh Kenner has, somewhat ghoulishly, linked coroner's initial inability to recognize Gilmore's heart (the actual organ) to the truth that...the heart of man is very often desperately wicked. resistance of Gilmore's corpse to this distasteful metaphorization marks, I claim, an ethical limit to fictionalization. My third chapter, The Abstracted Ladder: Mason a Dixon's Model of History, examines purpose underlying multiple returns to literal meanings and material objects staged over course of novel. As text reveals arbitrariness of organizing principles governing historical narrative, it frees up areas of past such narratives have obscured and suggests their recuperation depends on a multiplicity of imperfect frames.Read More
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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