Garcia, Maria_MENG_2019

Title Garcia, Maria_MENG_2019
Alternative Title Eden's Inmates
Creator Garcia, Maria
Collection Name Master of English
Description In this essay, I argue that Rachel Kushner explicitly invokes the American Adam in ​The Mars Room ​ to demonstrate the trope's incongruities through a contemporary, female, urban protagonist: a subject who experiences an inverted reality of this idealized figure. Largely, ​The Mars Room​ explores American approaches to agency, individualism, and the intertwined state of nature and technology to explicate the country's foundations, which are themselves inspired by a maintained idealism . The novel charts the ways in which this national idealism steers individual narratives and the process in which a disillusioned protagonist becomes forced to subscribe to this thinking (thus operating in a network of institutions influenced by the nationwide trope). By employing a character who avoids conventions and who is then forced to work within those previously rejected conventions, Kushner captures what nonfiction works cannot so easily demonstrate-the impossibility of an American Adam fantasy and, nonetheless, its influence on the construction of society, which reaches across technology, institutions, nature, and gender and class expectations.
Subject Literature; Popular literature; Research in literature
Keywords Literary tropes; Idealism; Kushner, Rachel; The Mars Room
Digital Publisher Stewart Library, Weber State University
Date 2019
Language eng
Rights The author has granted Weber State University Archives a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce their theses, in whole or in part, in electronic or paper form and to make it available to the general public at no charge. The author retains all other rights.
Source University Archives Electronic Records; Master of Arts in English. Stewart Library, Weber State University
OCR Text Show
Format application/pdf
ARK ark:/87278/s6gzp7k0
Setname wsu_smt
ID 96788
Reference URL https://digital.weber.edu/ark:/87278/s6gzp7k0
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