California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is a Conex-Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. She obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Wroclaw, Poland, in 2005. She is the author of Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal (Peter Lang, 2007) and co-editor of Interiors: Interiority/ Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (Cambridge Scholars, 2010) and A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2017), as well as essays, reviews and translations.

• IntroductionPart 1: Joan Didion, the Native DaughterDidion the Sacramentan, Californian, WesternerCritical ReceptionJoan Didion’s Melancholy California Part 2: Californian Losses and MelancholiaThe Myth of an Empty FrontierHow Joan Didion Expelled Herself from ParadiseRacial Melancholia and the Emergence of ConscienceThe Social Dimension of MelancholiaChapter 1: The Loss of NatureProblems with American NatureProblems with The Garden of EdenThe Paradoxes of NatureWriting to Remember and to RedeemPioneers and AncestorsPurification through FireThe Howling Wilderness: The California DesertTurner’s and Didion’s Frontierless WestChapter 2: The Loss of HistoryManifest Destiny and Its Fulfillment in CaliforniaFreedom from History History, Nature, and Hysteria"A History of Accidents""You Can’t Call This a Bad Place"The Freeway ExperienceEscaping the Meaninglessness of HistoryChapter 3: The Loss of EthicsThe Emergence of ConscienceThe Melancholic Donner PartyDesire and the Wagon-Train MoralityBetrayals of Familial LoyaltyLife as GamblingParental InfluenceParental TransgressionsChapter 4: The Loss of LanguageLooking Awry at Conscience and LossThe Language of MelancholiaThe Limits of LanguageEstrangement from the BodyTranslation and BetrayalThe Modern Pioneers and the Loss of MemoryThe Language of DemocracyConclusion