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In eager anticipation of the forthcoming publication of T. Coraghessan Boyle's new novel, A FRIEND OF THE EARTH, I have begun to assemble a selected bibliography of background materials on the Ecotage movement. T.C. Boyle personally recommends the following books:
ABSTRACT: The underlying assumption of this thesis is that T. Coraghessan Boyle deserves more serious critical attention than he has been given. Boyle is an outstandingcontemporary American writer who should be noted not only for his masterly command of language, but for the ideas he wants to communicate as well. East Is East is a novel that deals with issues of communication and perception. Through the tragicomical story of a Japanese sailor's misadventures in Georgia, Boyle shows how cultural misconceptions and the limitations of perspective prevent the kind of meaningful communication that could enhance the characters' lives. There is no redemption for Hiro Tanaka within the world of the novel; his quest for the American Dream turns into a living nightmare. The only hope lies in artistic communi ........ - - - - - Donadieu, Marc Vincent. "American Picaresque: The Early Novels of T. Coraghessan Boyle." University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2000: 219 pp. Degree: Ph. D. Advisor: Dr. Mary Ann Wilson.
ABSTRACT: T. Coraghessan Boyle is a contemporary American writer who has published seven novels and four collections of short stories so far, yet very little has been written about his work. His early novels use many of the protean conventions of picaresque fiction: episodic structure, biting social satire, first-person narration, the themes of alienation, travel, characters escaping their pasts and reinventing themselves, and frequent accidents to show the role of fortune in life, all of which are colored with a late twentieth-century American sensibility. In Water Music (1980), Budding Prospects (1984),World's End (1987), and The Road to Wellville (1993) Boyle uses the picaresque genre to generate scathing, insightful and often humorous observations of human folly, hypocrisy, and cruelty through a colorful gallery of con-artists, reprobates, social outcasts and other such antiheroic characters to explore the darker side of human experiences and the meanings behind them.... - - - - -- Gruesser, John Cullen. "White on Black: Non-Black Lierature about Africa Since 1945." University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1989: 401 pp. Degree : Ph.D. Advisor: John O. Lyons.
ABSTRACT: Building on the work of Christopher Miller, this study examines contemporary twentieth literature about Africa in English by non-black outsiders. By the early century, three means of depicting the continent, all imbued with Africanist discourse, had been firmly established: the political assessment, going native, and fantasy traditions. Outside writing about Africa since 1945 comprises three generations that descend directly from the dominant traditions and a fourth category that deliberately eschews them. Including books by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Saul Bellow, the first generation largely ignores the political changes occurring in Africa during the twilight of the colonial era. These authors exhibit little deviation from the traditions that reached their acme as much as sixty yea ........ - - - - - Paniccia Carden, Mary Elizabeth. "Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Nation-Building and Gender Construction in Modern and Contemporary American Novels." State University of New York at Binghamton, 1997: 241 pp. Degree : Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that 'the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible...for so many millions of people...willingly to die for such limited imaginings.' Explicating the modern vision of nation-ness in terms connoting both physicality and communality--deep and horizontal, comradeship and fraternity--Anderson illustrates the collapse of the nation's spaces with its people. What he does not note, however, is that this collapse of spaces and subjects genders the imagined community male; his national fraternity conflates the male citizen with the masculine space and spirit of the nation. Taking this gendered national imaginary as its starting point, my dissertation explores the int........ - - - - - Scott, Robert Francis. "The Reinvention of the Eighteenth-Century Novel in Contemporary British and American Fiction." Michigan State University, 1994: 229 pp. Degree : Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines the 'reinvention' of the eighteenth-century novel in contemporary British and American fiction as a discernible and sustained literary movement. The fact that eight of the twelve works considered in this study were published in or after 1980 suggests that this tendency toward reinvention is, by and large, a quite recent literary phenomenon. My use of the term 'reinvention' raises a series of important questions: What constitutes 'reinvention'? Does it consist primarily of re-writing or re-presenting an earlier work? How can we distinguish between mere literary allusion or ventriloquism and true reinvention? Moreover, why should contemporary novelists wish to reinvent a past literary form at all and, in particular, why should the eighteenth-century novel appear to ........ - - - - - Shelffo, Andrew James. "Satiric Ambition: The Self-Conscious Author in the Short Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle." Drew University, 1998: 144pp. Degree : Ph.D. Advisor: Merrill Skaggs.
ABSTRACT: This paper examines how T. Coraghessan Boyle satirizes society at large, other writers, and himself. He does this in his short stories by creating a unique and useful authorial image; by updating and rewriting other authors in his stories; and by expanding upon his image outside of his fiction, in interviews and public appearances. Boyle is an author acutely aware of the tenuous position authors hold in today's society, and he makes this self-awareness the basis of many of his stories. Rather than bemoaning his fate, however, he seeks to turn his disadvantages--his belatedness, his dependence upon an audience that may misinterpret him, and his alluring past--to his advantage. Thus, we see an author who often celebrates his debt to other authors, commiserates with his audience about the cur........ - - - - - Velcic, Vlatka. "Breaking the 'Conspiracy of Silence': Novelistic Portrayals of the Sixties and the Left i n Doctorow, Boyle, DeLillo,and Pynchon." University of California, Los Angeles, 1995: 194 pp. Degree: Ph.D. Advisor: Robert M.Maniquis.
ABSTRACT: While literature of and about the American Left before World War Two has been thoroughly researched and examined, my dissertation opens a critical discourse on fictional representations of the Left in the sixties and thereby brings this lively topic of contemporary cultural, social, and historical studies to literary studies. I focus on Doctorow's Book of Daniel, DeLillo's Libra, Boyle's World's End, and Pynchon's Vineland, which are American postmodern novels that offer extensive portrayals of the American Left in the sixties. Through detailed textual analyses I uncover an array of suppressed meanings in these novels contributing to a depiction of Leftists as perverts, traitors, and murderers. I discover media images of Lee Harvey Oswald serving as a 'politically unconscious' blueprint be........
© Copyright 2000, Sandye Utley