California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels : Exiled from Eden (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels : Exiled from Eden (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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  • 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版/ページ数 212 p.
  • 言語 ENG
  • 商品コード 9780367663643
  • DDC分類 813.54

Full Description

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion's novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion's interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion's fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion's oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion's fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion's fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity - which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Joan Didion, the Native Daughter

Didion the Sacramentan, Californian, Westerner

Critical Reception

Joan Didion's Melancholy California

Part 2: Californian Losses and Melancholia

The Myth of an Empty Frontier

How Joan Didion Expelled Herself from Paradise

Racial Melancholia and the Emergence of Conscience

The Social Dimension of Melancholia

Chapter 1: The Loss of Nature

Problems with American Nature

Problems with The Garden of Eden

The Paradoxes of Nature

Writing to Remember and to Redeem

Pioneers and Ancestors

Purification through Fire

The Howling Wilderness: The California Desert

Turner's and Didion's Frontierless West

Chapter 2: The Loss of History

Manifest Destiny and Its Fulfillment in California

Freedom from History

History, Nature, and Hysteria

"A History of Accidents"

"You Can't Call This a Bad Place"

The Freeway Experience

Escaping the Meaninglessness of History

Chapter 3: The Loss of Ethics

The Emergence of Conscience

The Melancholic Donner Party

Desire and the Wagon-Train Morality

Betrayals of Familial Loyalty

Life as Gambling

Parental Influence

Parental Transgressions

Chapter 4: The Loss of Language

Looking Awry at Conscience and Loss

The Language of Melancholia

The Limits of Language

Estrangement from the Body

Translation and Betrayal

The Modern Pioneers and the Loss of Memory

The Language of Democracy

Conclusion

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