Racing with the world: Hybridity and the construction of American literary modernism.
详细信息
文摘
Beginning with theorizations of hybridity to arise from postcolonial studies, this dissertation explores black and white American authors' attempts to establish viable positions of hybridity in fiction written during the first quarter of the twentieth century. These writers challenged American society's constructions of identity and difference by creating spaces between such oppositional identity positions as black and white, immigrant and native, self and other. Through rehistoricizing the work of these writers in order to focus on the similarity of their political projects, this study begins the process of dismantling the binary logic exhibited in recent critical constructions of American literary modernism which claim that black authors must be judged according to a different set or evaluative criteria than white writers.;The study begins by pairing a chapter on Frank Norris's novel The Octopus (1901) with a chapter on W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Both Norris and Du Bois establish a new, hybrid form of writing that attempts to account for opposed cultural positions. Norns questions the necessity of conceptualizing and representing the world in either a realistic or a romantic manner while Du Bois questions society's construction of racial difference and in the process produces a test of a hybrid gene. The study then moves to a chapter on James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1913) and a chapter discussing Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918) and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Each of these novels details a character's struggle to establish a connection between the self and an other. Society's fear of the hybrid position that this contact would establish eventually denies the connection; however, each author, through telling the tale, questions society's fear of hybridity and its consequent mores which restrict characters' actions. The study concludes with a chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel This Side of Paradise (1920) and another on Jessic Fauset's first novel There Is Confusion (1924). Both texts focus on the desire but final inability of characters to construct hybrid selves after the close of the World War.