Looking For and Mostly Finding the Literary in Contemporary American Nonfiction. By Stephen Andrew Guy A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in English Language and Literature in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada November 2013 Copyright © Stephen Andrew Guy Abstract Prose style criticism of literary nonfiction has faded from scholarly popularity since a boom in the 1980s. Recent literary criticism of nonfiction has focused on context while neglecting aesthetics, or left the work of style analysis to composition or rhetoric scholars. I examine the work of Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and two writers associated with the literary journal n+1, Keith Gessen and Elif Batuman, to demonstrate the way that prose style analysis is a meaningful critical approach that helps define changing nonfiction genres, including online genres. I read Didion's work across her oeuvre to demonstrate the way her prose style shifts subtly over time and between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and literary journalism. I trace the influence of David Foster Wallace's American postmodern forebears on his fictional and nonfictional prose styles, and follow that line of influence to the nonfiction writing of online genres. I conclude by discussing the way that young writers associated with the journal n+1 regard Wallace's influence on their work and the writing of their generation, and examine Gessen and Batuman's prose style on and offline to find the literary in some unlikely locations. i Acknowledgements It takes a boat load of help to make a dissertation. Thanks to my indefatigable supervisor, Dr. Molly Wallace, who encouraged me to write something I would want to read, and whose patience and insight helped me turn my grab bag of slangy thoughts and wiseacre complaints into a functional work of literary criticism. Thanks to Dr. Pat Rae for her incisive commentary and faith in the literary value of nonfictional genres. Thanks to the other members of my committee and the English Department at Queen's University, especially Dr. Sylvia Sőderlind and Django, who provided a house in the woods where a lot of early drafting took place. Thanks to my parents, Donald and Karen Guy, and my sister and niece, Allison and Lucy, for their support and love. It's really over now, I promise. Thanks to my wife, Ashley Scarlett. Get ready for all of the unsolicited “when I was writing my dissertation” advice you'll hear while you write yours. Thanks to the b'ys, Jonathan Gaboury and Mark Streeter, and the rest of my classmates from Queen's. Thanks to Oscar and Joanna Malan for showing me how to have another kind of literary life. Thanks to Niall Johnson-Byrne for the errands. Thanks to Novel Idea, PS, the Artel, and Story Club. Thanks Kingston, Toronto, Lisbon and Barcelona. ii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Preface v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: What Are Joan Didion's Styles Good For? 52 Chapter 3: How David Foster Wallace Taught us to Talk About Ourselves 109 on the Internet (By Talking About Himself in Print) Chapter 4: Partisans and Tweeters: Following Literary Nonfiction Into A 154 New Century Conclusion 201 Appendix A: Glossary 204 Works Cited 206 iii I Have to Explain Why I Wrote Like This: A Preface. This is a dissertation about prose aesthetics in literary nonfiction. I chose this subject because many of my favourite writers of fiction have chosen stylized nonfiction as their preferred alternate mode and I was interested in demonstrating how their artful sentences transcend genre. In researching the history of nonfiction criticism, I quickly discovered that style was frequently overlooked in discussions of genre, despite it being the property, to me, that most readily identifies a work of nonfiction as “literary.” My goal in this dissertation is to show how an analysis of prose style is the literary critical method best suited to understanding stylized nonfiction. Let me restate my opening a little more broadly. This is a dissertation about genre and style. I chose this subject because I think of myself as a writer first and a scholar second, and because I found myself struggling to match my writing style to the dissertation genre. Let me restate my restatement. This is an introduction about the dissertation genre and my own writing style. Many people procrastinate by performing a more gratifying task which they can justify to themselves as important work; I recall the history professor I once had who remembered fondly how clean her apartment had been when she was writing her own dissertation, or the office mates I've had who ploughed through their marking with alacrity to avoid the stack of library books on their desks. I started writing a novel near the end of my dissertation research phase to avoid starting writing the dissertation itself. I can report that this strategy completely worked. I produced many pages of fiction and virtually no pages of dissertation for a long, happy stretch, bolstered by the knowledge that some sort of work was being done on some sort of literature in my cramped back room office. Alas. There comes a point when you have to stop scrubbing the floor or doling out B minuses or writing pages of dialogue and start digging the long dissertation ditch. I made many small indentations, but you couldn't exactly irrigate a field of knowledge through them. Luckily, a dissertation is a iv collaborative project, and my supervisor surveyed the field and offered some advice. She pointed at the clean digging work that I had been doing on the procrastination projects and suggested applying some of that effective pickaxe work to the pertinent ditch (although I bet she didn't have this kind of belaboured metaphor in mind). By which I mean she suggested that I recognize the similarity between my own approach to writing and that of the authors I was discussing. By which I hope she meant that I was poised to become the next Joan Didion on the strength of this dissertation and the partial novel manuscript that no one has seen but which is, I assure you, extant. So I've tried to make this work of nonfiction, my dissertation, as literary as possible. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace's remark about his nonfiction being an “essayish thing” (257) in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again” (1996), the work you are holding might seem more like a “dissertationish thing” than a dissertation. Many times throughout my academic career I have been accused of writing in a journalistic rather than academic register (which I have always chosen to take as a compliment rather than a diagnosis of oversimplification), and I want to be careful to explain my approach without introducing a debate about opacity in academic writing. I believe that there is value in using technical language when it is enhances a sentence's precision (hegemony, polysyndeton), and I acknowledge that a neologism is occasionally the best way to reckon with a concept produced by the alarming march of progress (IED, smartphone). In general, I agree with the vague contours of the arguments that difficult writing and jargon can occasionally help us think through the confines of oppressive received wisdom. I am not trying to take a stand against the prevailing critical vocabulary of contemporary academic literary studies, but I am also not particularly interested in using much of that vocabulary. When I describe what I perceive to be my progressive traditionalism, a forward-looking formalist methodology, in the first chapter, this might be the traditionalism that I am talking about most directly: the tradition of the popular critical voice, present in the Partisan Review, New Yorker, New York and London Review of Books, and now in n+1. The critics whom I am most interested in v emulating are Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Louis Menand and Elif Batuman. This last example is especially important. Although Batuman has published the least of any of the writers that I discuss in these pages, her blend of erudition and humour inspires me the most. If I make any of the six to ten people who will ever read this document laugh even a fraction of the amount I laugh at Elif Batuman, all fourteen years of my university career will have been worthwhile. When I started drafting this thing, I comforted myself with the notion that it would take plenty of joking to get through the enterprise's inherent turgidity, planning the whole time to remove the jokes in the final judicious edit, transforming all of the whimsy into steely daggers of insight. As I wrote, however, the asides started to feel like an important part of the argument: why not leave in some stylized sentences of my own to reinforce the idea that a self-consciously stylized sentence is the property of a piece of writing that makes it literary, and make a play for some literariness of my own? I was encouraged to go for it, so I did. There are some risks to this approach, the ugliest one being hubris. What if I'm overvaluing my eloquence and wit? What if it seems as if I'm pasting over gaps in my academic acumen with cheap shots at Norman Mailer? What if I'm writing a two hundred page blog post instead of a dissertation? What if I'm just another critic weakly emulating the voice of his subject? It always surprises me how few Wallace critics can resist throwing in gratuitous, parodic footnotes.