Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This article offers a postmodern reading of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime which is labeled as a Historiographical Metafiction. It highlights some of the avant-garde strategies Doctorow utilize to reframe the contemporary historical narrative. It studies the novel’s conscientious construction which blends fiction with historical information in order to offer a peculiar vision of the American society during the ragtime era. The paper analyzes some characters in order to expose Doctorow’s notion of the indeterminacy of the past and to suggest that the historical records have always forged a naïve and sentimental image of the past in people’s mind.