Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--English and American literature--Colchester (GB)--University of Essex, 2007. / Bibliogr. p. 261-268.

This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailer’s relationship to the 20th century avant-garde. Mailer is often remembered as a pioneer in the new documentary modes of subjective non-fiction of the sixties. Looking beyond the decade’s themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailer’s aesthetics in general to other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis. In doing so, it argues that Mailer’s work represents a thoroughgoing aesthetic and political response to modernism in the arts, a response that in turn fuels a critical opposition to postmodern aesthetics. Two key ideas are explored here. The first is narcissism. In the sixties, Mailer was an avatar of what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism”. The self-advertising non-fiction was related to an emerging postmodern self-consciousness in the novel. Yet the myth of Narcissus has a longer history in the story of modernist aesthetics. Starting with the concept’s early articulation by Freudian psychoanalysis, this thesis argues that narcissism was for Mailer central to human subjectivity in the 20th century. It was also a defining trait of technological modernity in the wake of the atom bomb and the Holocaust. Mailer, then, wasn’t just concerned with the aesthetics of narcissism: he was also deeply concerned with its ethics. Its logic is key to almost every major theme of his work: technology, war, fascist charisma, sexuality, masculinity, criminality, politics, art, media and fame. This thesis will also examine how narcissism was related for Mailer to themes of trauma, violence, facing and recognition. The second idea that informs this thesis is the theoretical question of “the real”. A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailer’s initially radical work was excessively grounded in documentary and traditional literary realism. Yet while the question of realism was central for Mailer, he approached this question from a modernist standpoint. He identified with the modernist perspectivism of Picasso and his eclectic “attacks on reality”, and brought this modernist humanism to a critical analysis of postmodernism. The postwar (and ongoing) debates about postmodern and realism in the novel connect in Mailer, I argue, to what Hal Foster calls the “return of the real” in the 20th century avant-garde. This thesis also links Mailer to psychoanalytical views on trauma and violence; anti-idealist philosophy in Bataille and Adorno; and later postmodern art historical engagements with realism and simulation. Mailer’s view was that a hunger for the real was an effect of a desensitising (post)modernity. While the key decade is the sixties, the study begins in 1948 with Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead, and ends at the height of the postmodern eighties. Drawing on a range of postmodern theory, this thesis argues that Mailer’s fiction sought to confront postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The thesis also traces Mailer’s relationship to a range of contemporary art and visual culture, including Pop Art (and Warhol in particular), and avant-garde and postmodern cinema. This study also draws on a broad range of psychoanalytical, feminist and cultural theory to explore Mailer’s often troubled relationship to narcissism, masculinity and sexuality. The thesis engages a complex history of feminist perspectives on Mailer, and argues that while feminist critique remains necessary for a reading of his work, it is not sufficient to account for his restless exploration of masculinity as a subject. In chapter 7, the thesis also discusses Mailer’s much-criticised romantic fascination with black culture in the context of postcolonial politics.

Norman Mailer's seminal works The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night both outline Mailers distaste for oppression. The Naked and the Dead's bleak reprisal of oppressive leadership tactics offers little in the way of a solution to fight this power. However, twenty years later, The Armies of the Night names personal expression of political views as the answer to oppressive force within the American government. Mailer met the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom abroad while oppressing one's own citizens by encouraging personal expression and flaunting the "rules" of the novel. In the end, Mailer surmises that the best way to encourage freedom of thought and action is to educate his fellow citizens to question objectivity.

