Fabulative Histories and Syncopated Voices in Doctorow's RagtimeA part of PhD dissertation entitled as;Histories Revisited: A New Historicist Reading of Doctorow’s Ragtime, Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Marwan Maho  Abdi; Sherzad Shafie   Babo

doi:10.21271/zjhs.27.SpA.29

توێژەران

Marwan Maho Abdi University of Duhok
Sherzad Shafie Babo Department of English,College of Languages,Salahaddin University-Erbil

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https://doi.org/10.21271/zjhs.27.SpA.29

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Historiographic Metafiction##common.commaListSeparator## , Postmodernism ##common.commaListSeparator## Historicism##common.commaListSeparator## Parody##common.commaListSeparator## Syncopation.

پوختە

Doctorow’s Ragtime is a novel which Linda Hutcheon has labeled as a Historiographic Metafictional narrative, i.e., a work which self-consciously draws attention to its artificiality. By departing from the novelistic traditions this novel blurs the boundary between history and literature in order to draw attention to the limitations of historiography as a reliable source for projecting truth. Through such a representational method, this narrative provides an arena in which various oppositions and tensions are syncopated. In such an arena, many characters alter their ontological status, i.e., the fictional characters move from the peripheral realm of imagination into the sphere of historical reality while the historical characters lose their superior status, and deteriorate to the position of mere fictions. In this way the fabulative histories of the marginalized are brought to the fore and are prioritized over the factual historical events. This characteristic makes Ragtime a proper medium for resonating the voice of the underrepresented and the marginalized through the pages of history. This paper examines the strategies which are employed by Doctorow to prioritize the subjective truth, i.e., fictional truth over the objective reality, hence inscribing the untold stories which have been kept out of the pages of history.

سەرچاوەکان

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