Abstract

The colonialist cultural work of American literature has become one of major critical arguments since 1980. Several critics particularly propose the necessity of reexamining the ideological formation of the romance, which has been recognized as a primary genre in American literary history. In reaction to this criticism of the connection between the romance and American imperialism, this dissertation intends to investigate the complex field of national narratives that challenges the polarized assumption of the hegemonic and minority cultures. ;The authors I discuss in my first two chapters---Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Toni Morrison, Harriet Jacobs, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha---all represent the participation of women, as well as ethnic/racial minorities, in the process of nation-building. The "role" they describe, however, does not lead to a heroic achievement but instead to frustration by the cultural hegemonies dominating American social systems. Those authors' ambivalent contemplations upon American national identity informs their literary form: the anti-quest romance. Their national narratives, mediated through the anti-quest romance, tactically disrupt the conventional epic framework of the national romance, while they establish new American myth of the unsuccessful quest as an underrepresented experience of individual nations. ;Chapter 1 investigates the formalistic politics of self-expression in Tenney's Female Quixotism and Morrison's Jazz . Chapter 2 analyzes the image of cultural hybridity and trans-linguistic performativity as the central elements to the construction of national and authorial identity in Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee . In chapter 3, I will determine the theoretical significance of the anti-quest romance by investigating Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity . Rorty's theory of contingency suggests that a reexamination of the national narrative is a literary project anticipating the problem of "recognition" in a liberal community. My argument is, finally, followed by a coda in which I will trace some major contemporary arguments on the multicultural methodology of American literary studies, in terms of significances of those literary works; I contemplate on how we can substantiate the historicity of the "imagination" and the "community" in the unavoidable category of national literature