Ragtime as “false document" Narratives and a constructed world in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

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Gergely Vörös

Abstract

According to E.L. Doctorow, there is no genuine difference between fact and fiction: “there is only narrative.” He believes that “the regime of facts,” the epistemological dominant of the world we live in, “derives its strength from [prescribing] what we are supposed to be.” In this sense, our microcosm does not merely revolve around the scientific dogma of its own infallibility, but the ruling scientific discourse defines us in our very beings and demarcates our agentic horizons. In short, it imprisons us. In Doctorow ‘s view, only literature can offer us a way out of the tyranny of this rationality. For, fiction, speaking in the vernacular of freedom, has the ability, by revealing what we “threaten to become,” to transform the stories that govern our world. Ragtime testifies to this awareness, put forward in “False Documents,” in the present work I will rely on Doctorow’s essay as a key to interpret the novel and my aim is to show how stories govern the microcosm of Ragtime, condition the subjectivity and fate of its characters, and how stories themselves offer a liberation from normative constraints.

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How to Cite
Vörös, Gergely. 2018. “Ragtime As “false document": Narratives and a Constructed World in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime”. AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 14 (2). https://www.americanaejournal.hu/index.php/americanaejournal/article/view/45413.
Section
Essays
Author Biography

Gergely Vörös

Gergely Vörös is a postgraduate student at Comenius University in Bratislava. His research interests are related to postmodernist and contemporary US fiction. In 2018 he obtained an MA degree in English Literature from the University of Bristol. His MA dissertation by using Patricia Waugh’s definition of historiographic metafiction read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day as fiction that is not only conscious of its constructed nature but which aims to uncover the fictionality of our own world. Email: gv16294@my.bristol.ac.uk and voros17@uniba.sk