The novel of retrospect in American fiction of the 1990s: Pynchon, Morrison, Roth.
Item
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Title
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The novel of retrospect in American fiction of the 1990s: Pynchon, Morrison, Roth.
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Identifier
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AAI3074640
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identifier
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3074640
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Creator
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Cohen, Samuel.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Louis Menand
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Date
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2003
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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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In a nine-month period in the late nineties Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth published historical novels that directly or indirectly confront the sixties, the era in which they became the writers they are known as today. Mason & Dixon, Paradise, and American Pastoral, written by three very different authors, address many of the same questions about America. The time at which these books appeared---the nineties, a decade which in light of recent events can be seen not simply as the post-Cold War era but as a period between wars---has much to do with their similarities.;The retrospective climate of the nineties can be ascribed to the anniversaries of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, the end of the Cold War and the fiftieth anniversary of the last World War, and the end of the century and the millennium. This retrospective mood led Pynchon, Morrison, and Roth to reevaluate the original Edenic promise of America and the ways in which it has been lost. Pynchon revisits American history and asks whether the divisions and injustices of American life are as inevitable and insoluble as he has previously seen them to be. Morrison reconsiders her ideas about race, wondering if sixties movements which sought to elevate race-consciousness simply repeated the mistakes of white racism. Roth reexamines the sixties' rejection of tradition and counts the losses incurred in the course of the attempts at liberation. Given the space to look back, these three novels reread American history and find evidence of the binary habits of thought and exclusionary patterns of action at the roots of the dream of an American paradise and of its loss.;The historical aspect of these novels is important not just for what it tells us about the nineties but also for what it corrects in academic literary criticism. While Fredric Jameson and others claim that contemporary novels are unable to represent our incomprehensible postmodern reality, these novels do tell us things about our world, and in doing so ask us to think again not just about contemporary life but also about the things that novels can do.
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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.
