Reciting America, repetition and the cultural self-sufficiency of the United States in the fiction of Russell Banks, Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and T. Coraghessan Boyle

grantor: University of TorontoThis dissertation argues that several post-Second World War American works of fiction dramatize the way in which American identity is assumed by its citizens, largely through the repetition, recitation, and performance of the different kinds of American discourses by which the United States talks about itself to itself, and to others. These discourses, which provide the narrative patterns, vocabularies, mythologies, and explanations whereby American individuals conceptualize both their relation to the social real of the United States and to each other, are found, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's suggestive image, already existing in "other people's mouths" (Dialogic 294). This dissertation begins by theorizing the relation between language and consciousness, and the role of irony and the cliche in the processes of citing, performing, and repeating, with or without apparent difference, the social discourse which the individual finds in others' mouths. Chapter One examines the inscription in Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift of the discourse of the American dream. Chapter Two looks at the way the narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man attempts to understand his identity as an African American through, successively, three available vocabularies: that of the discourse of Booker T. Washington, that of the Communist Party of the United States, and that of Marcus Garvey's Romantic Nationalism. Chapter Three considers the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, who must also decide what is worth saying again, from grade school recitation to the retelling and "translat (ing) " (209) of two traditional Chinese tales, the anonymous "Ballad of Fa Mu Lan," and Ts'ai Yen's "Eighteen Laments." The Conclusion looks at T. Coraghessan Boyle's East is East, and suggests that the racial, racist cliche is a type of "preoccupied" signification, a form of repeated discourse which short-circuits its flexibility in representing the real. This dissertation concludes by examining, alongside President William Clinton's 1995 Loyalty Day Proclamation, two Inaugural poems (by Robert Frost and Maya Angelou), both with reference to Sacvan Bercovitch's assertion regarding the United States' "cultural self-sufficiency" (Rites of Assent 22).Ph.D