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NAVIGATING THE TORRENT: DOCUMENTARY FICTION IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA

CRINITI, STEPHEN FRANCIS
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1189530451

Abstract Details

2007, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature.
This dissertation examines the role of documentary fiction within contemporary media culture. Through the authors’ inclusion of documented historical events/personages and their critical mediation of these documents, the writers show an awareness of the mediated nature of historical knowledge—including a consciousness of their own act of novelistic mediation. As a result, I argue that contemporary documentary fiction, through its recognition of the inevitability of mediation and the challenges it brings to entrenched cultural notions, is best equipped to thrive in the media-saturated marketplace. In order to explore the variety of ways contemporary documentary fictions “navigate the media torrent,” I have paired the texts according to similarities in form and mode of mediation. Each chapter examines the authors’ novelistic renderings of history against dominant nonfictional accounts in order to analyze the authors’ mediations of and challenges to hegemonic conceptions of that history. Before moving to the pairs, however, I briefly examine the methodology of E.L. Doctorow’s The March, ultimately dismissing it as outdated. The first dyad, then, includes Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, which emphasize the imaginative nature of memory in order to influence and even alter their communities’ collective memory. In the second pairing, René Steinke’s Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer utilize a fictional biography form to revise popular conceptions of their biographical subjects, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Martin Luther King, Jr. respectively. Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues challenge American mythology by representing their characters’ searches for—and inability to find—Truth. The final pairing includes Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance and William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt. Sorrentino takes media distortion as his critical target, and Vollmann, with a grand encyclopedic scope, encompasses all the modes explored here. For this reason, I argue for Vollmann’s novel as a kind of ur-contemporary documentary novel, encapsulating in a single novel the myriad forms of mediation. Because of these responses to the “media torrent,” I contend that documentary fictions are our best contemporary fictions and are ultimately our best hope for the continuance of a potentially endangered genre: literary fiction.
Dr. Thomas LeClair (Advisor)
332 p.
Literature, American
documentary fiction; historical fiction; contemporary fiction; mass media; Alvarez, Julia; Doctorow, E.L.; Nordan, Lewis; Johnson, Charles; Sorrentino, Christopher; Steinke, Rene; Vollmann, William; Whitehead, Colson; Winegardner, Mark

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • CRINITI, S. F. (2007). NAVIGATING THE TORRENT: DOCUMENTARY FICTION IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1189530451

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • CRINITI, STEPHEN. NAVIGATING THE TORRENT: DOCUMENTARY FICTION IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA. 2007. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1189530451.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • CRINITI, STEPHEN. "NAVIGATING THE TORRENT: DOCUMENTARY FICTION IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1189530451

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.