1. E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel Lecture I
Ramon Saldivar
Stanford University

2. E.L. Doctorow and American Social History
Welcome to Hard Times 1975
The Old West
Ragtime 1975
Turn of the Century
Loon Lake 1980
Billy Bathgate 1989
The Great Depression
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel

3. “The sacrificial role of the left,” Doctorow
The Trial and Execution of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg
What is a Historical Novel?
Old Left/New Left
Hot War/Cold War
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel

4. The Sixties: Revolutionaries and Prophets of a New Age
Crisis in the contemporary American condition
Old “modern” America vs. a New “postmodern” America
Your parents’ generation and mine:
Civil Rights
Women’s Movement
Radical Environmental Movement
Viet Nam War
Sexual Revolution
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel

5. Four Themes and Radical Movements
Effacement of Objectivity and Critical Distance
Dispersal (or Decentering) of the Subject
Refigurations of Power
Collapse of Time and Space
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel

6. Doctorow, Book of Daniel
Radical Genealogy
As family histories:
Paul and Rochelle Isaacson
Daniel and Susan Lewin
As social history:
Progressive American political culture
As a history of discursive practice (Nietzsche, Foucault)
Structures of thought
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel

7. Doctorow, Book of Daniel
Master Narratives
The inevitability of the historical dialectic
The polymorphously perverse
The “postmodern”
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel

8. Doctorow, Book of Daniel
For Next time
Consider:
The title of the novel
The epigraphs to the novel
The Book of Daniel
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Allen Ginsberg, America
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Doctorow, Book of Daniel