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textual masks of Nathanael West

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Date Issued:
2005
Summary:
The novels of Nathanael West are preoccupied with the deconstruction of Western civilization, satirizing and parodying its most respected ideologies and literatures; they are also involved in recreating both cultural and personal identity from the deconstructed fragments of this culture by performances or masks of identity. The textual mask is a trope that performs both these functions in the work of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, but especially in West. West demonstrated the mask's destructive force and constructive potential in both his writing and his personal life. The novels---The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locust---variously attack artistic or political formulae that privilege escape from culture's degradation, or that offer erroneous promises of subjective or cultural wholeness. West's life and art, then, exhibit the usefulness of the mask in the grim battle for the formation of artistic and political subjectivity.
Title: The textual masks of Nathanael West.
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Name(s): Bezet, Jared
Florida Atlantic University, Degree Grantor
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
Department of English
Type of Resource: text
Genre: Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation
Issuance: monographic
Date Issued: 2005
Publisher: Florida Atlantic University
Place of Publication: Boca Raton, Fla.
Physical Form: application/pdf
Extent: 109 p.
Language(s): English
Summary: The novels of Nathanael West are preoccupied with the deconstruction of Western civilization, satirizing and parodying its most respected ideologies and literatures; they are also involved in recreating both cultural and personal identity from the deconstructed fragments of this culture by performances or masks of identity. The textual mask is a trope that performs both these functions in the work of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, but especially in West. West demonstrated the mask's destructive force and constructive potential in both his writing and his personal life. The novels---The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locust---variously attack artistic or political formulae that privilege escape from culture's degradation, or that offer erroneous promises of subjective or cultural wholeness. West's life and art, then, exhibit the usefulness of the mask in the grim battle for the formation of artistic and political subjectivity.
Identifier: 9780496967285 (isbn), 13201 (digitool), FADT13201 (IID), fau:10059 (fedora)
Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
Note(s): Adviser: Mark W. Scroggins.
Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2005.
Subject(s): Literature, Modern
Literature, American
Held by: Florida Atlantic University Libraries
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/13201
Sublocation: Digital Library
Use and Reproduction: Copyright © is held by the author, with permission granted to Florida Atlantic University to digitize, archive and distribute this item for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder.
Use and Reproduction: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Host Institution: FAU
Is Part of Series: Florida Atlantic University Digital Library Collections.