Date of Award
Spring 2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
Committee Chairperson
Eleanor F. Shevlin, Ph.D.
Committee Member
William M. Nessly, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Ruth Porritt, Ph.D.
Abstract
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son are both Pulitzer Prize-winning novels from the first half of the 2010s. Nguyen’s novel of a Vietnamese spy in America during the Vietnam war has been critically acclaimed and has attracted significant scholarly attention, a special issue of PMLA being dedicated to the work. Johnson’s novel about North Korea, while also a recipient of praise, has been comparatively less noticed and attracted little scholarly work. This thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarly literature on American literature and to literature on the poetics of the novel by reading these two US novels together, focusing especially on the theme of confession and its relation to an ethics of reading. The confession has a mode has exigency in a society enamored with what I call a logic of presentation. I argue that the poetics of the novel as a genre allows these two works to represent identity in ways that undermine demands that the characters be “authentic” in commodifiable ways. The narrative strategies used in Nguyen’s and Johnson’s novel are sophisticated and strategic, and their representations of identity create the conditions for what I call aesthetic faith. I conclude that this aesthetic faith involves a novel’s ability to suggest the supersensible realm of consciousness, and thus supports the reader’s openness to an atopic but socially-embedded otherness.
Recommended Citation
Feldman, Frederick, "Aesthetics and Poetics of the Novel in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer and Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son" (2020). West Chester University Master’s Theses. 138.
https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/all_theses/138