Document Type
Essay
Abstract
"The Transfenestrational Imaginary: Periodizing Vineland's Sixties" argues that the representational strategy in Vineland has much in common with Fredric Jameson's sixties periodization strategy, and offers a sustained analogy between narrative strategy and historiography. I suggest that Vineland is most productively seen as a continuation of the anti-literary genres of the sixties underground press and manifesto forms, genres that were necessarily temporary and politicized, and became opaque when separated from the context of active political social movements. The paper focuses on two key figures in the novel, Frenesi Gates and Zoyd Wheeler, and argues that the two are associated with the manifesto form and the underground press respectively. Frenesi embodies both the idealistic and recuperative elements of sixties discourse, with neither identity canceling out the other, but rather demonstrating the impasse of her position as a leftist and a feminist in a post-sixties historical conjuncture. Zoyd forms her passive, comic other associated with the easy-going countercultural humor and culture-saturated forms of the Underground Press. The dyad represents both the inflationary "superstructural credit" of the sixties and the complication of historicizing the decade's "failures." I argue that the novel develops a strategy of "irrealism" in order to tackle these impasses. Against the critical consensus on Vineland, I argue that the novel is neither transparent nor transcendent. Instead, Vineland's representational strategies point to a form of historical narrative that no longer attempts to produce "some vivid representation of history as it really happened," but rather to produce the concept history, a requisite of Jameson's periodizing politics.
Repository Citation
Isaacson, Johanna. "The Transfenestrational Imaginary: Periodizing Vineland’s Sixties." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1–25. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss4/6