![]() Doctorow once called his own book „a quite deliberate hommage” to the Kleist story. Their struggles are the same resulting in their own jurisdiction no matter how many innocent people have to die for the cause. The most important proof will be based on Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives and his brilliant photos.Īccording to many sources the figure of Coalhouse Walker is modeled after Michael Kohlhass, major figure in Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777-1811) short story, Michael Kohlhaas (1811). People other than white were treated as inferior beings, lived in crowded tenement houses or on the streets. Social injustice was greater than ever before. The treatment and acceptance was quite the same for people of color and immigrants as none of them were given equal rights and opportunities as the local whites so the ’non-whites’ had to fight hard to gain equality and extinguish discrimination. ![]() They are all immigrants coming to the New Land pursuing happiness. Jewishness becomes important when the story gets to Harry Houdini, the famous magician and later Tateh, his wife and his young daughter. The third chapter gives me the chance to examine the status of colored people in the early years of the 20th century and along with this the life-conditions, treatment and job opportunities the newly arrived immigrants had to face. The novel’s main characters can be divided into three very distinct social groups: white Anglo-Saxon, upper-middle class people immigrants (Jewish) and the African-Americans who turn out to be the motor, the mastermind of the whole story. This tendency can also be observed in the metamorphoses of some major characters. This novel is also a national Bildungsroman and as such it looks at the various stages of American history in the 20th century. Doctorow in his False Documents states „that there is no fiction or non-fiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.” (26) and being a writer is the proper job because a writer is privileged, and "alone among the arts, literature confuses fact and fiction" (18). I will also have a look at the trends that form today’s American novels and show Doctorow’s place in this process. Doctorow wants to entertain us with his novel and being faithful to history is not one of the criteria of show-business. He does not want to be accurate, he does not wish simply to retell facts but wants to use them for a colorful story in which they do not have to show history as it was but as it could have been. When reaching out for history Doctorow automatically undertakes the role of the cultural historian but he does it as he likes it. As Ragtime is not entirely a piece of historical writing, I need to demonstrate the other elements that mix and also mellow the otherwise quite rigid genre to make it into a more spectacular semi-fiction. I will have a look at the origins and the 20th-century versions of this genre in order to show Doctorow’s genius and mastery of the historical novel. Ragtime is a semi-historical novel which means it blends real and fictional people, locations and events. In the second chapter I am going to examine Doctorow’s writing style and some of his other works. The positive and negative critique of the novel Ragtime will be demonstrated along with the special narration as it starts the line of works with an obscured and overshadowed narrator with almost a cameo-role. Some evidences of this accordance are obvious (the epigraph, their job, color of skin etc…) so next to these I will have to concentrate more on the indirect, concealed references. Coalhouse Walker’s surface and hidden qualities are very similar to those of Scott Joplin, the father of ragtime. Two perfect mirrored image-pairs are Coalhouse Walker – Scott Jolpin (1868-1917) and Harry Houdini (1874-1926) – Al Jolson (1886-1950) so their figures will be examined and compared. Also the themes and techniques will be examined of which the mirror is the most important. According to Doctorow himself the structure of the novel perfectly follows the patterns given by ragtime music which has surface and secondary connotations, too. It is a type of music the structure of which is similar to that of the novel which is not an accident. In the first chapter the title will be examined first. In the following thesis I am going to look at Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1975) from different perspectives, taking into consideration its genre, the era it represents, the diversity of origins and lifestyles the people of that era stand for and also the possibilities pursued by the immigrants settling for America in the first decades of the 20th century. When Literature Meets Cultural History Ragtime as a Work of Midfiction Doctorow’s Style Ragtime – Music and History Critique and the Unique NarrationĢ.
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