Abstract

This dissertation explores the effects on readers of memorializing narrative techniques that range from extreme, documentary realism to what I call "pragmatist," nonrealist fiction. I challenge the popular view that realist narrative is the most effective literary way to improve society in the wake of well-documented atrocities, specifically the Nazi Holocaust and American slavery. ;The major difference between literary realism and pragmatism involves how readers learn and remember the story. Realism's correspondence theory of truth posits that truth-statements copy reality. Pragmatist philosophy, as articulated by William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, rejects the correspondence theory for its support of language as referential and its emphasis on completion and certainty. A pragmatist approach emphasizes one's bodily situatedness, reciprocal influence, and experimentation that lead to provisional truths about reality. I argue that in reading pragmatist nonrealism, the relatively passive eyewitnesses of realist fiction are transformed into active participants in the text due to the absence of a linear plot, rounded characters, and a fixed world narrated with rational certainty. ;The realist end of this continuum features Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List, which depicts Nazi atrocities through transparent language, consistent chronology, seemingly exhaustive details, and an epistemologically confident narrator. Though less realist overall, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage utilizes similar techniques of containment that tend to enforce division between passive readers and the text and thereby disallow opportunities for memorable perceptual growth. ;The more pragmatist techniques of Toni Morrison's Beloved require readers' active learning and remembering. Characters' traumatic memories are fragmentary, revisionary bits that readers struggle to piece together. An extremely active reading experience results because of the perceptual labor demanded, which in turn is likely to intensify readers' memories of the atrocities memorialized by the novel. Even more pragmatist, Raymond Federman's first three novels memorialize his Holocaust experience through tactile techniques like unconventional syntax and typographical enclosures that engage readers in a "hands on," bodily simulation of his survival. These pragmatist novels have great potential to shift the responsibility for memorialization to readers by fueling their habitual wariness against a comfortable, passive mind-set built on presuppositions and rational certainty, much like racist ideology