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theses

Imagining the Now considers the permeable relation between aesthetic form and the social uses of literature in order to theorize the relation between the American novel and the “now,” which is always and constitutively in the process of unfolding. I define literary contemporaneity as a site of symbolic contestation that, operating both within a text and in its reception, connects a particular literary work to the social, political, and cultural values that structure the present. Literary contemporaneity cannot, for this reason, be divorced the political implications inherent in rhetoric that seeks to describe social or political change by either consigning an event, social formation, or aesthetic object to the past, or affirming its continued relevance to the present. Such temporalizing judgments operate in historically specific contexts, and within particular ideological frameworks. By interrogating how American literature since 1945 resists, discloses, or participates in such rhetoric, we can begin to tell a literary history that makes the idea of the “period” or the “moment” an object of critical and political scrutiny rather than simply the articulation of historical context. I further argue that literary form can itself generate forms of contemporaneity that are not beholden to conceptions of the present as merely the latest stage on a trajectory of historical unfolding. I do this by looking to moments in which the act of writing, thematically central to all novels under my purview, comes apart from its historical or narrative ground. In the first half of the dissertation, I consider Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). These novels are usually treated as if they belong to separate traditions, but I show that they share a deep investment in the relation between narrative structure and forms of social marginalization. Whereas Ellison ultimately affirms the openness of aesthetic form as a conduit for imagining new forms of sociality, Nabokov positions Humbert’s desire for literary immortality as a figure for social and aesthetic stasis. In the second half, I turn to John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). I consider how these formally innovative novels think with and against contemporary racial and aesthetic formations by engaging with the historiography of sixties activism and eighties conservatism that dominate most accounts of the postwar period. Together, these four novels demonstrate how the American novel since 1945 interrogate the cusp between the contemporary and the historical as a site of political and aesthetic struggle.

ETD_8297

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Torleif Bo Persson

doi:10.7282/T35142C8

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.