《都市 漫游 成长:E·L·多克托罗小说中的“小小都市漫游者”研究(英文版)》以美国后现代作家E.L_多克托罗的三部小说——《但以理书》《世界博览会》和《比利·巴思盖特》中的“小男孩叙述者”为研究对象,分析他们在都市空间的“漫游”,证明多克托罗的都市书写反拨了美国文学传统中将城市视为“渎神之地”的倾向,从而创造了一种积极却不失批判性的都市美学。《都市 漫游 成长:E·L·多克托罗小说中的“小小都市漫游者”研究(英文版)》读者对象主要为外国文学、比较文学专业的师生,对都市研究,特别是纽约研究的相关人员具有借鉴意义,对犹太研究学者也有一定的参考价值。
袁源,文学博士,江苏南通人,上海理工大学外语学院讲师,国际叙事学研究协会会员。曾在《英美文学研秃论丛》《外国语文》《中南大学学报》(社会科学版)等cssc期刊表论文多篇,主持并完成上海市优秀青年教师科研专项基金等。主要研究领域:英美文学。
Introduction
1.Doctorow and His Boy-narrators in New York
2.Dialogism Between Critics and Doctorow
3.“Little Wanderer”and the City
4.Literature Review
Chapter One Wandering as Perceptive Psychic Alien in The Book of Daniel
1.1 Childhood Trauma and Psychic’Alien
1.1.1 Alienation Perceived.Inherited and Forced
1.1.2 Survivor Syndrome of the Little Wanderers
1.2 Orphan in Search of a Real“Home”
1.2.1 Perception of“Home”
1.2.2 A Wandering Soul in Search of“Home”
1.2.3 “Home”Motif and the City
1.2.4 Sublimation by Death and Orphanage
1.3 Desire for Utopia As a Cure for Trauma
1.3.1 Prototypes of the Future Dwelling Place
1.3.2 Disneyland as a Prototype of Utopia
1.3.3 Open Ending Suggesting Possibilities
Chapter Two Wandering to Be Perceptive Typical American Boy in World'S Fair
2.1 The Journey of Self Discovery
2.1.1 The“Shock”Motif
2.1.2 Accumulated Love of the City under Father'S Influence
2.1.3 Jewish American Boy as a New Yorker
2.2 The Cityscape Perceived from the Little Wanderer'S Eyes
2.2.1 Natural Environment in the City
2.2.2 Built Environment in the City
2.2.3 Human Environment in the City
2.2.4 Verbal Environment in the City
2.3 The World'S Fair as the Hope for Future Citizens
2.3.1 The World'S Fair and Its Logo:the Signifier and the
Signified
2.3.2 Edgar'S Stroll in the World'S Fair
2.3.3 The World'S Fair Perceived from Edgar'S Eyes
Chapter Three Wandering as Capable Perceptive Apprentice in Billy Bathgate
3.1 Capable Perceptive Wanderer in Pursuit of American Dream
3.2 Searching for a“Father”and Becoming a“Father”
3.2.1 Wandering in the Street in Search of Patrimony
3.2.2 Idling Resistance and Growth
3.2.3 Oedipus Showing Paternal Love in His Stroll
3.3 Billy the Little Wanderer'S Space Values
3.3.1 Cultural Map of New York
3.3.2 Identification with New York
3.3.3 The Man of the Crowd
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Postscript
《都市 漫游 成长:E·L·多克托罗小说中的“小小都市漫游者”研究(英文版)》:
In E. L. Doctorow, Harter and Thompson combines the life and art of Doctorow and comments on his novels published before 1985, excluding all those after World's Fair. Though this study is of a book length, there seems to be no central argument, with only a critical focus on each of the novels mentioned.
John Parks' study of Doctorow continues this combination of biographic
truth and Doctorow's literary creation, but this time, with a unified theme.In his book E. L. Doctorow, Parks mainly argues that Doctorow's prose is a political challenge to the American myth and history, in which Doctorow,with polyphonic and heteroglossic narratives, shows his willingness to counter the tendency of a culture which tends to monopolize the composition of truth.
Christopher Morris, based on the study of the previous three books,proposes his idea, that is, Doctorow's works are models of misrepresentation, in the sense that Doctorow purposefully deviates from historical facts and composes a history from his own perspective. Besides,Morris, by citing de Man, Derrida, and Miller, points out that the interpretation on Doctorow's works is mostly hermeneutic, which might be s'foredoomed to failure" ( Parks 1991: 22). He admits that his own interpretation of Doctorow's works might also be a "misrepresentation" of Doctorow.
John Williams takes the title of Doctorow's essay "False Documents" as the title of his book Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age . He concentrates on the postmodern writing techniques of Doctorow, and surveys the reception of his works in the era dominated by post-structuralism and deconstruction. Williams' central theme is: "postmodernism and the politics attached to it have created a field of study that exerts considerable influence on what gets written (not to mention what gets published)" (Williams 1996:2) .
While the previous five book length studies mainly focus on the contradiction between Doctorow's political commitment and his commitment to writing, Douglass Fowler, in Un.derstanding E. L. Doctorow, pays his due attention to Doctorow's commitment to family and to the city he lives in. In this critical as well as introductory work on Doctorow, Fowler concentrates on the autobiographical essence in Doctorow's novels, which are said by Fowler to be self-creating and patrimony-searching, with his gothic imagination of the Bronx and New York as a whole, Though Fowler's thoughts and comments are insightful, the book itself, as a series of guides or companions for students and nonacademic readers, cannot give a detailed study of each of the novels due to the limit of length, and thus leaves much space for further study.
The six book length studies of Doctorow in the 20th century started a systematic and specialized field of the study of the specific contemporary author - E. L. Doctorow. Ever since the six books were published, Doctorow studies have taken on a new look and have come to a new phase in the new millennium, with the characteristics of being varied, inter-disciplinary and comprehensive. In E. L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment published in 2000, at the threshold of the new millennium, Michelle Tokarczyk, synthesizing her published critical essays on Doctorow's works, the transcripts of her interview with Doctorow and some of her new thoughts,argues that Doctorow's works are allegories of his own society and city; they are autobiographical in the sense that they reveal how a New York author of Jewish tradition comes to be what he is now.
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