This paper is a collection of examinations into various topics in the nonfiction works of Joan Didion. The chapters are written from a personal perspective and delve into themes most meaningful to the author. The paper begins by probing Didion’s treatment of feminism and her opinions towards female figures in society, namely Lucille Maxwell and Georgia O’Keeffe. Didion’s essay “Georgia O’Keeffe” serves as a transition from feminist issues to a discussion of how “style is character” and the extent to which writing is an aggressive and hostile act. Didion’s assertion that writing is an invasion of sorts opens an exploration into the way writing is an act of communication and Didion’s strength of diction. Finally, this thesis concludes with a discussion of how Didion uses her private notebooks as a format for communication with herself, paying special attention to the importance of “nodding terms with the people we used to be.”

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Joan Didion, a native of Sacramento, California, is the author of many acclaimed collections of journalism and memoir, the first of which were Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). Eve Babitz, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, has produced two such volumes: Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977). While much critical ink has been spilled over Didion’s oeuvre, Babitz was, until the recent reprinting of the aforementioned titles, known best as an artist and muse. Perhaps due to this disparity in recognition and renown, no extant critical piece serves to compare the nonfiction of Didion and Babitz, despite their close geographic and social proximity. In viewing their early work side by side, the Golden West of the 1960s and ’70s emerges as the clearest point of comparison; however, the ways in which Didion and Babitz use place and time in their work often differ due to the marked contrasts in the identities they convey. In characterizing herself as a journalist and an observer, Didion offers a perspective that feels objective but is, at turns, wry and cool. Babitz, writing in a manner that was, at one time, considered autofiction, positions herself as the freewheeling focal point around which Hollywood’s dizzying cultural landscape unfolds. By manipulating the constructs of place and persona, these writers are better equipped to tell the story at hand and analyze their places within it, cementing their work in California’s literary canon.

This thesis explores Joan Didion’s concern of mass media’s infiltration on the processing and communication of her personal reality and memory. Didion herself communicates an anxiety of the infiltration of mass media into her individual communication of her unique, indescribable experience. Yet, she too is unable to escape this and instead, is forced to make this an act of adaptation, not separation. Mass media pervades Didion’s own mind, taking over her processing of experience and memory through the modes of photography and film. With these forms of mass media, Didion seeks a purity of personal expression through the form of writing. Ultimately, this proves to be just as problematic and is unable to escape the influence of mass media’s depersonalized representations of individual human experience.

This paper examines the feminist perspective in Didion’s collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Throughout the text, Didion looks closely at the West and the changing social climate which surrounds her. Her essays chronicle women struggling to find a balance between the domestic and independence promised by myth the West. I analyze how women are granted only limited participation within the American Dream because of the masculine power structures which dominate our society. As the values of the American Dream shift, the women that Didion depicts attempt to find identity and independence despite the restrictive forces around them.

“American Impotence” investigates a continuity between literary representations of masculinity and considerations of national identity in the works of five postwar novelists. In particular, I illustrate the manner in which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Couples, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Joan Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho challenge the patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made individualist, characterized by manly virtues like dominance, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. More specifically, this project examines the manner in which the iconicity of men helps sustain a narrative of “imperilled masculinity” that at once privileges an impossible identity, situated in the representative nucleus of postwar democracy, and forecloses other modalities of political life. Observing the full meaning of the word “potency,” I elucidate the interrelationships between narrative forms, masculine norms, and democratic practice. Ellison’s work ties the maturation of African American boys to the impossibility of full participation in civic life, for instance, while in Updike’s Couples the contradictions of virile manhood manifest in the form of a fatalism that threatens to undo the carefully cultivated social boundaries of early sixties bohemianism; in a variety of ways, The Public Burning and American Psycho represent the iconic nature of masculinity as a psychic threat to those men closest to it, while Didion’s female protagonists find themselves flirting with the promises of a secret agency linked to imperial adventures in Southeast Asia and Central America. In the cultural context of the Cold War, these novelists demonstrate how intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, this dissertation seeks to consider impotence as dissensus detached from the mandates of hegemonic masculinity.