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O principal objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a forma dialética presente em Exércitos da Noite, uma das mais reconhecidas e ousadas obras do romancista norte-americano Norman Mailer. Publicada originalmente em 1968, Exércitos é um relato pessoal do autor sobre sua vivência na Marcha sobre o Pentágono, manifestação civil que reuniu milhares de pessoas em Washington, em outubro de 1967, em protesto contra a política americana na guerra do Vietnã. O livro, dividido em duas partes, recria, na primeira, uma perspectiva ficcional dos eventos, em contraste com a segunda, na qual Mailer procura criar uma visão histórica sobre os episódios da Marcha, recorrendo, para tanto, a técnicas de reportagem e excertos da cobertura da mídia no período, num tom fundamentalmente ensaístico. Permeando toda a narrativa, há o explosivo contexto da vida norte-americana do período, com sua cultura hippie, a emergência dos movimentos civis e a queima pública das cartas de convocação para a guerra. A presente dissertação analisa este peculiar romance à luz de textos centrais das áreas de teoria literária e estudos jornalísticos, além de evocar outros autores que, como Mailer, fizeram parte de um grande contexto renovador do jornalismo literário nos anos 1960 e 1970 chamado, genericamente, de Novo Jornalismo, de origem norte-americana e repercussões profundas, inclusive no Brasil. Com tal abordagem, intento alcançar uma melhor compreensão acerca dos mecanismos ficcionais que sustentam e aproximam os discursos jornalístico e literário, nomeadamente na obra de Mailer, que o crítico do New York Times Alfred Kazin definiu à época como um \"diário-ensaio-tratado-sermão\", com Mailer desempenhando seu dileto papel ficcional de visionário da América. / The main purpose of this issue is to investigate the dialectic form on Norman Mailer\'s acclaimed and Pulitzer-winner novel The Armies of the Night: The History as a Novel, The Novel as History, first published in 1968 as the author\'s personal account of the March on the Pentagon, a peace rally that shook Washington D.C. for three days in October 1967 and gathered thousands of civilians on a protest against the american policies concerning the Vietnam War. The book, divided into two parts, recreates, on the first, a fictional perspective of the events, while the second intends to convey a historical view on the same context, by mixing reporting techniques, excerpts from the media coverage and essayistic interventions. Throughout the whole book runs the thread of the mythic north-american background of the period, with its hippie culture, civilian movements and burned draft cards. Drawing on key authors from the literary and journalistic studies, this work pursuits a better understanding of the specific fictional procedures shared both by journalism and literature, namely on Armies of the Night, Mailer\'s new journalistic piece, that the New York Times critic Alfred Kazin defined tentatively as a \"diary-essaytract- sermon\", with Mailer playing his favorite part of the American visionary.

Qu’y a-t-il de commun entre Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy et James Ellroy ? Ces cinq écrivains contemporains se sont intéressés au personnage du criminel asocial sur le territoire des États-Unis. Son existence repose sur le paradoxe propre à tout individu asocial : bien qu'il n'adhère pas aux conventions établies qu'il perçoit comme des entraves, il ne souhaite pas rompre les ponts avec la collectivité et refuse la vie en autarcie. S'il n'est donc pas antisocial, pourquoi fait-il le choix de l'asocialité ? Parce qu'il ne peut accepter ce qu'il perçoit comme des déviances dans le modèle de vie qui lui est proposé et qu'il va le remettre en question. Mais pourquoi serait-il de plus enclin à la criminalité ? La question est légitime dans la mesure où la relation entre criminalité et asociabilité n'est pas évidente alors que lier antisocial et criminel serait plus aisé car il y alors négation affirmée des lois de la société et volonté de s'en affranchir par l'action. A l'inverse, un asocial n'est pas nécessairement criminel. Cependant, chez les protagonistes des auteurs, ces deux caractéristiques vont de pair : peut-être sont-ils à la fois asociaux et criminels parce qu'ils ont décidé de vivre leur transgression en marge d'une société qui ne les satisfait pas mais qui ne les intéresse pas assez pour qu'il la combatte activement ? Ou peut-être trouvent-ils nécessaire de s'affranchir des lois pour exister dans le cadre qui leur est imposé et qu'ils ne cautionnent plus ? Il en résulte une écriture façonnée par ces questionnements et leurs nombreuses variations. Le corpus fait de biographies, récits fictionnels et non-fictionnels, entraîne une réflexion sur le modèle sociétal américain des années 50 à la fin des années 90 et plus particulièrement sur ses dysfonctionnements à l’origine de l’émergence de ce type de personnage qui devient alors l'instrument à visée démonstrative d'une littérature engagée. / What is the common point between Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy et James Ellroy ? These five authors have been interested in a specific character in the contemporary literature, the asocial criminal in The United States. He appeared in a paradoxical way : while he is fighting against the established social conventions, he does not wish to live away from this society. So if this character is not antisocial, why does he make the choice to be asocial ? Because he cannot accept what he considers as a deviance inside the American way of life and he is going to fight against it in order to achieve his personal goals. But why should he also be a criminal ? This is a legitimate question since the link between crime and lack of sociability is not necessarily an obvious fact. On the contrary, it is pretty easier to tie crime and antisocial behaviors because there is a desire to live like an outcast, to infringe laws with violence. So, an asocial cannot be a criminal. However, concerning the authors' protagonists, both of these features work well together. Maybe they are asocial and criminal because they decided to live according to their wishes inside their society with its restrictive rules but as they refuse to lose their freedom, they know perfectly well they must not go too far ? Or maybe they also simply think they do not have to follow rules that they cannot accept and support ? Anyway, all these questions lead to a various corpus composed by biographies, fictions and non fiction stories. It entires the reader to think about the American consumer society and more particularly about the dysfunctions which gave birth to the asocial criminal character. So that the latter becomes a thought-provoking within the socially-engaged literature.

