The orchestration of chaos : the context and structure of the novels of William Gaddis

A major issue in William Gaddis' novels, The Recognitions and JR, is the problematic role of art and the artist. The thesis traces this theme to certain classic and romantic ideas about art in the nineteenth-century American romance, as well as to the literary theories of such modernists as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and to the theories of such disparate writers as, among others, the New Critics and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The ideas and structure of Gaddis' novels are located and discussed in relation to this context. Like many contemporary novelists, Gaddis transposes his themes into the reflexive structures of his works. His development of self-referring form culminates in JR, a novel in which language is itself the structural and thematic focus. This thesis shows that, although Gaddis' novels demonstrate the modernist tenet that art vindicates life, they are also powerful satires which express the writer's concern for the social relevance of art