Zugl.: Diss. / Literaturverz. S. 183 - 189.

The paper describes social, economic and cultural processes in American society in the second half of the twentieth century and reveals the shift in traditional American values.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(文学) / 甲第24341号 / 文博第915号 / 新制||文||730(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院文学研究科文献文化学専攻 / (主査)教授 森 慎一郎, 准教授 小林 久美子, 教授 廣田 篤彦 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Letters / Kyoto University / DGAM

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The thesis paper focuses on the American suburbia, which is understood as an important social and cultural concept which plays a key role in the cultural history of America. The paper defines the basic characteristics and components of the utopian myth of the modern suburbs, such as the pastoral ideal, the notion of deliberate withdrawal from the urban areas, the role of the community or the focus on family togetherness. These concepts are traced in the American cultural history, especially in the idealized legacy of the early settlers and early Puritan communities. The development of the usage and depiction of these cultural concepts in the literary fiction of the period between the 1950s and 80s is then traced in the texts of three major American chroniclers of the suburban life - John Cheever, John Updike, and Raymond Carver. The social context and the historical development of the suburbs are also taken into consideration.

”Terrorism” is a term widely used today. It and its effects are portrayed and discussed innewspapers, in movies, on TV. Seeing as it seems to be present in most media, it appears quite inevitable that terrorism has also found its way into literature. Two examples of novels dealing with terrorism are the American novel Terrorist, written by John Updike in 2006 and Bernard MacLaverty's Northern Irish novel Cal, written in 1983. The novels have their similarities. They share terrorism as a major theme, and both of them have a young man as a protagonist. However, they differ in both time and place. Updike's novel is set in a post-9/11 New Jersey, while Cal takes place in a Northern Ireland divided by The Troubles. Furthermore, Updike's main character is a dedicated Muslim, while the main character of Cal is a not as dedicated Catholic. Indeed, the novels might seem similar at first, but the differences are significant.The perspective to be used in this essay is ethnic. Various theories on terrorism, manipulation and race will be used with said perspective in mind. The aim is to, with the help of relevant theories, examine and analyse the terrorism and its connection to religion and ethnicity in the two novels, in order to compare them and find out whether they portray these things in a different way or not. The question I will be asking, and thus the purpose of this essay, is whether the terrorismand its reasons, organisation – including influence by others – and connection to religion and ethnicity in the two novels mentioned above are similar or not. It is my belief that a comparative analysis of the novels will show that the terrorism and its connection to religion and ethnicity will not be the same in Cal as in Terrorist. One of the reasons for this is that they are set in environments that differ from each other not only geographically and chronologically, but also politically. Thus it seems likely that the reasons for and organisation of the terrorism will differ as well. Another reason is that the characters in Terrorist are more diverse than the ones in Cal, both in terms of religion and ethnicity. General theories dealing with reasons for terrorism, such as Kristopher K. Robison, Edward M. Crenshaw, and Craig J. Jenkins's theory on Islamist terrorism, according to which terrorism performed by Islamists is a reaction to the secular West (p. 2012), and Jeff Victoroff's rational choice theory, which suggests that terrorists are rational (p. 14), will be used to examine whether the characters of the two novels have different reasons for their terrorism or not.The next set of theories that will be used deal with influence, manipulation and brainwashing. Austin T. Turk suggests that a terrorist organisation often isolates its members inorder to ensure that they only have the required knowledge (p. 276), and since this can be used as a tool of manipulation, his theory will be used to examine, and compare, the level of influence and manipulation on the two protagonists. For similar reasons, I. E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, Louis Jolyon West and Joel Rudinow's theories on manipulation, with and without deception, will be used in the comparative analysis. Finally, racial theories, like the theory of signs, which suggests that people have a tendency to divide others into categories based on their racial differences, along with theories on imperative patriotism and the Arab American stereotype will be used. According to Steven Salaita's imperative patriotism, only those who act and look American can be truly American (p. 154), and Jack G. Shaheen suggests that Arab Americans are, by many, thought to be violent Muslims (p. 23). Furthermore, analysts Mita Banerjee and Pamela Mansutti both suggest that there is in fact a connection between religion and race in Updike's novel (p. 16, p. 108). These theories and ideas will be used to analyse the connection between terrorism, ethnicity and religion, and then to compare the two novels, whereupon a conclusion will be drawn. I believe that this conclusion will indeed confirm my thesis.

“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.

Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of the country. When Meliboeus begins his journey he does not travel toward a specific geographical location. Because the gods have forced him from his land and severed his spiritual connection to nature he travels into the unknown. This is the starting point from which I develop neo-pastoral threads in contemporary literature and discuss the alienation that people experience when they are no longer connected to a spirit of the land or genius loci. Neo-pastoralism relates Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope and the expansion of the narrative voice of the novel to include the time/space dialogic. Neo-pastoral fiction shows people in their quest to find spirituality in spite of damage from chemical catastrophic events and suggests they may turn to technology as an ideological base to replace religion. The (anti) heroes of this genre often feel no connection with Judeo-Christian canon yet they do not consider other models of spirituality. Through catastrophes related to the atomic bomb, nuclear waste accidents, and the realization of how chemical pollutants affect the atmosphere, neo-pastoral literature explores the idea of apocalypticism in the event of mass annihilation and the need for canonical reformation. The novels explored in this dissertation are John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer; Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; Toni Morrison’s Paradise; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

This project argues that there is a previously unnamed canon of literature called Magical Feminism which exists across many current popular (even lowbrow) genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, so-called realistic literature, and contemporary television and film. I define Magical Feminism as a genre quite similar to Magical Realism, but assert that its main political thrust is to model a feminist agency for its readers. To define this genre, I closely-read the image of the female magic user as one of the most important Magical Feminist metaphors. I argue that the female magic user–commonly called the witch, but also labeled priestess, mistress, shaman, mambo, healer, midwife– is a metaphor for female unruliness and disruption to patriarchy and as such, is usually portrayed as evil and deserving of punishment. I assert that many (although not all) of the popular texts this genre includes are overlooked or ignored by the academy, and thus, that an important focus for contemporary feminism is missed. When the texts are noticed by parts of the academy, they are mostly considered popular culture novelty acts, not serious political genres. As part of my argument, I analyze third wave feminism’s attempt to reconcile traits previously considered less than feminist, such as the domestic. I also deconstruct the popular media’s negative portrayal of contemporary feminism and the resulting reluctance for many young women to identify themselves as feminist. I also argue that this reluctance goes hand in hand with a growing attempt to seek new models for empowering female epistemologies. My assertion is that these texts are the classrooms where many readers learn their feminism. Finally, I list a short bibliography as a way of defining canon of texts that should be considered Magical Feminist.