O principal objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a forma dialética presente em Exércitos da Noite, uma das mais reconhecidas e ousadas obras do romancista norte-americano Norman Mailer. Publicada originalmente em 1968, Exércitos é um relato pessoal do autor sobre sua vivência na Marcha sobre o Pentágono, manifestação civil que reuniu milhares de pessoas em Washington, em outubro de 1967, em protesto contra a política americana na guerra do Vietnã. O livro, dividido em duas partes, recria, na primeira, uma perspectiva ficcional dos eventos, em contraste com a segunda, na qual Mailer procura criar uma visão histórica sobre os episódios da Marcha, recorrendo, para tanto, a técnicas de reportagem e excertos da cobertura da mídia no período, num tom fundamentalmente ensaístico. Permeando toda a narrativa, há o explosivo contexto da vida norte-americana do período, com sua cultura hippie, a emergência dos movimentos civis e a queima pública das cartas de convocação para a guerra. A presente dissertação analisa este peculiar romance à luz de textos centrais das áreas de teoria literária e estudos jornalísticos, além de evocar outros autores que, como Mailer, fizeram parte de um grande contexto renovador do jornalismo literário nos anos 1960 e 1970 chamado, genericamente, de Novo Jornalismo, de origem norte-americana e repercussões profundas, inclusive no Brasil. Com tal abordagem, intento alcançar uma melhor compreensão acerca dos mecanismos ficcionais que sustentam e aproximam os discursos jornalístico e literário, nomeadamente na obra de Mailer, que o crítico do New York Times Alfred Kazin definiu à época como um \"diário-ensaio-tratado-sermão\", com Mailer desempenhando seu dileto papel ficcional de visionário da América. / The main purpose of this issue is to investigate the dialectic form on Norman Mailer\'s acclaimed and Pulitzer-winner novel The Armies of the Night: The History as a Novel, The Novel as History, first published in 1968 as the author\'s personal account of the March on the Pentagon, a peace rally that shook Washington D.C. for three days in October 1967 and gathered thousands of civilians on a protest against the american policies concerning the Vietnam War. The book, divided into two parts, recreates, on the first, a fictional perspective of the events, while the second intends to convey a historical view on the same context, by mixing reporting techniques, excerpts from the media coverage and essayistic interventions. Throughout the whole book runs the thread of the mythic north-american background of the period, with its hippie culture, civilian movements and burned draft cards. Drawing on key authors from the literary and journalistic studies, this work pursuits a better understanding of the specific fictional procedures shared both by journalism and literature, namely on Armies of the Night, Mailer\'s new journalistic piece, that the New York Times critic Alfred Kazin defined tentatively as a \"diary-essaytract- sermon\", with Mailer playing his favorite part of the American visionary.

This essay investigates how Norman Mailer’s “true-life” novel The Executioner’s Song may also be read as an autobiography. The novel contains strong traces of Mailer’s existential philosophy as related to sexuality, non-conformity and death. The essay discusses the nature of the relationship between truth as defined by the author and the function of autobiography to tell the truth about a life. The discussion centres around Mailer’s conviction that the novel is a better, i.e. more accurate vehicle for truth than is the autobiography. The essay argues that the truth which Mailer imparts is less the “true” story of Gary Gilmore and more the “true” story of Norman Mailer.

