http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/583013

"Jarring witnesses" : modern fiction and the representation of history

"This thesis begins by surveying briefly the discussion in philosophy of history of the function of point of view as a formal, a cognitive, and a cultural determinant in narrative historiography in relation to Bourdieu's theory of doxa and heterodoxy and Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. With this theoretical framework established, a number of modern novels concerned with history are then explored. Chapters devoted to Conrad's Nostromo, Ford's Parade's End and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! examine the ultimately orthodox historiographical points of view of these novels, while a chapter on the fiction of black American women engages the problem of historiography from the margins of the dominant culture. In the final chapter, Pynchon's V. is the focus of a discussion of postmodernism in relation to historiographic discourse." --

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