| Summary: | In this dissertation, the use of apocalypse and elegy in contemporary American literature has been explored in an attempt to draw some conclusions about America's complex twenty-first century consciousness. I have selected the millennial novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde), Don DeLillo (Underworld), and Philip Roth (American Pastoral), since all three, written at the century's end, are at once apocalyptic and elegiac in tone, and comprise a useful trilogy tor giving voice to the fracturedness of the American experience. My analysis of the texts traces apocalyptic moments in the novels -- moments of destruction and rebirth, endings, new beginnings, and great revelations -- against some of the most turbulent and often despairing twentieth-century events, in an attempt to show the connection between public and private history. While contemporary apocalypse diners from its biblical origins, the desire for regeneration and renewal persists despite its necessary deferment -- and, even, failure. Yet the apocalyptic impulse persists, and it is this determined future-looking and repeated self-reinvention that I discuss. In terms of the elegy, I argue that the overwhelming sense of loss and mourning that permeates the novels is reflective of a much larger national sense of disillusionment and disappointment at the failure of the American Dream and the dissolution of the America conceived of in the imagination of its first European settlers. While the traditional elegy moves towards consolation, the contemporary elegy often denies the mourner such release from grief. Consequently, in the contemporary novels discussed, consolation is to be found elsewhere. Indeed, I conclude that despite the melancholia of novels that deal so intensely with death, suffering, and tragedy, the act of writing an apocalyptic novel -- of presenting an image of the apocalypse, even if not an apocalypse that gives way to rebirth -- is itself an act of hope, and a call for change.
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