Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation

Description

Despite the success and significance of Jonathan Franzen’s fiction, his work has received relatively little scholarly attention. Aiming to fill this conspicuous gap, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community analyzes each of Franzen’s five novels in chronological order to reveal an interior logic animating his work. Integrating various formal and ideological perspectives to illuminate Franzen’s work, Jesús Blanco Hidalga demonstrates that the concepts of salvation and redemption, typical of romance narratives, run throughout Franzen’s fiction. Even as he re-assesses and expands the familiar interpretations of Franzen’s work, Blanco Hidalga shows how these salvation narratives are used for self-legitimization not only by the characters, but by the writer himself. Combining critical rigor with interpretative boldness, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community offers a new theoretical approach to a major contemporary author. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Preface List of Abbreviations Chapter 1 Introduction: A formal and ideological approach to Jonathan Franzen’s fiction 1 Jonathan Franzen’s relevance to contemporary American culture 2 Narratives and metanarratives: The conversion 3 Theoretical coordinates: Socially symbolic narratives 4 Questions of mode: The end of postmodernism? 5 What we talk about when we talk of realism 6 Realism, contingency and the weight of inherited forms 7 Realism, totality and late capitalism 8 The problem of perspective 9 Community issues Chapter 2 Knowable conspiracies: The Twenty-Seventh City 1 Introduction: Striking up a conversation 2 Mapping ‘the inner city of fiction’ 3 Vanishing city: The wasteland of vacant lots 4 City of boredom: Highways, malls and the hunger for the Event 5 Visions of (second) nature: Songbirds and concrete 6 Suburban sprawl and the quest for orientation 7 Conspiracy or the end of the public sphere 8 The (non-)politics of irony: Agency and apathy 9 Systemic paralysis and Utopian drives 10 Nostalgias of the industrial age 11 History, form and ideology Chapter 3 Strong Motion: Activism of the private sphere 1 Introduction: Reassessing Franzen’s disavowal 2 Family affairs 3 Geophysics of the Other 4 Natural history and historical nature 5 The quest for truth in Risikogesellschaft 6 Urban novel and novelistic city 7 Agency and community: Liberals and radicals 8 Perspectives of salvation 9 The novel and the problem of alterity Chapter 4 The Corrections: A family romance for the global age 1 Introduction: The Corrections as a hybrid novel 2 Postmodernist essentials: Conspiracies, representation, visions of the self 3 The realism of The Corrections 4 Suburban ambiguities 5 On the House: Domestic symbolism in The Corrections 6 Family pictures and social elegies: Franzen’s sympathetic types 7 The end of the era of hardware 8 Problems of perspective in the postmodern scene 9 The search for community in post-historical times Chapter 5 How to close a (meta)narrative: Freedom 1 Introduction: Freedom as a destination 2 Guilty (liberal) pleasures 3 Beaten up by rednecks: Class discourse and ideology 4 Franzen and the culture wars 5 Enlightened elites and fear of populism 6 The insidious charm of the ruling class 7 Aurea mediocritas: Franzen’s middle-class ideal 8 Beyond the war: Salvation and reconciliation 9 Keeping it in the family 10 The politics of environmentalism: Failure and salvation 11 The elephant in the room 12 The ring of life: How to Live. What to Do Chapter 6 Recapitulation: What’s in an ending? Chapter 7 Epilogue: Purity and hope 1 Romance and narrative desire 2 A Touch of Evil: Purity and the Gothic 3 What lies beneath: Purity and repetition 4 Franzen and the Great American Rant 5 Journalism, fiction and hope for the public sphere 6 The perks of limited closure Works cited Index