States of reclamation: Narrative, history, race and land in contemporary American fiction

This dissertation investigates how contemporary American authors employ the pragmatic project of redescription to tackle the intersections of history, narrative, race and land in the twentieth century. The postmodern turn at the end of World War II ushered in an era suspicious of objective narratives, especially those historical writings considered univocal and indisputable. This suspicion of narrative's ability to convey objective truth engendered a new sort of writing, the alternate history. While many alternate histories took the form of fantastical science fiction, some writers, especially minority writers, capitalized on this opportunity to write a different version of their own history, one they felt more suited to their sense of the past. These narratives offer a new history of the marginalized and oppressed that often contradict or overturn those narratives traditionally written by the white, male and privileged.States of Reclamation: Narrative, History, Race and Land in Contemporary American Fiction focuses primarily on four narrative works---John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1960 1967), Peter Matthiessen's Killing Mister Watson (1990), Louise Erdrich's Four Souls (1990), Thomas King's "Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre"---and examines how they engage, respond to, and complicate the redescription project of pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty. In his writing Rorty seized upon the suspicion of objective narratives and advocated it as an opportunity to redescribe and reinvent one's identity, to write an alternate history of one's self and one's community. Subsequently, the fiction writers in this study turn the focus of redescription towards race and land---two intricately linked and central preoccupations within American history that have always been contingent---and question how reclamation of racial identities and disputed land claims can engender, in Rorty's terms, the creation of one's "best possible self." This project asks contemporary scholars to reassess how contemporary literature can model and critique experiments in social organization and efforts to create liberal societies where everyone can attempt self-creation to the best of his or her abilities.