Trilogies and temporality: Progress and the temporal sturcture of American exceptionalism

Temporality and Trilogies: Progress and the Temporal Structure of American Exceptionalism argues that when studied as a genre, American literary trilogies utilize representations of time inherent to the production of ideologies of progress. This work intervenes in scholarship on the presence of progressive thought that has long been connected with both affirmations and critiques of the American exceptionalism. In examining the properties of progress as understood in the western tradition, this dissertation shows how canonical narratives of progress rely on a representational understanding of temporality schematized poetically into a narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end. This structure represents a more rigid ordination of narrative than what one finds in literary formations like the novel. Making present the progressive structure on the level of narrative organization separates trilogies into their own category of analysis. The three-part structure produces tropological overlaps that inform the content of these sets of widely consumed texts underwrite the close readings of literary trilogies that critique American exceptionalism.;Each trilogy studied criticizes the role progress plays in supporting and justifying the violent regime of American exceptionalism, both domestically and globally. Each makes progress present on the level of content by representing its position in American culture as an ever-present force in determining social organization. Utilizing the work of Giorgio Agamben on the "economic" structure of power in contemporary democracies, this dissertation argues that these trilogies make present a progressive economy. Within the context of the totalized drive for improvement demanded by protectors of American exceptionalism, progress is a plastic term that gains its power through continued re-deployment. The close readings of William Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, and Toni Morrison's Love Trilogy show how the demands for progress produce political climates dangerous for those on the periphery of U.S. culture. Each reading excavates these criticisms and measures their power against the presence of progressive temporality on the level of narrative structure. These trilogies represent the difficulties and possibilities associated with deploying a literary genre against the ideologies that support its construction.