Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2005

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Abstract

The novels of Nathanael West are preoccupied with the deconstruction of Western civilization, satirizing and parodying its most respected ideologies and literatures; they are also involved in recreating both cultural and personal identity from the deconstructed fragments of this culture by performances or masks of identity. The textual mask is a trope that performs both these functions in the work of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, but especially in West. West demonstrated the mask's destructive force and constructive potential in both his writing and his personal life. The novels---The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locust---variously attack artistic or political formulae that privilege escape from culture's degradation, or that offer erroneous promises of subjective or cultural wholeness. West's life and art, then, exhibit the usefulness of the mask in the grim battle for the formation of artistic and political subjectivity.

Extent

109 p.

Comments

FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Adviser: Mark W. Scroggins.|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2005.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Identifier

FADT13201

Format

pdf

Download

Share

COinS