E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel Lecture I

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E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel Lecture I

• Ramon Saldivar
• Stanford University

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E.L. Doctorow and American Social History

• Welcome to Hard Times 1975
• The Old West
• Ragtime 1975
• Turn of the Century
• Loon Lake 1980
• Billy Bathgate 1989
• The Great Depression

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The sacrificial role of the left, Doctorow

• The Trial and Execution of Julius and Ethyl
  Rosenberg
• What is a Historical Novel?
• Old Left/New Left
• Hot War/Cold War

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The Sixties Revolutionaries and Prophets of a
New Age

• Crisis in the contemporary American condition
• Old modern America vs. a New postmodern
  America
• Your parents generation and mine
• Civil Rights
• Womens Movement
• Radical Environmental Movement
• Viet Nam War
• Sexual Revolution

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Four Themes and Radical Movements

• Effacement of Objectivity and Critical Distance
• Dispersal (or Decentering) of the Subject
• Refigurations of Power
• Collapse of Time and Space

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Radical Genealogy

• As family histories
• Paul and Rochelle Isaacson
• Daniel and Susan Lewin
• As social history
• Progressive American political culture
• As a history of discursive practice (Nietzsche,
  Foucault)
• Structures of thought

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Master Narratives

• The inevitability of the historical dialectic
• The polymorphously perverse
• The postmodern

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For Next time

• Consider
• The title of the novel
• The epigraphs to the novel
• The Book of Daniel
• Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
• Allen Ginsberg, America