Illusions of escape: representations of Harry Houdini in contemporary U.S. narratives

This thesis is the first full-length study of the significance of Harry Houdini for U.S. literature and culture. Despite his enormous and enduring fame, Houdini does not appear in literary fiction until the 1970s. Through readings of his representation in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), and Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), I argue that these contemporary writers turn to Houdini as a diegetic symbol of, and formal model for, their self-reflexive, overtly illusionistic representations of history. In this, I suggest Houdini as a common means of mobilizing what has recently been called a ‘neo-historical’ generic mode – an emergent post-postmodern form typically concerned with re-representing the past in order to offer meaningful comment on the present.

Throughout, I assess the extent to which these representations of Houdini suggest solutions or alternatives to various impasses and schisms within contemporary literary discourse following the ‘turn from critique’ in the academy. These theoretical impasses – namely, a general questioning of literature’s capacity to represent the ‘real’, the often binarized attitudes of irony and sincerity, and the abstractions of economic neoliberalism – are all related to the more totalizing impasse of illusionistic neoliberal culture, which representations of Harry Houdini help to articulate, historicize, and critique.