"Following a strange course": reading, race, and the anachronistic histories of postwar american fiction

This dissertation retells a story of the American postwar period as a debate about what it means to be contemporary: a story made legible by tracing out an ongoing confluence of depictions of reading, anachronistic temporalities, and theorizations of race. Specifically, it tells the story of an ongoing argument about how the present is related to both the past and the future, and how the activity of reading has been a central, though often unremarked upon, aspect of that debate. The notion that the past is causally linked to the present is the foundation of any sense of historicism; this project, however, shows how that relationship was far from inevitable or desirable to the writers of the last half of the twentieth century. Their frequent pairings of descriptions of reading and an anachronistic imagination demonstrate their attempts to imagine other relationships to history, and the resulting perspectives that could help them reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas about race, politics, and literary innovation. The unique temporal connections embodied in reading activate that sense of anachronism and help them conceptualize what that perspective might look like: where the present is already history. These writers use anachronism to insist both on connecting to the material past in order to recover a usable sense of it and imagining historical distance from that past in order to see it in new ways. In working through that dual insistence in their scenes of reading, these authors provide a means for understanding their historical moment alongside our shifting present, since we now inhabit the future perspective they sought to imagine. This dissertation is deeply immersed in the two major literary histories of the late twentieth century: of postmodernity as an aesthetic form and of racial recovery work based in historicism Furthermore, tracing out the ongoing confluence of anachronism and reading complicates the assumptions of what Stephen Best has called “the archival turn” in recent literary criticism. By reconsidering the way we interpret history and race in novels, this project allows us to bring together two discourses associated with the postwar period but often thought to be mutually exclusive: ironic, experimental, and abstract writing on the one hand, and earnest, historically grounded, politically engaged writing on the other. Rather than choosing sides between an allegedly apolitical, ahistorical textual innovation and a sincere, ethical commitment to recovering racial histories, the writers in this study seek a perspective that can merge the two. Building on the work of scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Brian McHale, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, this project reads these novelists as combining and expanding the differing understandings of history associated with each discourse. The main contribution, then, is viewing these literary texts and the debates around them through the lens of the imagined future; in other words, thinking anachronistically, just as this group of novelists strives to do. In looking forwards rather than back, the project attempts to view the present as if it were already history.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference