Wright Morris: Memory and Imagination

Wright Morris imposes his imagination on the chaos of recollected experience, creating a unified vision of reality from a threateningly indeterminate mass of raw material. This study examines how Morris transforms the commonplace, the past, and language in his fiction. A chapter on the commonplace bases its method on the Russian formalist concept of defamiliari- zation. A chapter on the past is a psychological exploration of Morris’s fictional use of incidents from his early life. And a chapter on language is inspired by recent critical explorations of the relation between language and reality.