Quest For Status Within The Shifting Power Dynamics In Tom Wolfe's Novelistic World

As the founding father of the New Journalism Movement, Tom Wolfe incorporatesthe widest range of possible literary techniques to represent the world, greatly enriches the aesthetic expression of media report, and pioneers an original prosaic style marked by a far cry from the previous dispassionate mode. The year 1989 witnessed Wolfe's plunge into novel writing and publication of his far-reaching literary manifesto"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast". In the manifesto, Wolfe compares the imperceptible and fragmented reality of contemporary American life to a deformed"beast"beyond instant recognition and calls for writers of the younger generation to inherit the legacy by social realist writers like Sinclair Lewis, Emile Zola, Thackeray and Balzac and to return to a more sociological approach of writing. Meanwhile, he bombardspostmodernistobsession in making literature strange and condemns the"innovative"technique as the cowards'refuges, where novelists could avert their eyes from the roaring challenge of American reality. In all his work, Wolfe present a highly detailed realism based on reporting and successfully rejoins elements of literature that have become separated from each other in American culture.Wolfe practices what he has preached in the manifesto with all his novels, conducting extensive research on his topic, and functions as a stimulating commentator with both a historical and sociological perspective. This dissertation is going to examine how Wolfe respectivelytackles the zeitgeist and captures the cultural moment in his three novels, with the first one Bonfire of Vanities(1988) dealing with racial politics and criminal justice of New York City in the 1980s, the second A Man in Full(1998) tackling decay of the Southern Dixie tradition as epitomized by the 1990s Atlanta, and the most recent I am Charlotte Simmons(2005) exposing how hooking up culture on college campus corrupts the American youth and denouncesthe possibility of American"Ubermensch". Key for Wolfe to fathom the seemingly imperceptible cultural life is his focus on the role quest for status plays in individual experience. As Wolfe claims, status is fundamental in explaining human action.In terms of theoretical support, thisdissertation resorts tomany sociological and cultural theories and sociological discoveries to analyze Wolfe's texts because Wolfe's fiction itself represents the turbulent sociology that captures the breadth of the time and defines the age. Chapter Irelies mainly on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose analysis of social habitus, disposition, social capital and symbolic capital fits perfectly into interpretation of a text heavily relying on the delineation of status details, like clothing, manners, and the nuances of the way characters walk, what they drive, which street of which part they reside in in Bonfire of Vanities. Chapter IIapplies Thorstein Veblen's concepts of"pecuniary emulation"and"conspicuous consumption", Fredric Jameson's postmodern cultural logic and Michelle Foucault's Panopticon to elucidate A Man in Full's interrogation of a rising Atlanta society within a capitalist world-system and the resultant consumer's culture. Chapter III revolves around examination of biological and neuroscientific discoveries by Edward O. Wilson and his followers to launch a critique of how intellectual influence corrupt the youth in I am Charlotte Simmons, in which sex, not educational goals, defines social status and the Nietzschean Ubermensch is nowhere to find.Besides, the dissertation also uses many classical texts with similar themes as a comparison to map out the difference occurring to American society in varied historical periods. All his life Wolfe has remained steadfast in his commitment to a wider and more populist view of literature with a more interactive cultural relationship. So this dissertation also provides an explanation of how Tom Wolfe's thematic concerns interact with his stylistic expression and thus lays the foundation for a greater understanding of his writings.