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New Sincerity and the Contemporary American Family Novel: Jonathan Franzen’S the Corrections and Marilynne Robinson’S Gilead

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New Sincerity and the Contemporary American Family Novel: Jonathan Franzen’S the Corrections and Marilynne Robinson’S Gilead New Sincerity and the Contemporary American Family Novel: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie am Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin vorgelegt von Zuzanna Gorenstein Berlin 2014 Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting Tag der Disputation: 29. April 2015 Acknowledgements The present study was accepted as a doctoral thesis in December 2014 by the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Freie Universität Berlin. It was written within the organization- al framework of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies (FSGS) and with the financial support of both the FSGS and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). I would first like to thank my dissertation advisors, Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein and Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting, for their guidance during the winding process of researching and writing a doctoral thesis. Their continued support has allowed me to complete this project. Second, I would like to thank my fellow doctoral candidates and the academic staff at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies. Their productive input has shaped not only the process but also the outcome. The efforts of the administrative staff at FSGS have made the practical aspects of completing a dissertation significantly more pleasant. Further, I would like to thank Prof. Bill Brown, the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Pro- fessor in American Culture at the University of Chicago, for his open door and encourage- ment during my stay as a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago. Our conversations on questions of family, materiality, and realism were immensely helpful to my writing pro- cess. I am also grateful to the members of my examination committee for their time and willingness to read and discuss my thesis: Prof. Dr. Florian Sedlmeier, Dr. Alexander Starre, and Prof. Dr. Sarah Wasserman. Their critical questions and helpful suggestions have been considered and included during the revision of the manuscript for publication. A number of people have over the years and in many ways helped to see this project complet- ed. Among them I want to name Dr. Camilla Leathem, who has expertly polished my English and eradicated my Germanisms. Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their unwavering patience and belief in my ability to write this dissertation. I would not have been able to do it without their love and support. Zuzanna Gorenstein Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1 I “Homely and Real”: Sincerity and the Family Genre ................................................................. 12 I.1 Sincerity: Representation of Feeling ............................................................................... 12 I.1.1 Rhetorical Forms of Sincerity ................................................................................... 13 Sincerity and Authenticity ................................................................................................ 14 Semiotics of Sincerity: Transparency and Immediacy ..................................................... 20 I.1.2 Social Functions of Sincerity .................................................................................... 25 Early Modern Origins of Sincerity ................................................................................... 25 Sincerity as Reaction to Crisis .......................................................................................... 29 Politics of Sincerity ........................................................................................................... 32 New Sincerity: “Moral Life in Revision” ......................................................................... 37 I.1.3 Intelligible Forms: Sincerity and Genre ................................................................... 42 I.2 Family: Production Place of Feeling ............................................................................... 45 I.2.1 Social and Literary History of Family ...................................................................... 45 The Family: A Shifting Form of Social Organization ...................................................... 45 Literary Families: Oppressive Structures and Wish-Fulfillment ...................................... 48 Contemporary Family Fiction: Family Values and the Postmodern Family .................... 52 I.2.2 A Narrative Form of Family ..................................................................................... 56 Forms of Family Fiction ................................................................................................... 57 Family as a Structural Principle of Narrative ................................................................... 61 Reasons for and Functions of Family Fiction ................................................................... 63 Homely and Real ............................................................................................................... 73 I.2.4 Contemporary American Family Novels .................................................................. 75 Single Perspective ............................................................................................................. 75 Multiperspectivity ............................................................................................................. 79 II “A Desire to Be Understood”: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead ................................................. 86 II.1 “Whispers of Faith in a Postmodern World”: Robinson’s Creed of Sincerity .............. 87 Conversion Narratives and Spiritual Autobiographies: Puritan Practices of Literary Sincerity .............................................................................. 89 “Endless Letter”: Intergenerational Community .............................................................. 94 “Imaginative Love”: Robinson’s Theory of Sociality .................................................... 100 II.2 Crafted Immediacy: Literary Sincerity in Gilead ........................................................ 105 II.2.1 “An Experiment with Candor”: Gilead’s Narrative Form .................................... 105 “Short-Cut to the Heart”: The Epistolary Form as Pretension of Authenticity .............. 107 “Writing to the Moment”: Evoking Epistolary Presentness and Temporal Immediacy . 109 “Light within Light”: Evoking Depth of Human Consciousness and Spatial Immediacy ................................. 114 “Light that Rests on Your Shoulders”: Sensory Perception and the Rendering of Consciousness .............................................. 120 II.2.2 “Artists of Our Behavior”: Sincerity as a Social Act in Gilead ............................ 125 III Writing Inner Lives: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections ................................................... 132 III.1 “Mr. Difficult”: Oprah and the End of Books ............................................................ 132 “This is so fundamentally bogus!”: The Oprah Book Club ............................................ 133 “Why Bother?”: The End of Books ................................................................................ 138 “Aesthetics of Accessibility”: A Contract with the Reader ............................................ 142 “Everything Profound Loves the Mask”: Sincerity as Social Interface .......................... 146 III.2 “Nudity of Form”: Literary Sincerity in The Corrections .......................................... 154 III.2.1 Transparency of Form in The Corrections ........................................................... 156 Accessibility of Family Fiction ....................................................................................... 157 Accessibility of Characters’ Consciousness ................................................................... 159 III.2.2 Unveiling the Chronotopological Structure of The Corrections .......................... 175 Staged Opacity ................................................................................................................ 175 Narrative Unveiling ........................................................................................................ 180 III.2.3. Sincere Masks: A Means to an End .................................................................... 188 IV Conclusion: New Sincerity – New Realism ............................................................................ 192 Neorealism ...................................................................................................................... 193 Reestablishing Dialogue ................................................................................................. 195 Cycles of Referentiality and Anti-Referentiality ............................................................ 197 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................................... 202 Primary Literature ............................................................................................................... 202 Secondary Literature ........................................................................................................... 204 Introduction Introduction “In the twenty-first century, American
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