Abstract
Any investigation into the impulse toward the heroic narrative in the contemporary American novel must necessarily end with more questions than answers. Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo do not hold the key to a final and complete formulation of the hero. I chose these authors not because they had answers but because they seemed to be asking the question I myself had asked as a literary scholar in an age when certain questions or even categories of questions no longer seem to be asked. It seemed to me rhetorical studies, culture studies, and postcolonial theories, while analyzing valuable “how” concerns had back-benched the “why.” Had all literature really become nothing more than something one tells? Were all readers silently nodding their heads in agreement with “just so” on their lips, or else putting the book down having gleaned from their favorite storytellers a handful of facts about seventeenth-century pirate routes or the joual of northern Quebec lumberjacks? Can we read literature now only as a curiosity closet?
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© 2007 Stephanie S. Halldorson
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Halldorson, S.S. (2007). Conclusion. In: The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609785_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609785_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53938-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60978-5
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