Narrating America: Myth, history, and countermemory in the modern nation (Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Julie Dash)

This dissertation analyzes the relationship of history and myth to the contested conceptual territory of “America” in a range of historical fiction from the last third of the century. Drawing on a range of American historical fiction—Don DeLillo's Americana (1971) and Underworld (1997); Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998); Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise (1993); and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992)—I investigate cultures of resistance and survival, and demonstrate that the conceptual boundaries which define American identity are composed of traditional myths that are being ruptured and revised, as well as of new mythologies that are being rendered by historically marginalized peoples.; Chapter two argues that DeLillo produces a critical project of demystification by revising myths of quintessential American innocence in a contemporary context that exploits the tension between innocence and violence. Chapter three studies Morrison's evocation and revision of the myth of the West as virgin land in Paradise. Chapter four illustrates that the innovative narrative strategies by which Cliff recontextualizes the Civil War as a colonized slave uprising in a transnational context make the novel a resistant narrative that theorizes America as a postcolony. Chapter five elaborates Dash's critical remembrance of the African diaspora, demonstrating that it transforms the opposition between modernity and tradition into a dialectic whereby multiple political and cultural genealogies interpenetrate to form hybrid identities.; This study uniquely addresses contemporary historical imagination by focusing on the tension between national mythologies and history, and countermemories that have historically sustained marginalized peoples. While my project joins recent scholarship that opens up dialogue between the fields of American studies and postcolonial and diaspora studies, it contributes an original revision of the margin-center topography through its study of mythic formulations of America. Through my investigation of a heterogeneity of localities that articulate national culture and produce a politics of truth, I hope to reveal the depth and range of cultural identities that comprise the American nation and constitute a resistant comparative American literature.