American "I -deologies": The personal and the political in the post -Vietnam novel.
Item
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Title
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American "I -deologies": The personal and the political in the post -Vietnam novel.
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Identifier
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AAI3325438
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identifier
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3325438
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Creator
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Balter, Barrie.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Morris Dickstein
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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This dissertation addresses five works that I argue represent an unrecognized and specifically American political novel. In doing so, it challenges a tacit critical consensus that "true" political novels disappeared at the end of the Second World War. The disfavor in which critics like Irving Howe have held American political novels stems largely from the perception of American individualism as innately apolitical, complicated by an attendant and longstanding critical bias against domestic political fiction. As a result, Howe in particular treated the American political novel as either a mythic beast---a contradiction in terms, or an anachronism---a casualty of the anti-Stalinism that arose at end of the Second World War. Strictly speaking, however it was not the novels that vanished, but the politics that informed them. Beginning with E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel (1971) and proceeding through Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song (1978), Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), Mailer's Oswald's Tale (1995), and Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), these new, generically hybrid "novels" reexamine formative moments in American history (including the Rosenberg trial and the Kennedy assassination) through the personal histories of their central figures. Because these "historical biographies" foreground the experience of culturally marginal players rather than "heroes" (Oswald rather than Kennedy for example), they present a kind of dissenting testimony that calls received historical narratives into question. More importantly, these five works elevate personal experience to political significance, reversing Irving Howe's notion of what constitutes "political" subject matte, and redeeming American political fiction as source of trenchant social critique.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
