E. L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment

by Michelle M. Tokarczyk

Overview

This book gives a political reading of E. L. Doctorow’s fiction. For Doctorow, there was a tension between the ideals of his socially aware family and those of the new critics under whom he studied as an undergraduate. This tension, making him skeptical about the possibilities of political involvement, has been beneficial because it has enabled Doctorow to avoid the excesses of both polemical writing and formalism. Through a stance Tokarczyk terms «skeptical commitment» he has written political fiction of high literary quality. In part, he has done so by adapting genres such as the western and the romance. Furthermore, Doctorow has used experimental techniques to express political and historical themes, thereby writing a kind of postmodern fiction that still maintains the possibility of establishing some truths, while acknowledging indeterminacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820444703
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	04/05/2000
Series:	Twentieth-Century American Jewish Writers , #13
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

The Author: Michelle M. Tokarczyk is Associate Professor of English at Goucher College. She received her Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In addition to several articles and reviews in contemporary literary and cultural studies, she has written E. L. Doctorow: An Annotated Bibliography and co-edited Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory.

Preface

Asking ‘what it means to write political fiction in America—at this historical moment,’ Dr. Tokarczyk uses the word "political" in its enlarged contemporary sense, a sense instructed by feminism and other recent social movements to remember that strikes and barricades do not exhaust the subject of politics. If ‘the personal is political,’ then most if not all novelists must count as political novelists. But Dr. Tokarczyk refuses to take this easy way out. She gives Doctorow full credit for his commitment to politics of a literal or traditional kind—and she takes for her real subject what she calls Doctorow’s ‘politics of indirection’: the tense zone of subtle and unpredictable interactions that Doctorow sets up between such large, public, historical matters and the ‘personal’ materials of the novel.—Bruce Robbins

Editorial Reviews

«Asking ‘what it means to write political fiction in America... at this historical moment’, Dr. Tokarczyk uses the word ‘political’ in its enlarged contemporary sense, a sense instructed by feminism and other recent social movements to remember that strikes and barricades do not exhaust the subject of politics. If ‘the personal is political’, then most if not all novelists must count as political novelists. But Dr. Tokarczyk refuses to take this easy way out. She gives Doctorow full credit for his commitment to politics of a literal or traditional kind ...and she takes for her real subject what she calls Doctorow’s ‘politics of indirection’: the tense zone of subtle and unpredictable interactions that Doctorow sets up between such large, public, historical matters and the ‘personal’ materials of the novel.» (Bruce Robbins, from the Preface)

From the Publisher