'Spectacular failures': The futile/fruitful pursuit of multivocality in American literature (Maxine Hong Kingston, Tony Kushner, William Faulkner)

"'Spectacular Failures': The Futile/Fruitful Pursuit of Multivocality in American Literature," examines the determination of three American writers to incorporate multiple diverse voices into their texts as an exploration of national identity. Their objective, I argue, is to create a representation of American pluralism born out of an idealism either consciously believed (Kushner) or hypothetically desired (Kingston). My contention is that these three authors share a preoccupation with using multivocality to represent American multiculturalism, focusing specifically on techniques of plays and performance that make such representation both visual and participatory.; I foreground my argument with William Faulkner, whose work throughout his life encompasses a wide variety of narrators within each text. I emphasize the transition from his earlier use of multiple narrators to relate a single, ever-elusive narrative to his deployment of this structure in his novella/play hybrid, Requiem for a Nun. Maxine Hong Kingston and Tony Kushner, equally concerned with issues of representation, adapt Faulkner's multivocal style, but replace his modernist focus on the individual with contemporary issues of identity politics. In both form and content, Kingston's work suggests an idealized America of constantly-blurring boundaries. Tripmaster Monkey, like Requiem, shifts fluidly between the genres of play and prose, emphasizing the potential to perform racial and gender identities. Kushner's epic Angels in America depicts a diverse nation filled with mutually beneficial tension. In both his plays and prose, Kushner constructs America through its continual progress toward a community of diversity, toward a promised land eventually attainable.; In conclusion, my dissertation explores each author's relationship to the construct of identity as performance, considering how race, gender, religion, and sexuality are always in the process of negotiation, and how each author uses the dramatic form to literalize American multiculturalism. In my final chapter I consider the importance of the textual space as one in which authors can themselves perform, creating multivocal representation as a parallel of America's ideological foundations if not its extant reality.