Footnote 2Īlthough these novels share a preoccupation with the personal, political and cultural transformations that define twentieth-century American experience, they are unlike each other as well as alike. This version of Ovid both shapes and is shaped by Doctorow’s portrait of the Progressive Era (from the early 1900s to the end of World War One) in New York City, New York State, Philadelphia, Massachusetts and Detroit, and it also shapes and is shaped by Eugenides’s mock-epic account of the decades-long assimilation of the Stephanides family, in which the narrator’s grandparents emigrate from eastern Greece (now Turkey) to Detroit in the 1922. A particular reading or understanding of the Metamorphoses – in which the poem is taken to epitomize the flux, the fluidity and the constructed nature of modernity – underpins a range of modern and contemporary American texts concerned with these themes. Less surprising, although also under-analysed by critics, is Ovid’s presence in each of these profoundly playful chronicles of individual and national transformation. Footnote 1 It is surprising that although these novels have much in common, in that they both deploy postmodern voice(s) to examine conceptions of changing identity in the rapidly modernizing America of the twentieth century, critics have rarely considered them together. L Doctorow’s Ragtime, of 1975, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, of 2002. Yet Doctorow’s best work will live as classics.This article takes as its starting point the engagement with Ovid in two greatly feted American novels published more than twenty-five years apart: E. Few would rank works like The Waterworks (1994) or City of God (2000) as important American novels. Among other things, the roots of Ragtime music in African-American culture aren’t forgotten in Doctorow’s novel, which includes one of the most harrowing accounts of racist humiliation in American fiction in the form of the story of Coalhouse Walker.ĭoctorow’s substantial body of work-twelve novels and three story collections as well as a play and many essays-was uneven. Everything that is forgotten in The Sting is remembered in Doctorow’s Ragtime. A sprightly caper film starting Paul Newman and Robert Redford, The Sting captures the look and feel of the Ragtime era, and helped spark a revival of popularity in the music of Scott Joplin, but has no ambitions to be more than entertainment. It’s instructive to compare the movie The Sting (1973) with Ragtime. His books never shirked from describing the primordial conflicts over race and class that were the very foundations of history. Still, the success of Feiffer’s book inspired countless imitators, which robbed the artifacts of the past of their historical context.ĭespite his role in sparking the nostalgia boom, Doctorow was in fact an anti-nostalgist in a nostalgic period. The text of Feiffer’s book indulged in no good-old-days falsifications: It was clear-eyed in linking superheroes to the trauma of the Depression and World War II. In the early 1960s, as editor at The Dial Press, he commissioned the publication of Jules Feiffer’s The Comic Book Heroes (1965), the first hardcover reprinting of such 1930s and 1940s caped crusaders as Sueprman, Batman, and The Spirit. Doctorow actually had a role to play in the rise of the nostalgia industry.
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