The Dialectic of Self and Story : Reading and Storytelling in Contemporary American Fiction by Robert Durante
In an age of digital fragmentation and “grand narratives” that no longer feel true, Robert Durante’s The Dialectic of Self and Story offers a vital lifeline. It reveals how we use contemporary fiction to “find ourselves,” transforming into “symbolic authors” who reconstruct identity from the shards of experience. This book is essential today because it proves that storytelling is not just art—it is our primary tool for personal and cultural survival.
Who May Benefit
- Literary Scholars: For deep dives into the fusion of realism and postmodernism.
- Aspiring Writers: To understand how narrative “sorcery” can transform facts into emotional truths.
- Cultural Critics: For insights into how monuments and landscapes function as readable texts.
- Educators: Seeking a self-reflexive “teaching map” for multicultural literature.
- General Readers: Looking to use stories to heal personal deficiencies and find “singularity.”.
Top 3 Key Insights
- Mimesis as Connection: Realism isn’t just a “slice of life”; it’s a relational process between authorial construction and reader interpretation.
- Storytelling as Healing: Narrative acts empower us to discover a sense of wholeness and repair cultural or personal “loss.”.
- Micronarratives Empower: In a fractured world, local, personal truths provide far more liberation than the inflexible “totalizing” stories of the past.
4 More Takeaways
- Landscape as Text: Physical environments are “narrative landscapes” that characters must learn to “read” to navigate their lives.
- Identity is Fluid: The “self” is a continuous construction through language, not a static, fixed core.
- Truth via Fiction: “True” stories often require fictional reinvention to reach a deeper, “hard and exact” emotional reality.
- Recursive Reading: To build meaning, readers must trace steps backward and forward, connecting repetitive motifs like a “deep map.”.
Book in 1 Sentence
This work explores how contemporary American fiction blends realism and postmodernism, empowering readers to reclaim their identities through the transformative act of storytelling.
Book in 1 Minute
Robert Durante invites you into a world where the line between “real life” and “fiction” is a permeable membrane. By analyzing masters like Raymond Carver and Tim O’Brien, Durante demonstrates that we are all “symbolic authors” who must read our own lives to find stability amidst cultural chaos. The book’s heartbeat is the belief that storytelling is a necessity, not a luxury—a way to “make the dead talk” and heal cultural wounds. Ultimately, it suggests that our “self” is the most important story we will ever write, requiring us to navigate our history with both a “nervous side-glance” and a “steady confronting gaze.”.
1 Unique Aspect
The book provides a brilliant analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a “postmodern text,” arguing that the monument is “unfinished” until visitors actively “read” and project their own stories onto its surface.
Chapter 1: The Fiction in the Story and the Story in the Fiction
“The contemporary addict turns to the short story to find himself.”
Durante introduces the concept of the “permeable membrane” between realism and postmodernism. He rejects the narrow view that postmodern fiction is “anti-referential”; instead, he argues it is “self-conscious metafiction” that engages deeply with reality. Using Sherwood Anderson as a foundation, Durante illustrates that the “real story” is the storyteller’s power to create art from the fragments of life. This sets the stage for a world where “micronarratives” replace the outdated, totalizing stories of old, giving the sender and receiver equal power in the “language game.”.
Chapter Key Points:
- Realism meets self-conscious metafiction.
- Fragmented lives seek singularity.
- Micronarratives replace grand narratives.
Chapter 2: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Postmodern Text
“The wall is not merely a text… it also evokes individual and cultural responses.”
The Wall is analyzed as a “postmodern edifice” that acts as a repository for 58,132 local narratives. Unlike vertical, white-marble monuments to mythic heroes, this horizontal black granite slab requires visitors to “walk down into” a collective tragedy. It functions as a mirror where “readers” see their own reflections while tracing the names of the lost, making it an active participant in a “relational process” between the past and the present.
Chapter Key Points:
- Wall as a reading act.
- Repository of diverse opinions.
- Mirroring self through memory.
Chapter 3: Toward Transcendence: Raymond Carver
“Writing is an act of expressed moral responsibility.”
Durante defends Raymond Carver from the “minimalist” label, arguing his work is “fuller and more interesting” than critics suggest. Carver’s characters often struggle with enervation—figured through insomnia and alcoholism—but find potential for “transcendence” through narrative connection. In the story “Cathedral,” the narrator moves from a “deconstructive void” to a “relational process” by drawing with a blind man, learning to “see” through shared creative action.
