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영어

This paper aims to launch a comparative study of American Romanticism and postmodernism, focusing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s two short stories and Paul Auster’s postmodern novels. It argues that there are certain shared elements in what Melville once called “the power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s fiction and what the author of this papercalls the “aesthetic of chance” explored by Auster’s fiction. It has been claimed by researchers that postmodernism is subversive of the traditional literary imagination and its narrative strategies. American postmodernism, however, shares with American Romanticism an emphasis on the unavoidable role of the mysterious, the uncertain, and the contingent playing in human lives in this precarious world. Both Hawthorne and Auster unearth the mysterious and unknowable forces working in human transactions, though the latter tends to absolutize them to the extent that the former relates them to historical causalities, particularly to the ones between the undertakings of the Puritan ancestors and their descendents. Both authors also critically revisit the stained cultural
pasts of the American republic, which presumably sprang up in the dark wilderness of the “New World.” Auster as a postmodern writer revisits and recycles the dark visions of the world shared by early American Puritans and American Romantics, proving himself to be an atavistic literary, cultural descendent of the traditional collective American imagination, or the symbolic universe to which Hawthorne made a conspicuous contribution.