"A wasteland fortunes": History, destiny, and cultural frontiers in American literature Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Gwinner, Donovan R. Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 06/10/2021 09:46:42 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289823 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 "A WASTELAND OF FORTUNES": HISTORY, DESTINY, AND CULTURAL FRONTIERS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE by Donovan R. Gwinner Copyright © Donovan R. Gwinner 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 200 1 UMI Number; 3010216 Copyright 2001 by Gwinner, Donovan R All rights reserved. ® UMI UMI Microform 3010216 Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Infomnation and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of Che Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by R. Gv/inner entitled Wasteland of Fortunes": History, Destiny, and Cultural Frontiers in .%erican Literature and recommend chat it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for Che Degree of Doctor of Philosophy . '•^2 ^ ^ I 1 r ' ^ /•> D3.te Lawrence J. Evers iy // / LuIL- Suresh Raval ^ ^—• Date Susan Aiken Date Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. J STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: f AA Ttia-A/ 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have provided support as I have researched and composed this dissertation. I will refrain from naming all of these people, but I wish to acknowledge those who have made specific contributions or to whom I owe a substantial general debt. The members of my committee. Professors Larry Evers, Suresh Raval, and Susan Aiken, have been superb mentors. Moreover, I am much indebted to Professor Annette Kolodny for her painstaking and incisive readings of interim drafts of chapters 2 and 3. I would also like to acknowledge other non-committee mentors who have influenced my scholarship: Tenney Nathanson, Daniel Cooper-Alarcon, Barbara Babcock, and William Epstein. Throughout my graduate studies, a cohort of colleagues (at the University of Arizona and elsewhere) has contributed to my thinking and writing on the topics and issues of this dissertation. Two colleagues deserve special notice and thanks; in addition to being great friends, Tom Olsen and Eric Anderson have been generous with their time and energy in responding both to my less formal ruminations about the project as well as to various permutations of the document. During the course of working on this dissertation, family members and friends have constituted a network of inspiration and support. It is especially difficult to imagine finishing my doctoral studies and this project without the companionship of my partner, Mimi Ojaghi, who not only survived this tortuous (and sometimes torturous) odyssey with me but who also patiently and persistently encouraged and sustained me throughout the process. To my parents, who have provided. To Mimi, who has abided. And to Rich, for teaching me that the past contains multitudes 6 PREFACE The overarching concern of this dissertation is the influence of literature on our understanding of ourselves, Americans of the United States, as a national culture. This study examines the literary heritage that has contributed to the molding of our collective notions about American history and culture. After analyzing how nineteenth-century American writers established a conventional literary discourse about historical transformation in the "New World," I focus on the ways in which twentieth-century writers have received and responded to those conventions in their works on the same general topic. A priority of this investigation is to recognize and emphasize a type of literature that not only counters narrative convention but also articulates alternative, innovative visions of American history and culture. This project represents a culmination of interests. From my master's essay (on Ray Young Bear's Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives), to a number of specifically relevant seminars (including a yearlong course on Frontier Studies), to my qualifying examinations, to the dissertation itself, I have pursued a theoretically informed, multicultural version of Americanist literary criticism. My critical practice is much indebted to cultural studies and critical theory, a conjunction that emphasizes issues of language, representation, power, identity, and cross-cultural relations. Specifically, my interests in (post)colonial studies and American literature have yielded a synthesis of the insights of the former field with primary attention to significant works of the latter field. Like many others, I have been intrigued and inspired by the extent to which 7 Americanist studies lend themselves to the modes of analysis practiced by contemporary (post)colonial scholars and critics: Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, et al. For example, a pair of works such as Said's Orientalism and Robert Berkhofer, Jr. 's, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present can inform each other and consequently undergird a more compelling understanding of history and culture in milieus that bear the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, including the United States. This dissertation joins the line of contemporary Americanist literary criticism that seeks to analyze how prevalent ideas, beliefs, and values find their expression and development in literature over the course of decades and centuries. One prominent member of this group, Richard Slotkin, observes that he participates in a contemporary "movement whose project has been to demystify the governing ideologies of the nation" (2000). My critical practice grows out of that sense of a (counter)movement, but rather than seeking to "recover the historical experience and consciousness of peoples and classes previously excluded from the history written by the 'victors'" (Slotkin 2000), this study reconsiders the ways in which writers have contributed to a poetics of exclusion, a colonialist literature, and to examine v^iters who address and/or attempt to redress the hegemony of American historical literature (some of whom indeed belong to the excluded or "vanquished" groups). More particularly, as my reference to Slotkin emblematizes, my analyses build on the lessons I have learned from that branch of contemporary Americanist literary criticism that could be referred to as "Frontier Studies" (despite the almost hopeless breadth of such a label): an area of inquiry that 8 investigates the prominence of "the frontier" and the successive conquests of frontiers in literary-historical conceptions of "America." I seek to contribute to an important precept of this type of inquiry, that literary cultural production contributes meaningfully to our