Political Engagement In Contemporary American Historiographic Metafiction

This dissertation seeks to mark out and explore the issue of political engagement in contemporary American fiction. In particular, I will examine three selected texts: E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and Don DeLillo's Libra, which I argue that best embody the political engagement in contemporary American histroriographic metafiction.History, politics and literature are intricately interwoven. Admittedly, literature does not only represent but also reacts to the politico-historical situation in which it is produced. American fiction produced since the 1970s, to a large degree, has been characterized by"a return to history."As the concept of"history,"both in historiography and in literature, has undergone tremendous change, postmodern novelists have a more significant role to assume in their reconstruction of history. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to suggest that postmodernism has changed the literary landscape of the United States. Never before, in the literary history of the United States, has any other literary movement exerted such a strong influence upon traditional philosophical conceptions and literature itself. Despite the considerable scholarship devoted to the studies of postmodernism, little consensus has been achieved on even some of the most fundamental questions regarding the subject. While some supporters welcome postmodernism, its detractors vehemently attack it from various angles. For instance, Daniel Bell argues that American fiction since the 1960s"became increasingly autistic"and"the voice of the novelist grew more and more disembodied,"Fredric Jameson attacks the"flatness, depthlessness, superficiality"and"absence of political interventions,"Terry Eagleton criticizes postmodernism for its alleged"depthless, styleless, dehistoriczed"tendency, its"empty of political content"in particular, to name only the most important.Partly as a response to these theorists'attacks on postmodernism, this dissertation examines the paradoxes of the three selected texts as historiographic metafiction, and their different approaches to engaging in the external political life. By placing and situating the three texts back into the political climate of the moment of writing, I argue that contemporary American historiographic metafiction, and by extension late postmodernism, is not"apolitical"but"politically engaged"in social reality. Late postmodernism indicates an explicit"political turn"in terms of its depiction and reinterpretation of major political events in recent history.As a fictional adaptation of the Rosenberg Case in the early 1950s, Doctorow's The Book of Daniel best exemplifies the inherent paradox of historiographic metafiction: self-reflexivity is juxtaposed with historical grounding. Notably, it does not argue for the innocence of the Isaacsons (the fictional counterparts of the Rosenbergs), but traumatizes the survivals from the frantic persecution. The psychological breakdown and deformity of the Isaacson children reveal the influence of the persecution on two generations. By relating the Old Left communists with the New Left students, the novel criticizes the anarchism and violence of the New Left movement.Robert Coover's The Public Burning is another imaginary reconstruction of the trial and executions of the condemned Rosenbergs. Coover's version of this emotionally charged event combines metafictional techniques with historically verifiable events and personages. By transforming the grave executions at Sing Sing prison into a circus event in Times Square, the novel creates a carnival of shame. With Richard Nixon as its principal narrator, the novel also offers a satirical foreshadow of the humiliation that the later President experienced in the Watergate Scandal.Libra, Don DeLillo's recreation of assassination of John F. Kennedy, is also an exemplary text of historiographic metafiction. It is a novel deeply grounded in historical context while explicitly concerned with the process of fiction-making. By telling an alternative truth, the novel refutes the"official truth"contained in the Warren Report. Written in the wake of the Iran-Contra Affair, the most serious political crisis since the Watergate, the novel implicitly attacks the pervasive dishonesty and manipulation of power of the Reagan Administration.The major paradox of historiographic metafiction lies in the contradiction between its historicity and self-reflexivity. What accommodates these two contradictory impulses is the critique of ideology and politics embedded in this kind of postmodern fiction. Based on a close reading of the three selected texts, together with a consideration of the political climate of their moment of writing, this dissertation serves as a tentative refutation of the "apolitical"accusation of postmodernism by some of our best known theorists. As contemporary American fiction has been led by the radical experimentalists and traditional realists to different predicaments, contemporary American historiographic metafiction, by reuniting the aesthetic pursuit with political engagement, indicates a new direction towards"the replenishment of literature."...