In this essay on Welcome to Hard Times, I build on Roman Jakobson's theory of the dominant and on recent scholarly studies of the American West by Richard Slotkin and Jane Tompkins to discuss how Doctorow reworks the conventions of the popular western to demystify standard historiographic and literary versions of the Westward Movement deriving largely from the Turner Thesis. I also emphasize how he uses his self-doubting narrator to raise questions about the nature of historical knowledge. Finally, I show how, in vision and technique, his novel anticipates the genre of the Anti-Western popular in fiction and film in the 1960s and the 1970s.
"The Revision of the Western in E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times"
FARRANT, Winifred
1989-01-01
Abstract
In this essay on Welcome to Hard Times, I build on Roman Jakobson's theory of the dominant and on recent scholarly studies of the American West by Richard Slotkin and Jane Tompkins to discuss how Doctorow reworks the conventions of the popular western to demystify standard historiographic and literary versions of the Westward Movement deriving largely from the Turner Thesis. I also emphasize how he uses his self-doubting narrator to raise questions about the nature of historical knowledge. Finally, I show how, in vision and technique, his novel anticipates the genre of the Anti-Western popular in fiction and film in the 1960s and the 1970s.
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