E. L. Doctorow Research Papers (original) (raw)

Top Papers
Most Cited Papers
Most Downloaded Papers
Newest Papers
People
- by
- •
- Jewish American Literature, Imprisonment, Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow
- by Dora Tsimpouki
- •
- American Civil War, Narrative Photography, E. L. Doctorow

In recent decades, a body of literary writing has emerged in which religious questions are foregrounded. Many literary works depict characters reading sacred texts and world-as-text anew. This body of writing and the criticism connected with it is increasingly referred to as postsecular. In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the characters and the text perform the struggle of reading prophetically, as it is defined in the writings of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In his time, Buber urged not a return to existing models of the religious, but a turn toward prophetic reading, which is founded in relation. Literary writing of this postsecular moment, including City of God, is likewise engaged in a reconceptualization of the religious. Doctorow's novel conveys the idea that engaging the religious involves failure, but that it is through failure that we are pushed to a new modality of reading. 13 13

- by Kathryn Ludwig
- •
- Martin Buber, Martin Buber (Philosophy), E.L. Doctorow, Postsecular

Most fictional works by the American postmodern writer Edgar Lawrence Doctorow are set in the New York City and depict the life of ordinary New Yorkers. The present essay, by applying relative theories in Cultural Geography, aims at exploring the ways and characteristics of Doctorow’s city writing and how the author draws a cultural map of New York from his own perspective. It tends to disclose the reasons why Doctorow seems to have different attitudes towards Manhattan, the Bronx and the Lower East Side. Research findings indicate that Doctorow actually wants to combine being a Jew, an American and a New Yorker as a trinity in his own cultural identity. Besides, what he concerns is not merely life of Jewish immigrants in New York, but rather how people of different cultural backgrounds co-exist in this international metropolis. Thus, his works reveal the characteristics of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” proposed by Homi Bhabha, and display a special urban aesthetics, which might make him distinct from other postmodern writers in America.

- by Yuan Yuan
- •
- Jewish Identity, E. L. Doctorow, Literary Representation of New York

E. L. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel is saturated with a negative affect that I will refer to as "vicious eroticism. " Insofar as vicious eroticism pervades Daniel’s violently sexualized narrative, it acts as the text’s “global or organizing affect,” the predominant “feeling tone” that establishes the book’s “affective bearing” toward the world. Coming to terms with how this “objectified emotion” organizes Daniel’s often explicit and frequently sadistic sexual content is crucial to understanding this political novel, particularly Doctorow’s deployment of what has become a predominant postmodern trope: the fantasy of a directly transmissible experience. Taking seriously two of Daniel’s schizoid rhetorical interjections (a fragmentary formulation, “the novel as a sequence of analyses” and the Ebonics-inflected taunt cited in the epigraph), this essay analyzes Daniel’s book as “the story of a fucking” — a narrative that imagines sexual sadism, defined broadly to encompass a range of eroticized practices, to be an exceptionally affective and meaningful mode of communication. It provides an account of the dialectic between affect and meaning in Daniel’s fragmentary book, elucidating Doctorow’s avowed commitment to literature’s ability to convey the “truth of the felt life” while observing how The Book of Daniel stages some of the dangers involved in conflating a truthful representation of an event with the experience of reliving the event’s affective force. This account focuses on three aspects of the book’s vicious eroticism: epistemological, rhetorical, and technological.

- by Eric Dean Rasmussen
- •
- Philosophy, Trauma Studies, Literary Theory, Literature and Politics

The latest novel Andrew’s Brain by E.L.Doctorow is mainly narrated in the form of dialogue between the cognitive scientist Andrew and his therapist.The novel therefore becomes a classical case for the application of Narrative Therapy in literary creation. Narrative Therapy, as a Postmodern therapeutic method, not only provides inspirational convenience for metalepsis, the displaying of metafictional art and the arrangement of narrative time, but also helps cure cultural trauma of fictional characters and the author himself. By analyzing the mechanism of the Narrative Therapy employed in the novel, the paper argues that this novel is not confined to "representing" the trauma incurred by 9/11 for aesthetic purpose, but aims at "curing" the cultural trauma and thus getting rid of it in the long run.

- by Yuan Yuan
- •
- Narrative Therapy, Cultural Trauma, Post 9/11 literature, E. L. Doctorow
- by Şenol Bezci
- •
- New Historicism, Narratology, Narrative Theory, Postmodern Literature
- by Niranjan Casie Chitty
- •
- History, American History, The Novel, Compulsive Hoarding