Percival Everett's Fictional Experiment In Percival Everett By Virgil Russell

Percival Everett(1956-),one of the most prolific contemporary African American writers,received considerable publicity for his unique artistic style and characteristic humor and ironic language.However,Everett is quite different from his precedent black writers and his peer writers.In the light of textual structure and artistic genre,his novels varied from neorealism and anti-realism to poststructuralism to postmodernism.In his creative practice,he mostly chooses middle-class Americans as his protagonists and experiment on the form and structure,which breaks through the stereotypes and status quo of blacks socially,economically,culturally,and politically.Indeed,his works not only subvert the techniques of traditional western novels but also retort the traditional view of races.At the same time,Everett also focuses on the current social reality in the US by thinking critically about the historic,political and social problems,in close relation to the African blacks.He has written many types of literature works which cover a wide range of subjects.His peculiar artistic style and pioneering experiment in writing have been highly acclaimed in Academe and beyond,especially the French Academy and European and American academic and critical circles.This thesis aims to explore Everett's artistic orientation and his view in poetics and aesthetics from the perspective of deconstruction.By deconstructing the textual form,the narrative mode,language meaning and racial identity,this paper also finds a cut-in point to fully interpret the novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.It consists of three parts,Introduction,body part and Conclusion.In Introduction,I make an overview of Everett's life and his works,with special attention to Percival Everett by Virgil Russell,a theoretical novel which seems like a labyrinth mixing language games with personal and collective symbols.Chapter one presents the conceptual framework modeled on the basis of deconstructionism and postmodernism as two theoretical discourses informing Percival's creative writing.Chapter two is the analysis of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell from the deconstructionist perspective.It mainly analyzes and expounds the deconstruction thought as manifest in the author's formal,stylistic and thematic experimentation.In Chapter three,I discuss the text in case from the macroscopic view.Through close reading,I venture to argue that this text redefines the tendency and development of African American Novel.By way of conclusion,I call into focus the high degree of accordance between deconstructionism and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell,entailing the possibility of reading it as a highly experimental,deconstructive and theoretical artwork reflecting the Zeitgeist of Contemporary America.