The American Dream Machine: Anti-Systemic Fictions of Coover, Thompson, Burroughs, and Acker
| Thesis title in Czech: | Stroj na americký sen: Protisystémová fikce Coovera, Thompsona, Burroughse, a Acker |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | The American Dream Machine: Anti-Systemic Fictions of Coover, Thompson, Burroughs, and Acker |
| Key words: | americký sen|transgrese|limit|moc|exces|spektákl|karneval|kapitalismus|konzumní|establishment |
| English key words: | American Dream|transgression|limit|power|excess|spectacle|carnival|capitalism|consumerism|establishment |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2015/2016 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | Louis Armand, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 05.10.2015 |
| Date of assignment: | 05.10.2015 |
| Administrator's approval: | not processed yet |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 07.10.2015 |
| Date and time of defence: | 05.09.2017 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 07.08.2017 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 05.09.2017 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | Mgr. David Vichnar, Ph.D. |
| Guidelines |
| The thesis will engage in the diagnostics of the ever-changing trope of the “American Dream” and its literary manifestations through the lens of selected American authors of transgressive fiction published in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, including Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Coover, Hubert Selby Jr., Bret Easton Ellis, and Damien Ober. Analysis of the chosen texts will confirm transgressive literature as a means of exposing the dark side of the Dream—that it is a pre-permitted ideal imposed by a capitalist, spectacular society, an unfeasible fiction promoted as reality that remains deeply ingrained in the stereotypical American mindset of primary ambition. The cultural, historical and political context and evolution of the American Dream will be examined—its origin, changing meaning and its depiction in American literature, both negative and positive. Thanks to the popularization of the American Dream ideal by James Truslow Adams in 1931, the expression came to symbolize an essential, unalienable part of American society even in times of political and economic upheaval throughout the 20th century. Just like the New Deal in the 1930s divided the political stance on the American Dream, so did Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” vision introduced in the 1960s. It is no coincidence that the Vietnam War brought the Dream into perspective a decade overdue. During the turn of the 1960s, the American Dream acquired an air of insignificance due to the political, cultural and economic decline of the nation, resulting in disillusionment and the degeneration of the ideal, a perception that would resurface during the 1980s’ AIDS epidemic. This new economical variation gradually resulted in the metamorphosis of the individual freedom ideal into a corporate ideal that shadowed the 1980s, bringing the American Dream back to the materialistic dominance of the 1950s’ consumerist tinged vision. Transgressive fiction theory will be discussed along with the theory of limit-experience in connection to selected texts with literary genealogy taken into account. Through the exploration of the common extremism found in the discussed transgressive texts, the thesis will expose the American Dream as an ideal prostituted by its propagators—the media and capitalist institutions, both flourishing in postwar America, asserting the literary heritage of the negative trope of the American Dream. Instead of euphemizing reality, transgressive writing provides an acute social critique of the machinery powering this Dream. Michael Silverblatt, who defines the transgressive fiction genre, argues that “[t]he underlying idea of transgressive thinking […] is that knowledge is no longer to be found through the oppositions of dialectical reasoning. Instead, knowledge is found at the limits of experience.”[1]In reaction to the disillusion with the fabricated dream, the texts portray a psychological panorama of the American nightmare. This cultural malaise is depicted through extremity, the motif of self-destructiveness going hand-in-hand with the idea of the limit-experience. The objective is to test the boundaries of organized reality, and through the blurring of reality and realism facilitate an exploration of consciousness and unconsciousness. Analyses of the texts will trace the commonality and differences found in the selected group’s writing in regards to their response to the American Dream, American exceptionalism and the American way of life, paying specific detail to issues of obscenity, literary merit, extreme individualism, hypocrisy, and the extent of the freedom of choice. The analysis will describe how these works defy the ideal of the American Dream and the American way of life in terms of social critique with particular focus on motifs of the maverick, conformism, the pursuit of happiness, control and addiction, and self-validation. The authors supply their own interpretation and realization of the American Dream, be it through exploitation, distortion or perversion of the myth. The texts violate the already perverted idea of the American Dream, supplanting it with their own subverted manifestations. The problematic of defining these labels—transgressive, American Dream, American sensibility—will be debated as well. The thesis will explore whether literature can be effectively transgressive and whether there exists such a thing as distinctly American transgressive fiction. The already traditional convention of the marginal being assimilated into the mainstream discourse applies to this subject as well, further complicating the issue of normalization. Can transgressive texts effectively work in opposition to social normativity if they themselves become normalized by the very institutions they attack? This question relates to another point to be discussed in the thesis, the issue of cultural authority. Who is the arbiter of reality? American cultural and political propaganda, extending well past the Cold War era, testifies in favor of the official establishment and military industrial complex aided by media. Through media and official structures, reality becomes a fiction, while transgressive fiction delves into hyperreality, drawing the curtain and exposing the Wizards of Oz, the masterminds behind the American Dream. [1]Michael Silverblatt, “SHOCK APPEAL / Who Are These Writers, and Why Do They Want to Hurt Us? : The New Fiction of Transgression,” Los Angeles Times 1 Aug 1993: 2. 20 Feb 2014 |
| References |
| Allué, Sonia Baelo. “Serial Murder, Serial Consumerism: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991).” Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Clarke, Jamie. "An Interview With Bret Easton Ellis." Geocities.com. November 4, 1996 and October 22, 1998. 30 May 2007. Cohen, Roger. "Bret Easton Ellis Answers Critics of 'American Psycho.'" New York Times. 6 Mar. 1991: C13, 18. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Decker, James M. Harry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Eldridge, David. “The Generic American Psycho.” Journal of American Studies. Vol. 42, No. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of “American Psycho.”” Diacritics. Vol. 27, No. 2. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997. Giles, James Richard. Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Grant, Barry. "American Psycho/sis: The Pure Products of America Go Crazy." Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999: 23-40. Gregg, John. Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Hanson, Sandra and White, John. American Dream in the 21st Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Hume, Kathryn. American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960. Chicago: University of Illinois, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Kjerkegaard, Stefan. “The Medium Is Also the Message: Narrating Media in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Hunter, Jeffrey W. Vol. 345. Detroit: Gale, 2013. Lydenberg, Robin and Skerl, Jennie. William S. Burroughs At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Malkmes, Johannes. American Consumer Culture and its Society: From F. Scott Fitzgerald`s 1920s Modernism to Bret Easton Ellis’ 1980s Blank Fiction. Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag, 2011. Mandel, Naomi. Continuum Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction: Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park. London: Continuum International Publishing, 2010. Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Mayné, Gilles. Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller. Vestavia Hills: Summa Publications, 1993. Mookerjee, Robin. Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. O’Neill, Maggie and Seal, Lizzie. Transgressive Imaginations: Crime, Deviance and Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 Samuel, Lawrence R. American Dream: A Cultural History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012. Schneiderman, Davis and Walsh, Philip. Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto Press, 2004. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Weinreich, Martin. “”Into the Void”: The Hyperrealism of Simulation in Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho”.” Amerikastudien/American Studies. Vol. 49, No. 1. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag WINTER, 2004. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005. |