Doct. Th.--Uppsala--Uppsala university, 1995.

In Derek Attridge's J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004), the novel is referred to as "an ethically charged event, one that befalls individual readers and, at the same time, the culture within which, and through which, they read" (xii). The ethical positions of individuals, communities and cultures are addressed through one of the most explosive issues in imaginative fiction: "the right to speak." What happens when a novelist not only encroaches on the values of an ethnic group or religion but also speaks on their behalf, as if from within that community or belief? This question has become especially charged with the emergence since the 1960s of "cultural politics": the identification of a political viewpoint within each discrete community in a multicultural society, and the resolute claim by each community to represent its history and values in its own terms. I consider this question by way of the responses to two novels: William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). Both of these novels were highly controversial when they were released, inciting anger among minority groups because they transgressed the limits of representation. Styron's novel challenged the right to speak because, as a White man, he attempted to portray the consciousness of a Black slave. The African-American community, during a time of upheaval, radicalism and assertion of their power, responded with vitriol, arguing that Styron's novel was a racist, stereotypical, appropriation of Black history. The allegedly blasphemous portrayal of Islam in Rushdie's Satanic Verses created even greater controversy throughout the Islamic world and British Muslim community - their anger amplified by a feeling of betrayal by one of their own. These novels illustrate the ethical dilemmas of the representations of minority groups and make urgent the question of whom has the right to speak for them in literature. Increasingly the tensions between individualistic White liberal ideology and communitarian sensitivities about the representation of their cultures, religions, histories and identities are being contested through the site of the novel. Satanic Verses and Nat Turner demonstrate the challenges faced by multicultural societies when liberals and communitarians force themselves into a manufactured binary through which no effective debate can take place. While the novelist's right to speak should be defended precisely because of the ethical dilemmas that can be presented by literature, freedom of speech is never absolute. The "ethical event" of the novel requires a more nuanced response, which recognises both the valuable and the potentially destructive nature of literature.

This paper, then, purposes to examine these two characteristics of Styron's novel form--structure and point of view--as they are handled in his major works, the novels Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire, and the novella The Long March.

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<p>A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested. </p>

A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.