Suburban grotesque: The vision of John Cheever.
Item
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Title
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Suburban grotesque: The vision of John Cheever.
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Identifier
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AAI9224819
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identifier
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9224819
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Creator
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Hartman, Lorie S.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Irving Howe
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Date
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1992
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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 is a study of the fiction of John Cheever who is primarily known for the short stories he wrote and published in the New Yorker magazine from the years 1935 through 1975.;It is the purpose of this dissertation to trace the recurring themes that dominate Cheever's fictions and to reveal Cheever as a writer haunted by dark images of the grotesque. In his best work, Cheever was able to illumine the disorder and alienation at the heart of contemporary American life, especially that life which is carried on in the suburbs.;But the grotesque is not limited to Cheever's fictional suburbs. Cheever identified the generating source of his work as the fear of confinement, and he used geographical places to symbolize that fear: the small, decaying New England town of St. Botolphs, the suburbs such as Shady Hill and Bullet Park, and finally the Falconer Penitentiary.;Cheever's method was to beguile the reader through a casual narrative style of apparent realism which allowed the grotesque and the supernatural in his fiction to seem believable and even inevitable. He was a master at blending the laughable and the comic with images of terror or despair.;Because he dreaded the incursions of technology into the seeming beauty of pastoral settings, he is very much in the tradition of what the critic Richard Chase calls "American Romance." In this tradition, the writer is allowed a greater freedom from verisimilitude and continuity, since his purpose is to illumine the inner reality of characters who find themselves in crisis.;Although Cheever's style became more radical and less realistic in his later years, the presence of the grotesque was there from the beginning. As a result, his best fiction is far more daring and experimental than has generally been realized.
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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.
