An Interpretation Of Ragtime From The Perspective Of Narrative Space

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is an eminent postmodern writer in contemporary American literary circle and his works bear a lot of personal styles. Ragtime, as one of Doctorow’s representative works, is well recognized by many literary critics and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in1976.In Ragtime, Doctorow constructs a unique literary space through the employment of postmodern techniques and imitation of music, painting and film, interweaving many real historical events and figures with fictional characters and stories into spatialized narrative text. These characteristics fairly tally with the focus of the Theory of Narrative Space. However, currently, the studies on Ragtime are mainly from such perspectives as New Historicism and postmodernism, and few scholars have approached it from narratology, let alone the Theory of Narrative Space. The Theory of Narrative Space plays an important part in the western literary criticism in the20th century. American literary critic, Joseph Frank, in his essay, The Spatial Form in Modern Literature published in1945, first time puts forward the theory of the spatial forms of novels, which serves as the foundation of the Theory of Narrative Space. In addition, many other contemporary literary critics and philosophers have also pushed the development of the Theory of Narrative Space with their works, which have greatly consolidated the theory.This thesis attempts to interpret the narrative space of Ragtime and the aesthetic significance of the spatialization of the novel through the Theory of Narrative Space. Apart from a brief introduction to Doctorow and Ragtime, this thesis offers a retrospection and also summary of the studies on Ragtime at home and abroad, as well as a concise review of the development of narratology and an illustration of the Theory of Narrative Space. Based on the preceding information, the nuclear part of the thesis presents a systematical analysis of the topographical space, social space and chronotopic space of Ragtime, and the aesthetic significance of the spatialization of the novel, among which the forms of the chronotopic space are emphasized. Finally, the thesis concludes that in Ragtime, Doctorow reconstructs a visualized and defamiliarized novel space through the application of a series of postmodern techniques such as nonlinear narrative, juxtaposition, collage, montage, etc. and imitation of the artistic means of music, painting and film; the dynamic novel space is a reconstructed real historical space, revealing that during the so-called prosperous era in American history, American society is laden with various crises and is not a happy and harmonious society at all; through the perspective of narrative space, readers not only can develop a more comprehensive understanding of Ragtime, but also can better appreciate the artistry of this novel.