<p>Norman Mailer announced in Advertisements For Myself (1959) that he wished to revolutionize the consciousness of our time. With this as his goal he developed an aesthetics which views both life and art as a process of growth toward a full humanity and away from post-World War II American (and universal) tendencies to stifle human r,rowth through a technological totalitarianism.</p> <p>Mailer envisions the creation of life as a function of a divine power and the destruction of life as that of a satanic power who war with each other for possession of the universe. We do not know for whom we do battle, but our intuitions of good and evil are to be trusted.</p> <p>Growth for Mailer takes the form of a line of movement made by confronting and defeating opponents of a full humanity; he terms such engagements whose outcome is unknown and therefore dangerous to the self "existential". His life and his art make up a dramatic and progressive dialectic. There are three books which I believe contain Mailer's most effective expressions of his aesthetics and which have the greatest potential for revolutionizing the consciousness of our time. Each is the culmination of a phase in Mailer's growth which contains in itself the unified strands of that growth.</p> <p>The first phase includes the early success of The Naked and the Dead, the subsequent popular and critical failures of Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, the slou~hln[. off of old models, political and artistic, the creation of a radical creed in "The \'lhi te Negro" and a radical form in Advertisements For Myself. The latter is the culmination of this phase and is analyzed in detail. By the time of Advertisements Mailer has made himself the chief metaphor for his concept of erowth, thus synthesizing theme and method. The second phase enlarges the meaning of Mailer's existentialism, most particularly by his venturing deeply into the current political and social realm, and culminates in a new synthesis of growth in fictional theme and form in An American Dream (1965). The novel's protagonist, Stephen Rojack, defeated by a powerful satanic agent and by his own weakness, proves unequal to the task Mailer sets for the American hero: to unite the real- and the dream-life of the nation in himself and to lead a united nation to human wholeness which embraces all contradictions.</p> <p>The central occupation of the third phase of Mailer's work, therefore, is to develop himself--in the absence of other suitable candidates--into a representative American hero. His experimentation with various media for communication--drama, film, television, and others--ls a search for effective vehicles for his vision and is preparation for his assumption of the heroic role. Mailer's involvement with the central issues confronting the United States is rendered in a considerable experiment in novelistic form, Why Are We in Vietnam? The culmination of his efforts in this phase is the culmination of his work to date as well: The Armies of the Night (1968). Relating the experiences of a character called "Mailer", Mailer as narrator and novelist-historian not only creates himself as a representative comic American hero but invents a form which carries a total vision of the events of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, uniting traditional methods and aims of history, the novel, and journalism. With this boolc Mailer assumes the role of interpretor for our time, immersin~ himself in important contemnorary events in order to present us with his views of their meaning and significance.</p> <p>Mailer's three books following The Armies of the Night are discussed in a final chapter as similar to but lesser efforts than Armies.</p> <p>In this thesis Mailer's work is placed in two specific contexts which provide a basis for suggesting his significance: that of American literature, with emphasis upon his contribution to the literature of the American Dream and upon his indebtedness to Hemingway in particular and twentieth-century novelists in f,eneral; and that of contemporary thought which also seeks to influence the direction of future human life.</p> <p>Because his aesthetics of growth sees human progress as its art, Mailer's nonlitrerary roles are considered a vital part of his total work and consequently the critical standards applied in this thesis are Mailer's own: how well does each work register growth on Mailer's part and how potentially effective is the work in revolutionizing the consciousness of our time?</p> <p>Mailer scholarship is still in infancy. The contribution of this thesis to that scholarship lies in its approacth to Mailer's work as a progressive whole and its delineation of that progress; its critical approach whlch confronts Mailer on his own terms; its extensive treatment of works other than novels; the broad contexts which suggest the significance of Mailer's work; and the comprehensive bibliography, the most complete yet assembled on Mailer.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The thesis provides a comparative analysis of the American Dream's concept in the two essential pieces of American literature: Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Norman Mailer's An American Dream. The theoretical part of the text focuses on the general definition of the American Dream and its development throughout the history of the United States. It aims at exposing the close relationship of the idea of the American Dream and the American national consciousness in terms of self-reliance, individualism and freedom. The analytical part concentrates on isolating the individual literary motifs of each novel that can be regarded as related to the notion of the American Dream. It discusses the central characters as well as dramatic aspects of The Great Gatsby and An American Dream in order to prove the American Dream to represent an essential theme in their literary frameworks. As a conclusion the thesis presents the opinion that each author elaborates this theme differently. Both novels, however, expose the individual version of the American Dream as being defeated in a struggle against the collective nature of the 20th century American society restricting the efforts of an individual for his or her self-realization. Keywords: Norman Mailer, An American Dream, Francis Scott Fitzgerald,...