The style of our age: estudo sobre três romances americanos contemporâneos

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Thiago Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/7245
• topic: Mason & Dixon; Blood meridian; American pastoral; Thomas Pynchon; Cormac McCarthy; Philip Roth; História dos EUA; Mito adâmico; Mito do paraíso terreno; Mito do destino manifesto; Violência; Fracasso; Estados Unidos; Literatura americana; Ficção contemporânea; Romance americano; Mason & Dixon; Blood meridian; American pastoral; Adamic myth; C paradise; Violence; Failure; LETRAS::LITERATURA COMPARADA

This doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of three main contemporary authors: Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, through the reading of three main novels written by them, respectively, Mason & Dixon; Blood Meridian and American Pastoral in this order here analyzed. The main objective of the research and its writing is an attempt to prove a historiographical connection as well as of themes and of style among these three novels, in their effort to reinterpret the American History in a strongly ironic way. This has been characterized by Harold Bloom (also in a ironical way, it seems) as “the style of our age”, among other reasons because the three writers as well as their three novels are focused on grasping different periods of the United States History and on deconstructing the main basis of American myths, even if through different and individualized narrative styles. The most important of these myths is the one that, since the Colonial Period, and based in the belief that being White, Protestant and of Anglo-Saxon origin would make the new man to be born in the New Continent a New Adam, and his nation, America, a new and exemplar Paradise on Earth. Mason & Dixon, Blood Meridian and American Pastoral show, each one in his own way, how this myth resulted in failure. In order to achieve this we have chosen three main myths as the basis for this research: The Myth of the American Eden (from the European imaginary Colonial Paradise); The Myth of the American Adam (from the concept of the new man, inhabitant of that Paradise; The Myth of the Manifest Destiny (the Messianic idea of a possible Universal Paradise). In order to achieve this, in the first chapter, dealing with Mason & Dixon, we will analyze the context of the Eighteenth Century and the beginning of the American Nation. In the second chapter, dealing with Blood Meridian, we will analyze the context of the Nineteenth Century, when the territorial expansion during the Great March to the West took place. In third and last chapter, dealing with American Pastoral, the context of the Twentieth Century, specifically the period from the end of World War II to the 1990s, that is, from the American Golden Age of prosperity to the economic and social crisis during and after the Vietnam War. Finally, we will try to analyze the logic of the irony shared by the three authors who, in their three novels, historically summarize the failure of the formation of the ideal nation based on its three main myths and its continual recurrence to different types of violence