Emplotment, Ideology, And the Transatlantic Metaphor in Colum Mccann’s Transatlantic

Аннотация

This article examines Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic through the theoretical frameworks of Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, focusing on how historical narrative is constructed, ideologically coded, and symbolically charged within a postmodern literary context. By applying Jameson’s model of the three interpretive horizons, historical, social, and political, the study explores the novel’s fragmentary structure, the role of ideological subtexts, and the symbolic function of narrative form. The analysis demonstrates how McCann’s depiction of real and fictional figures across different time periods generates a transhistorical dialogue, in which the metaphor of the “transatlantic” serves as a narrative and conceptual connector. White’s theories of emplotment and tropology further reveal how historical events are aestheticized and reframed within fictional discourse. Ultimately, the article argues that TransAtlantic enacts a complex negotiation between history and fiction, offering a multilayered reflection on memory, identity, and the representational challenges of narrating the past. Keywords: Historical narrative, emplotment, postmodern historiography, ideology, symbolic act, transatlantic metaphor, memory and fiction. broader debates about the role of fiction in Introduction: This article examines TransAtlantic representing the past. through the theoretical frameworks of Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, focusing on the novel’s narrative METHOD construction, ideological subtext, and symbolic The novel TransAtlantic by American writer Colum dimensions. By applying Jameson’s model of the three McCann, published in 2013, received wide acclaim from interpretive horizons: historical, social, and political, we literary critics and readers alike, thanks to its seek to reveal how McCann structures historical complexity, deep symbolic meaning, and the meaning and engages in what Jameson terms a intertwining of historical context with personal “symbolic act.” White’s typology of emplotments and experiences. Fragmentary in its narrative structure, the tropes further assists in analyzing how historical events novel is composed of three parts and spans the period are narrativized and aesthetically reframed within the from 1845 to 2012. It presents, in a non-linear and novel. Central to our analysis is the metaphor of the fragmented fashion, historical events such as the “transatlantic” itself, not only as a geographical American Civil War (1861–1865), the Great Famine in connector but as a narrative and conceptual device that Ireland (1845–1852), the transatlantic flight of Alcock underpins the novel’s logic of continuity and rupture. and Brown (1919), Frederick Douglass’s journey to Through this theoretical lens, the article demonstrates Ireland (1845–1846), the Northern Ireland conflict, and how TransAtlantic functions as a multilayered narrative the Belfast Agreement (1998). Alongside these, in which history is not merely depicted but mediated, McCann creates fictional characters such as Lily reconstructed, and symbolically recharged. This Duggan, her daughter Emily, granddaughter Lottie, and approach enables a deeper understanding of the great-granddaughter Hannah, who loosely connect novel’s engagement with memory, identity, and these events into a broad transatlantic mosaic. The historical consciousness, while also situating it within novel’s extensive thematic range invites multiple International Journal Of Literature And Languages 17 https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ijll International Journal Of Literature And Languages (ISSN: 2771-2834) interpretations, yet it is our view that its historical and ideological resonances, and symbolic function. The cultural subtext forms the key to decoding the work. historical horizon highlights the formal organization of the narrative and its genre hybridity; the social horizon The use of Jameson’s and White’s theories for uncovers the ideologemes embedded in individual interpreting TransAtlantic. stories; and the political horizon situates the novel as a Analyzing the novel through the lens of Fredric symbolic act that reflects and reconfigures historical Jameson’s and Hayden White’s theories requires a consciousness. Hayden White’s theory of emplotment detailed interpretation of many aspects of the text, and tropes further illuminates how McCann transforms including the type of emplotment, the tropes used, and historical facts into narrative forms that carry their reading across Jameson’s three interpretive interpretive and affective weight. The recurring motif horizons. First, it is worth noting that the novel of the transatlantic, both as metaphor and narrative presents several narrative lines, particularly three axis, serves to bind disparate episodes and figures, involving historical figures, which are not provided in while also marking moments of rupture, displacement, chronological order and appear disconnected, along and transformation. McCann’s fictional women, with t