A New Historicist And Cultural Materialist Study Of Norman Mailer's Works

Norman Mailer (1923-) has been active in American literary world since his first novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. Events such as the totalitarian tendency or the Wallacite fear for new fascism in postwar America, the American Dream and American individualism, counter-culture trend, the Vietnam War, Apollo 11 lunar landing project and the technological development, American presidential campaign, Marilyn Monroe, feminism, the execution of criminal Gary Gilmore, the CIA, the Kennedy assassination trauma, the murderer Lee Oswald and the case of Russian spy Robert Hanssen which shocked American society in the year 2001 are all Mailer's concerns. Owing to his constant and conscientious representations of the postwar American social-cultural life and political involvement, Mailer is considered by many literary critics as the spokesman-artist of postwar America. His works are granted to be great and unavoidable in postwar American literary canon.Even so, it seems that Norman Mailer has never enjoyed a unanimously positive comment among American critics, though The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979) have won him the Pulitzer Prize, and the former makes him the winner of National Book Award. Nearly all of his novels have received extremely negative reviews from American critics which almost always overwhelmed the sparse positive ones. However, Mailer has never quit. During his long course of 50-year-odd writing career, Mailer has written near 40 works, of which 8 certifiable novels, 5 new journalistic political, technological and sports reportage, 4 nonfiction novels, or "novelistic biographies" as Mailer called, or 'Biographical Metafictions" defined by John Keener. His other prose forms include novella, short story, interview, essays for newspaper and magazine columns, letter, book review, preface, introduction, poem, play and screenplay etc.The quick-change of his themes, his frequent participation in social events and exposal of his private life to media make critics more concerned with Mailer's ideas, his philosophy of Hip and his personality, but less with his aesthetics. The prosperous development of contemporary literary criticism provides new perspectives and methods for studying Mailer's works both thematically and aesthetically. Robert Begiebing in his doctoral dissertation Acts of Representation: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer (1980) refers to allegorical and archetypal theories to discuss one of the principal themes in Mailer's works: the struggle of life against death in the contemporary world. Andrew Gordon has made a psychoanalytic study of Mailer's fiction in his An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (1980). This dissertation, similar to that of Robert Begiebing and Andrew Gordon, will employ the theories of new historicism and cultural materialism, which were initiated in early 1980s in America and Britain, to assess Norman Mailer's aesthetic and thematic concerns. Of course, this relation of Norman Mailer to new historicism and cultural materialism is by no means farfetched and improvisational. My argument is that Norman Mailer and new historicism and cultural materialisminterestingly share some important notions concerning the postmodern status of history, and the relationship between literature and history, literary texts and politics.Chapter One, "The Historicity of Mailer's Texts", first analyzes the new historicist and cultural materialist notions of "the historicity of texts". Namely, literary texts are not only the material products of specific historical conditions, but also functional components of historical formations. Then, with new historicism and cultural materialism as theoretical guidance, this chapter intends to argue that Mailer's texts not only reflect the various social and cultural conditions of his time, they also make "a revolution in the consciousness of our time". Consequently, Mailer's texts participate in the formation of American intellectual and cultural h...