History As Construct: Postmodern Retextualization Of The Rosenberg Case

The questioning of the authenticity of written history and literature has remained controversial for decades. While most people read history to feed their curiosity of the past, literature readers aspire for spiritual and moral growth.Postmodern literature has grabbed the interests among literary critics even though its kaleidoscopic nature defies easy generalization. When historical elements are incorporated in postmodern literature, they are merely for the ironic purposes rather than for the true reflection of the past, let alone the spiritual fulfillment usually to be elicited from literature reading.The thesis builds upon two postmodern novels– The Book of Daniel and The Public Burning to see how postmodern writers manipulate historical facts. In the comparative study between the two novels, the thesis outlines similar attributes of postmodern fictions in the ironic transformation of historic details. And what lies behind the bold treatment of hard facts is the revolutionized understandings of history as an objective narrative strategy. In placing history and literature at the same par, both E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover repudiate the impartiality of history writing. Such notions propel them to turn the Rosenberg case upside-down in their respective novels in typical postmodern way, such as the use of fantasy, hyperbole, irony and the foregrounding of the novel's fictionality.Neither of the two writers claims their versions of the Rosenberg case are truer than the official one, but their unrestrained creation leaves behind two more models of interpretation. And that is the real purpose of postmodern writers in writing historiography metaficitons– if the development of the modern age far exceeds our expectation, why shouldn't literary creation alter its conventional trajectory?...