Tragedy, Affect and Labor in American Literature, 1945–2020

Abstract

This book is a politically urgent and critically rigorous study of the reemergence of tragedy in American literature since 1945. It argues that literature appeals to tragic forms and figures to narrate the lived experience of labor during a period of social upheaval. In the novels of William Gaddis, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Philip Roth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the generic coordinates of tragedy attach to the precarious work lives of multiple characters in ways that bring labor into direct conversation with a literary history of tragedy. It explores Faustian pacts in The Recognitions (1955) and the inescapable determinism of The Bell Jar (1963), through the sacrificial scapegoat and singing choruses of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the Oedipal reckoning of Blood and Guts in Highschool (1984), to the Shakespearean bloodlines of The Human Stain (2000) and the tragic forms of alienation in Americanah (2013).