![]() This Ovid refracts both authors’ explorations of human desire and sexuality of the numerous processes that capitalism involves (technology, industry, mobility, immigration, the shifting formations of class, gender and race identities) and of the interplay between all of these with art or representation itself. Footnote 3 Both authors simultaneously, and not coincidentally, deploy a prototypical post-1970 reading of the Metamorphoses – one which emphasizes ubiquitous, cataclysmic change as well as the Roman poet’s ludic energy. Doctorow (to a greater extent) and Eugenides (to a lesser) each gleefully intersperse historical and fictional events, and stage encounters between historical figures with imagined characters, with a conscious disregard for ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’. Despite their differing narrative structures and emotional registers, however, both novels exemplify prototypical postmodernism in their disregard for the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘reality’. Callie/Cal, meanwhile, is a biologically intersex character who interweaves the immigration/assimilation narrative with an account of her/his transition from ‘living as a girl’ (performing a female gender) to ‘living as a boy and young man’ (performing a male gender) in line with the changes taking place in her/his body. While the breakneck-paced story of the minimalist Ragtime (which features a WASP nuclear family, a Jewish immigrant family, and an African American family) is told through a dispassionately toned omniscient narrator, the unashamedly expansive or ‘maximalist’ Middlesex is told through the emotionally involved first person narrative voice of Callie/Cal. ![]() Footnote 2Īlthough these novels share a preoccupation with the personal, political and cultural transformations that define twentieth-century American experience, they are unlike each other as well as alike. This version of Ovid both shapes and is shaped by Doctorow’s portrait of the Progressive Era (from the early 1900s to the end of World War One) in New York City, New York State, Philadelphia, Massachusetts and Detroit, and it also shapes and is shaped by Eugenides’s mock-epic account of the decades-long assimilation of the Stephanides family, in which the narrator’s grandparents emigrate from eastern Greece (now Turkey) to Detroit in the 1922. A particular reading or understanding of the Metamorphoses – in which the poem is taken to epitomize the flux, the fluidity and the constructed nature of modernity – underpins a range of modern and contemporary American texts concerned with these themes. Less surprising, although also under-analysed by critics, is Ovid’s presence in each of these profoundly playful chronicles of individual and national transformation. Footnote 1 It is surprising that although these novels have much in common, in that they both deploy postmodern voice(s) to examine conceptions of changing identity in the rapidly modernizing America of the twentieth century, critics have rarely considered them together. ![]() L Doctorow’s Ragtime, of 1975, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, of 2002. ![]() This article takes as its starting point the engagement with Ovid in two greatly feted American novels published more than twenty-five years apart: E. ![]()
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