“An entire past comes to dwell in a new house”Topophilia and jeremiad in Joan Didion’s Run River
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Universidad Complutense de Madrid
info
ISSN: 2531-1654, 2531-1646
Datum der Publikation: 2020
Nummer: 41
Seiten: 105-121
Art: Artikel
Andere Publikationen in: ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies
Zusammenfassung
In this paper, I will analyse Joan Didion’s poetics of praise and mourning in her first published novel, Run River, understanding the Western landscape she presents in it as an instance of Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the childhood home as a felicitous, eulogised space. I will argue that Didion’s depiction of the Sacramento Valley and the struggle of the families inhabiting it to accept the changing face of the landscape results in a jeremiad narrative of the West as paradise lost. Reflecting on the limitations both of Bachelard’s discussion of the childhood home and of the West as a mythographic space, I will conclude by assessing Didion’s topophilia and her ambiguous stance as a Western writer.
Bibliographische Referenzen
- References Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994.
- Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1981. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. U of Wisconsin P, 2012.
- Brady, H. Jennifer. “Points West, Then and Now: The Fiction of Joan Didion.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 20, no. 4, 1979, p. 452.
- Didion, Joan. Run River. Vintage, 1994. Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 4th Estate, 2017. Didion, Joan. South and West. 4th Estate, 2018. Didion, Joan .Where I Was From. Harper Collins, 2004.
- “eulogy”. WordReference.com. Collins Concise English Dictionary © HarperCollins Publishers, 2019. Web. Accessed 20 November 2019.
- Goggans, Jan. “California at the Point of Conflict: Fluvial and Social Systems in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Joan Didion’s Run River.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 17, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 5–22.
- Zehelein, Eva-Sabine. “‘A Good Deal about California Does Not, on Its Own Preferred Terms, Add up’: Joan Didion between Dawning Apocalypse and Retrogressive Utopia.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, Sept. 2011.