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کلیدواژهها
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The 42ND Parallel, 1919, The Big Money, U.S.A., John Dos Passos, Jacques Derrida, Binary opposition, Différance
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چکیده
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The present study aims to vividly explore John Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. concerning the deconstructionism concepts of différance and binary opposition. U.S.A. contains three books, The 42ND Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money which later all published in one book. Passos had added a prologue with the title U.S.A. to The Modern Library edition of The 42ND Parallel and started a trilogy beginning with it. Deconstructionism is a theory of literary criticism initiated by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, which questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth. It asserts that words can only refer to other words attempting to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. The obvious certainty and absoluteness in Passos’ works thus demanded an approach of deconstruction to be applied to his novels and his trilogy. The novels have four major narrative styles and the attempt to deconstruct such novels with multi narrators should be certainly different for each narrator. When Dos Passos speaks through the perspectives of his characters the task is both to deconstruct the created character and Das Passos himself as the character. The Significance of this trilogy is obvious, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, as it acts as a representative of the American people who underwent pivotal changes before, during and after the war. The decisiveness of the author for labelling undecidable terms such as n nationality, war, money, and racism and feminism has been overturned and reversed in meaning and value by requesting aid from Derrida’s concepts.
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