| dc.description.abstract | Re-founding America: Nation, Ideology, and the Modern(ist) Epic Novel argues that during the 1920s and 30s a cadre of minority novelists employed the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of culture as in ancient, poetic epic, Modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy of the modern world; other authors, including George Santayana and Richard Wright, created insipid or outrageous anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo dominance in the United States. Chapter 1, Beyond the Genteel, argues that Santayanas The Last Puritan subverts and ultimately extinguishes the sterile Genteel Tradition of New England (embodied by protagonist Oliver Alden), replacing it with a vibrant strain of multiculturalism (exhibited by his cousin, Mario van de Weyer).^Chapter 2, The Unmaking of American Progress attends to Steins The Making of Americans, which destabilizes the longstanding American ideology of salutary progress, instead asserting that failure is the default condition of the nation, and that even success comes at a great cost. Chapter 3, A Modernist Symphony, takes up the plight of the futile individual in Dos Passos U. S. A., asserting that life in the modern United States requires a plural collectivism embodied by the itinerant characters of that epic novel. Finally, Chapter 4, A Rent in the Curtain, explores the subversion of American apartheid in Wrights Native Son, tracing the epic journey of anti-hero Bigger Thomas, who crosses the Chicago color line to achieve self-actualization and claim meaning for his life.^In all, I claim these epic novels sought to undermine and subvert the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while revitalizing the epic form for use in the modern age. The marriage of this classical form to Modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: the U.S. was too large and diverse, and longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed for the nations axis be entirely dislodged. | |
