At least at a theoretical level, the spatial turn in the humanities has attempted to take distance from the idea of temporality, accusing the long hegemony that time exercised over culture in the last two centuries. Although situated within the spatial turn, the PhD thesis speaks about the impossibility of eliminating time and history from recent American city literature and pleads for a post-spatial rediscovery of time that renders the latter more attentive to space’s own contouring of identities. More precisely, I investigate the role that temporality and history continue to play in a number of American city novels such as E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Toni Morrison’s Jazz and others.
How much are such novels still postmodern in their perception of the historical past and how much do they depart earlier postmodernism’s view of history as analysed for example by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism? If they are no longer ‘metafictional historiographies’, how has their view of history changed? My research aims to underline an important shift away from earlier historiographic metafiction towards a less self-reflective, less doubtful and more spatially aware literature that confidently assumes a role in reinvestigating history.
One the one hand, the analysis focuses on a drastic, typically postmodern attack on the self and on reason that a first group of novels perform. I claim that the books in this group reverse notions of progress and dismantle late 19th century’s optimism and trust in the future which they see as already exhausted. Interestingly, a mutually critical dialogue occurs in the subtext between late 19th century and late 20th century, the result being a view of time as essentially non-evolutionary, stagnant, if not plainly regressive. A de-humanising element is at work in the city here, the outcome of excessive desires and of an exorbitant material culture that in The Waterworks, for example, transform old plutocrats into blood-thirsty zombies. Parallel worlds and temporalities unfolding simultaneously in our proximity in the city is one of my major interests here.
On the other hand, a second, smaller group of city novels are seen as illustrative of a post-postmodern perspective on the city, which is more optimistic, more trustful of the possibility of progress and emancipation in time as well as more preoccupied with the idea of interhuman relations. I argue that the novels in this second group operate a re-humanisation of the city and of literature through their giving voice to otherness and asserting various minorities’ equal rights to the metropolis, in what recalls Lyotardean micronarratives while being simultaneously a return to the Enlightenment values.
The project thus aims at showing how such paradoxical attitudes towards history and time can coexist in the recent literature of the city and what the tension between them tells us about the contemporary American literary scene.