E.L. Doctorow: A Reconsideration

by Michael Wutz (Editor), Julian Murphet (Editor)

Overview

Showcases the life-work of one of America’s greatest contemporary novelists
Essays written by an international set of scholarsContributions by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow: Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky, and Jennifer Egan Pays particular attention to the extraordinary novels of Doctorow in the last 20 years, including The Waterworks, City of God, and a set of his recent preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science, and media cultureThis book gathers a suite of newly commissioned, original essays on the work of E. L. Doctorow. It reframes our understanding of his oeuvre by engaging it in entirety, including the significant accomplishments of the late period. The book features chapters by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow, such as Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky and Jennifer Egan and explores Doctorow’s novels and his diverse preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science and media culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474458849
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	08/31/2021
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Michael Wutz is Rodney H Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor at Weber State University. His publications include: Conversations with W. S. Merwin, coedited with Hal Crimmel (Weber State University), Jackson: UniversityPress of Mississippi, 2015; reissued in paperback 2018.Enduring Words—Literary Narrative in Changing Media Ecology, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009, pp. 279 "Young Swiss Writers," a special double issue of the international, bilingual magazine Dimension2 co-edited and -introduced with Romey Sabalius (Cal State, San José), vol. 8 (2/3), pp. 177-455, February 2007. "Media, Materiality, Memory: Aspects of Intermediality," a special issue of Configurations, the journal of the Society for Literature & Science, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, vol. 10, no.1 (Winter 2002): pp. 201, coedited with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Univ. of British Columbia.

Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is the author, previously, of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (Oxford UniversityPress, 2017) and Todd Solondz (Northern Illinois UniversityPress, 2019), and of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905 (Oxford UniversityPress, 2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2023).

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsNotes on Contributors

Introduction: E. L. Doctorow Reconsidered, Michael Wutz and Julian Murphet

I Generic Border Crossings 1. Doctorow and the Halbbildungsroman, Tamlyn Avery 2. "The Dark Horrors of Consciousness": Doctorow and the Gothic, Stephen Arch 3. E. L. Doctorow as Short Story Writer, Mark Azzopardi

II Politics, Allegory, Difference4. Submerged Politics and the Artist, Nicholas Murgatroyd5. Redeeming the National Ideal: Revisiting E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and Its Political Implications, Jieun Kwon6. "A Rearrangement of Molecules": On Doctorow’s Perpetual Motion Machines, Julian Murphet7. Cocks, Corsets, Clocks: E. L. Doctorow and the Tunnel of Love, Alexander Howard

III Narrative, Media, and Cognition—The Case of City of God8. Literary Neutrinos and the Hot Dark Matters of Doctorow’s City of God, Nathan Frank9. City of God / City of Bits: Signs, Signals, Noise, Michael Wutz

IV Tributes 10. E. L. Doctorow, Inhabiting History, Jennifer Egan11. The Polyphonic Past, Don DeLillo12. A Half Century of Friendship and Literary Greatness, Victor Navasky

Index

What People are Saying About This

University of Exeter Mark Steven

E. L. Doctorow once likened narrative art to the experience of driving an unlit road at night. The author apprehends the close-distance illumination of the headlamps; everything else, he suggested, would only visualise upon encounter with mechanical luminescence, as if conjured into being by the very act of forward propulsion. This collection fits out the narrative motorway of Doctorow’s literary career with vivid overhead lighting. These essays are both transformative and illuminating, and together will serve as a definitive guide to the long journey of Doctorow’s narrative worlds.

Editorial Reviews

E. L. Doctorow once likened narrative art to the experience of driving an unlit road at night. The author apprehends the close-distance illumination of the headlamps; everything else, he suggested, would only visualise upon encounter with mechanical luminescence, as if conjured into being by the very act of forward propulsion. This collection fits out the narrative motorway of Doctorow’s literary career with vivid overhead lighting. These essays are both transformative and illuminating, and together will serve as a definitive guide to the long journey of Doctorow’s narrative worlds.

University of Exeter Mark Steven