'Earthquake I.D.', a novel, plus, 'Grounding the dialogue, destabilizing the drama,' a contexual essay (with Original writing)

The novel concerns an American family who has come to Naples, Italy, to work for the homeless victims of the next earthquake to rack this city. The story brings together a marriage in crisis, a complex social canvas (including both local NATO officials and recent refugees from Africa), and an element of the surreal. This admixture often drives events to a quasi-comic extremity, though technically the narrative is traditional. The story develops suspense and then resolves it, while maintaining a consistent point of view and plausible psychology. What liberates Earthquake I.D. from bourgeois orthodoxy, paradoxically, is its close fidelity to the exotic setting. Neapolitan reality tends to subvert any ruling system, and so destabilizes both the conventions of a family-crisis novel and those of a novel about Americans in Italy. This twinning of fidelity and destabilization constitutes my novel's primary artistic contribution to the field.; The context essay construes the narrative's combinatory aesthetic as “dialogic,” in the vocabulary of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin proved the theorist most congenial with the book's imaginative challenges, since the novel is in many ways Marxist, polyphonic, and subversive.; The essay also establishes a context for Earthquake I.D. in turn-of-the century postmodern fiction, among both older masters like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and newer ones like Don DeLillo. In addition, the essay discusses my research and methodologies for the PDE, and divides this work into three groupings, or courses: “The Problem of Sensuality,” “The Problem of Heterogeneity,” and “The Problem of Enfranchisement.” These courses each addressed a major element in fiction: the first style, the second point of view, the third character.; In the integration of these elements and others, the essay identifies a quality of the novel that sets it apart from other artforms, namely, its interrelatedness. Success in the longer narrative resides to a large degree in how many parts it can bring into a vital yet coherent interdependency. Defining this interrelatedness and reaffirming its value to the novel stands as the theoretical contribution of my PDE, one that has implications for the teaching of Creative Writing.