Chapter Key Points:
- Beyond the minimalist label.
- Metaphors for reading and writing.
- Transcendence through shared process.
Chapter 4: Reading the Landscape: Richard Ford
“Self-consciously calling attention to the artifice of fiction… can be regenerative.”
Richard Ford creates “fictional landscapes” where rootless characters must “proofread” their world. Durante argues that Ford’s realism is “experimental” because it treats events as abstractions from narrative rather than raw materials. Characters like Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter must navigate “vacant moments” and use storytelling to “face the earth” and find stability in a chaotic, unstructured American landscape.
Chapter Key Points:
- Landscapes demand constant deciphering.
- Events as narrative abstractions.
- Facing the ordinary world.
Chapter 5: Beyond Ethnicity: Louise Erdrich
“Once they smash there is no way to put them right.”
Louise Erdrich’s fiction is presented as a “multi-textured” blend of family history and cultural survival. Storytelling here is a “redemptive” force used to “track” lost histories and heal the wounds of cultural destruction. Characters like Nanapush and Lipsha use narrative to bridge the gap between “descent” (blood) and “consent” (choice), creating a “sustaining web of intimacy” through interwoven personal monologues.
Chapter Key Points:
- Healing cultural destruction via story.
- Self as a sustaining web.
- Bridging descent and consent.
Chapter 6: Reading and Storytelling: The Vietnam War
“That’s what a story does… You make the dead talk.”
War writers like Tim O’Brien and Bobbie Ann Mason use fiction to re-create a “hard and exact truth”. O’Brien’s work reveals that “true” war stories are not about what happened, but what “seemed to happen,” transforming memory into “living moments.”. Storytelling becomes a form of “sorcery” that preserves the dead, allowing survivors to achieve personal regeneration by “bringing the dead home.”.
Chapter Key Points:
- Fact vs. emotional truth.
- Making the dead speak.
- Fiction as cultural survival.
Chapter 7: Epilogue: An Extended Map Reading
“Writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place.”
Durante concludes by linking writing with the act of traveling, using William Least Heat-Moon’s work as a “deep map.”. He advocates for a “self-reflexive” approach to education, where students investigate “how and why we read.”. The book ends by reminding us that reading is the foundation for experiencing “genuine otherness and difference,” helping us survive by connecting us to the “great reticulum” of our past.
Chapter Key Points:
- Writing as map-making.
- Context is teaching’s cornerstone.
- Reading as experiencing otherness.
10 Notable Quotes
- “The contemporary addict turns to the short story to find himself.”
- “The power of the storyteller to create art out of life… is the story’s real subject.”
- “Consciousness is an aspect of reality and reality itself is provisional.”
- “No one is entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him.”
- “The world offers itself not as a fully realized datum but as a potential to be activated.”
- “Memory… is the origin of storytelling.”
- “Writing is an act of expressed moral responsibility.”
- “The self is a story: our individual, brief place in history is compounded of stories.”
- “Stories can save us.”
- “Reading will contextualize our lives, will show us, even allow us to experience genuine otherness and difference.”
About the Author
Robert Durante is a literary critic and scholar specializing in contemporary American fiction and postmodern theory. His work focuses on the “relational process” between the text and the world, arguing that reading is an active, performative event. Educated at SUNY Buffalo under mentors like Mark Shechner, Durante’s style is marked by a meticulous and thorough approach to editing and literary analysis. He has made significant contributions to the study of “neo-realism” and the way narrative landscapes provide “historical authenticity” in modern literature. His major works explore the delicate balance between the “loss” common in postmodernism and the “healing” power of storytelling.
How to Use This Book
Practice “recursive reading” by tracing recurring motifs backward and forward. View yourself as a “symbolic author,” using these narratives to “proofread” your own life and find stability amidst cultural fragmentation.
Conclusion
Robert Durante’s The Dialectic of Self and Story proves that in our “slippery, protean world,” we are the stories we tell. By bridging the gap between realism and postmodernism, we can transform our “insomniac voids” into sites of profound connection and transcendence. Don’t let your history be a “blank text”—pick up your pencil today and start drawing your own “deep map” toward self-discovery!.