Critical distances: Liberal multiculturalism, United States citizenship, and contemporary American literature.

摘要

This dissertation looks at the ways in which various "minority" writers in the United States represent and critique discourses of post-civil rights era, liberal multicultural citizenship. I employ a combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic methodologies to develop a theory of what I call, following Althusser, an aesthetics of internal distantiation. This aesthetics is both formalist and political in that, (1) it uses particular narratological and poetic techniques to engage and situate its readers, and (2) it allows a reader to "'perceive' (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which [she is] held." The writers I address---including Audre Lorde, Sherman Alexie, Arturo Islas, Reginald McKnight, and Jamaica Kincaid---employ aesthetics of internal distantiation to evoke reader responses that might make readers more aware of the ideological limitations of liberal multiculturalism. My project aims to contribute to the field of contemporary U.S. literary studies by constructing a critical interpretative model that can incorporate representations of different racial-, ethnic-, gender- and sexual-group experiences without ignoring the important differences between such identitarian positions and the ways in which these positions affect each writer's use of distantiating aesthetics.