“American Impotence” investigates a continuity between literary representations of masculinity and considerations of national identity in the works of five postwar novelists. In particular, I illustrate the manner in which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Couples, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Joan Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho challenge the patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made individualist, characterized by manly virtues like dominance, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. More specifically, this project examines the manner in which the iconicity of men helps sustain a narrative of “imperilled masculinity” that at once privileges an impossible identity, situated in the representative nucleus of postwar democracy, and forecloses other modalities of political life. Observing the full meaning of the word “potency,” I elucidate the interrelationships between narrative forms, masculine norms, and democratic practice. Ellison’s work ties the maturation of African American boys to the impossibility of full participation in civic life, for instance, while in Updike’s Couples the contradictions of virile manhood manifest in the form of a fatalism that threatens to undo the carefully cultivated social boundaries of early sixties bohemianism; in a variety of ways, The Public Burning and American Psycho represent the iconic nature of masculinity as a psychic threat to those men closest to it, while Didion’s female protagonists find themselves flirting with the promises of a secret agency linked to imperial adventures in Southeast Asia and Central America. In the cultural context of the Cold War, these novelists demonstrate how intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, this dissertation seeks to consider impotence as dissensus detached from the mandates of hegemonic masculinity.

No description available.

This dissertation proposes to examine the conspiracy narratives of Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Leslie Marmon Silko that retell American experience with the Cold War and its culture of paranoia for the last half of the twentieth century. Witnessing the resurgence of Cold War paranoia and its dramatic twilight during the period from late 70s to mid-80s and the sudden advent of the post-Cold War era that has provoked a volatile mixture of euphoria and melancholia, the work of DeLillo, Didion, and Silko explores the changing mode of Cold War paranoid epistemology and contemplates its conditions of narrative possibility in the post-Cold War era. From his earlier novels such as Players, The Names, and Mao II to his latest novel about 9/11 Falling Man, DeLillo has interrogated how the American paradigm of paranoid national self-fashioning envisioned by Cold War liberals stands up to its equally paranoid post-Cold War nemesis, terrorism. In his epic dramatization of Cold War history in Underworld, DeLillo mythologizes the doomed sense of paranoid connectivity and collective belonging experienced during the Cold War era. In doing so, DeLillo attempts to contain the uncertainty and instability of the post-Cold War or what Francis Fukuyama calls "post-historical" landscape of global cognitive mapping within the nostalgically secured memory of the American crowd who had lived the paranoid history of the Cold War. In her novels that investigate the history of American involvements in the Third World from Eisenhower through Kennedy to Reagan, Didion employs the minimalist narrative style to curb, extenuate, or condense the paranoid narratives of Cold War imperial romance most recently exemplified in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In her latest Cold War romance novel The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion reassesses her earlier narrative tactic of "calculated ellipsis" employed in A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy and seeks to commemorate individual romances behind the spectacles of Cold War myth of frontier. Departing from the rhetoric of "hybrid patriotism" in Ceremony, a Native American story of spiritual healing and lyricism that works to appease white paranoia and guilt associated with the atomic bomb, Silko in Almanac of the Dead seeks to subvert the paranoid regime of Cold War imperialism inflicted upon Native Americans and Third World subjects by mobilizing alternative conspiracy narratives from the storytelling tradition of Native American spirituality. Silko?s postnational spiritual conspiracy gestures toward a global cognitive mapping beyond the American Cold War paradigm of "paranoid oneworldedness".

This doctoral thesis explores the literarity of reportage, with a focus on the 20th century and modern reportage. The aim is to describe the literary strategies used in modern text-based reportage and how these strategies relate to journalistic standards of credibility and ethics. A primary focus is the question of what the reportage is looking for in the literary, what happens to this literarity when it is used for journalistic purposes, and, in turn, how the literary establishes ethics in the text.        By suggesting that a piece of reportage is a journalistic text that simultaneously tells the story about the reporter’s encounter with the event, this dissertation sheds light on possible approaches to the concept of literarity: Subjectivity, narrativity, meta-narrative aspects, the poetic function of language and the performative movements in the text. The ethics of reportage is also to be derived from the encounter, and this thesis implements a concept of ethics in conversations with Emmanuel Levinas and dialogical philosophy. It provides an opportunity to separate ethics from moral, ideological and political dimensions of responsibility in the encounter. This aspect of ethics, where literarity and counter-movement operate beyond the direct intention, is what is needed to understand the reportage genre.      The dissertation also includes six longer reportage analyses embodying its results: Djuna Barnes’s, Vagaries Malicieux, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hanna Krall’s A Tale for Hollywood, Sven Lindqvist’s Kina nu: Vad skulle Mao ha sagt? and Joan Didion’s, Slouching towards Bethlehem.