Title:
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The shifting borderline : minority in twentieth-century American writing
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The thesis draws on twentieth-century continental philosophy and literary theory· to frame
a counter-tradition in post-World War I American writing that confronts hegemonic
cultural values such as individual autonomy and teleological progress. Deleuze's concept of
minor literature plays a structuring role: the unending disruption of power structures
consolidated by and mirrored in the enforced regularity of language-use. Aspects of
Derrida's writings on the rogue further define the theoretical perspective together with
Wittgenstein's thought on the drive for (metaphysical) certainty.
America's fraught relationship with its self-mythologizing suggests strenuous efforts to
regulate signification as well as the necessity of denying material that does not fit into such
schemata. The network of writers brought together responds to this tension by disengaging
from the struggle between propaganda and protest, while remaining in conversation with
both. One aim is to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of literature that can usefully
be read using such an approach.
The thesis interweaves philosophy, fiction, and memoir through chronologically ordered
chapters on specific authors. Emerson's and Thoreau's (re-)placement of the non-rational
at the heart of philosophical thinking, for example, discussed in the first chapter as a stagesetting
moment, anticipates John Dewey's redescription of logic as a completely
historicized and thus contingent technique. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man probes the outer
limits of liberal individualism with its narrator's uncanny credulity,-· wliile race,
respectability, and gay gender pose potentially insurmountable problems for James
Baldwin's cultural critique in Giovanni's Room. Stanley Cavell's inheritance of Freud's
work on melancholia grounds his understanding of philosophical skepticism as both
expression and obfuscation of ordinary anxieties. Chuck Palahniuk's insistently superficial
looks at beauty, violence, and (social) waste emphasize the body's formative influence on
self. Alison Bechdel's memoir of her and her father's quests for a livable II erotic truth"
synthesizes fact and fiction using the deceptively transparent comic idiom.
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