University of North Dakota UND Scholarly Commons Theses and Dissertations Theses, Dissertations, and Senior Projects January 2016 City Of Clans Geoff eckP Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/theses Recommended Citation Peck, Geoff, "City Of Clans" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1946. https://commons.und.edu/theses/1946 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, and Senior Projects at UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CITY OF CLANS by Geoffrey Charles Peck Bachelor of Arts, Vanderbilt University, 2006 Master of Fine Arts, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of North Dakota in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Grand Forks, North Dakota May 2016 PERMISSION Title CITY OF CLANS Department English Degree Doctor of Philosophy In presenting this dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a graduate degree from the University of North Dakota, I agree that the library of this University shall make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for extensive copying for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor who supervised my dissertation work or, in their absence, by the chairperson of the department or the dean of the School of Graduate Studies. It is understood that any copying or publication or other use of this dissertation or part thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of North Dakota in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my dissertation. Name: Geoffrey Charles Peck Date: April 12, 2016 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………..vi ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………vii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….1 II. WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………..15 II. NOVEL………………………………………………………………………16 Chapter 1……………………………………………………………..17 Chapter 2…………………………………………………………......33 Chapter 3……………………………………………………………..58 Chapter 4……………………………………………………………..81 Chapter 5……………………………………………………………..95 Chapter 6……………………………………………………………..98 Chapter 7……………………………………………………………110 Chapter 8……………………………………………………………124 Chapter 9……………………………………………………………135 Chapter 10………………………………………………………..…154 Chapter 11…………………………………………………………..172 Chapter 12…………………………………………………………..175 Chapter 13…………………………………………………………..182 iv Chapter 14…………………………………………………………..188 Chapter 15…………………………………………………………..214 Chapter 16…………………………………………………………..224 Chapter 17…………………………………………………………..235 Chapter 18…………………………………………………………..245 Chapter 19…………………………………………………………..255 Chapter 20…………………………………………………………..270 Chapter 21…………………………………………………………..271 Chapter 22…………………………………………………………..275 Chapter 23…………………………………………………………..278 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank, first and foremost, my wife, Meredith, for her unwavering support during this journey. I would also like to thank each of my committee members for their help in completing my dissertation, and especially Elizabeth Harris for her patience, wisdom, and guidance over the years. vi ABSTRACT City of Clans is a novel that examines the sociopolitical issues in Pittsburgh following the 2008 economic crisis. The narrative follows a teenage male struggling to break away from a culture that discourages thought, and the work takes the common form of the coming- of-age novel, but one made unique by examining the confluence of athletics, sexuality and political consciousness in the twenty-first century. City of Clans presents a number of complex relationships, which includes individuals struggling with sexuality, but the novel also examines familial relationships where feelings of love and loyalty are just as strong and often reinforce conventional views of gender and sexuality. City of Clans balances these topics against the broader sociopolitical issues facing Pittsburgh in 2009, issues that, of course, include gender and sexuality, but move further out to critiques of a globalized economy based on finance capitalism, and a local economy now driven by technology-based jobs and pop culture consumerism. The result is a novel that looks back at the history of the labor struggle in America in order to weave the larger contemporary sociopolitical issues into a narrative about the individual struggles that make us human. vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In simple terms, my dissertation, City of Clans, takes the initial concept of a teenager struggling with his identity, his sexuality, and situates the narrative in Pittsburgh on the eve of the 2009 G-20 Summit in order to discuss the sociopolitical issues relevant to contemporary society. But the novel feels much larger, more unwieldy, than something I can neatly pack into a thesis statement. I want it to be about love and loyalty. To be about post- industrial Pittsburgh. To provide a sense of history that is often glossed over, a sense of unidealized industrial Pittsburgh. I want my novel to be about the complexities of family, friendship and sexuality, about nascent sexual predators, the ways they can be enabled. I want my novel to convey the ways people can become locked in troubling situations that give them comfort. But I also want the novel to be bigger than its own narrative, to be aware of the broader sociopolitical issues of our time, for the protagonist’s narrative to appear as only one that is moving in the same current as many, many others. And, in the end, I want City of Clans to be a novel about change, for the narrative to consider the way cultures evolve and the way individuals respond. While certain characters and elements of the plot have been with me since I quit playing basketball and first thought about writing as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, the novel has evolved immensely through my studies and subsequent experiences. My initial 1 literary influences of Norman Maclean and John Steinbeck can be seen in City of Clans, and more recent influences are too numerous to discuss in great detail: writers like Thomas Bell, Tillie Olsen, and Clara Weatherwax, who provided me with an introduction to Proletarian literature; N. Scott Momaday, Thomas King, and Sherman Alexie for their blending of the mythic with the historic, the human; Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for their beautiful crafting of character; and, of particular importance to this project, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, and Ben Fountain for their use of language. These writers along with my experience working in a party goods warehouse in Pittsburgh around the time of the economic crisis of 2008 have transformed City of Clans into the novel it is today: the story of a teenager struggling with his identity has been vastly complicated, with the protagonist’s story now situated within some of the issues of contemporary society. The setting of the novel, Pittsburgh, is key because of Pittsburgh’s labor history and its masculine working class ethos that has been branded and commodified by a football team, but also because of the way the city has evolved. Following the economic crisis, Pittsburgh became the center of the global news cycle, if only for a day or two, in September of 2009, when the protests of the G-20 Summit turned violent. These riots were about individuals coming together to make their voices heard, to do what they could to bring about change. Rather than City of Clans being about these protests, I want them lie on the periphery, running parallel to the protagonist’s narrative as he continues to withdraw further into himself and struggles to understand his place in Pittsburgh. In this way, City of Clans takes on the natural form of the bildungsroman, and it would be easy for me to have a ready-made statement about how the novel is a coming-of- age story in post-industrial Pittsburgh or a twenty-first century Proletarian bildungsroman, 2 but my hope is that the novel can transcend these labels. I do want to acknowledge the history of Proletarian literature, particularly as it relates to the history of Pittsburgh’s labor struggles, but my aim is to do this while naturally examining contemporary sociopolitical issues through character. This is similar to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which attempts to balance the economic and political issues of the Great Depression with the individual plights of the Joad family. With Tom Joad as the protagonist, the novel reads as an unconventional bildungsroman as it alternates between vignettes from the collective perspective and longer chapters that trace Tom’s developing political consciousness. Proletarian writers were frequently charged with being too didactic, leaving readers feeling like they were being lectured, and despite all of the praise Steinbeck received, The Grapes of Wrath also received such criticism. But Steinbeck mitigated the didacticism by balancing the vignettes from the collective perspective that establish the setting and provide the larger sociopolitical context with those of the Joad family that humanize the narrative for the reader. I’ve tried to do something similar in City of Clans to avoid being too didactic while still raising important sociopolitical issues. Though the point-of-view is always tied to the protagonist, Jeremy, I situate him in different contexts, with different characters who