![]() Thus, in the article the term history-making is preferred instead of history writing and history-making is regarded as bearing close resemblance to story-making. Relying mainly on Hayden White, Louis Mink, and Paul Ricoeur's ideas of history and narrative, the present article concludes that history is a reproduction of past actuality instead of an imitation of it. ![]() Is narrative the indispensible component of history? What is the function of narrative in history? How does history represent human experience with the narrative function? Is historical narrative imitation or reproduction of the past? What is the role of the historian and his constructive imagination in history writing? This article discusses these questions in the context of a literary text, Gardner's Grendel, which is a rewriting of the Old English epic Beowulf, and with reference to phenomenological and Kantian ideas of history, narrative, the self, and imagination. The relationship between history and narrative has always been a subject of controversy among philosophers, historians and literary theorists. Through a focus on processes of mobility and immobility as expressions of a fundamental sense of social dislocation these readings disclose a social logic at work in Gardner’s writing. ![]() In contrast with earlier Gardner criticism, the readings in this study emphasize the relations that have to be denied in order for the “moral affirmation” to be made. The conjuncture of this relative release from constraints and the emergence of a new literary generation led Gardner to overreach himself in his “moral fiction campaign.” The dissertation argues that it is only through a relational and sociological analysis that these contradictory movements can be properly understood. After critical recognition and popular success had established Gardner’s position as a “major new voice,” he sought to redefine his literary project. This compromise is shown to have resulted from the meeting between, on the one hand, a strong “home culture” that emphasized “deep seriousness” and, on the other, a stance of irreverence and relativism that attached to the dominant positions established in the critically acclaimed fiction of the 1960s and early 1970s. One general conclusion of the study is that Gardner’s position-takings between 19 were marked by a literary production that was highly compromised. The second part of the study presents four readings of individual works that demonstrate the interplay between the individual habitus, the problematics of the literary field and the curve of the trajectory leading up to the work in question. Following this, an extensive outline is given of Gardner’s trajectory through that space and time, seen as a project that is necessarily a negotiation of the positions established in the field. The dissertation contains an analysis of John Gardner’s habitus and of the field of fiction writing in the U.S. ![]() Applying this model to the American author John Gardner, the study not only seeks to provide an understanding of the individual career of one writer, but by insisting on the relational logic determining this career, it also contributes to a new perspective on the literary field in the period after the Second World War. This study employs the sociological model that has been developed by Pierre Bourdieu for the analysis of the production of literary works.
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