Tropes of Garbage in Ragtime

Abstract

E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, is a collection of tropes that are generally on unacknowledged by the so-called objective history of ragtime era. This research sees Ragtime as a text, which gives the concerns of blacks, immigrants, jews and women the central focus in the history. Doctorow, as an archeologist goes to the past to collect such unacknowledged historical knowledge and tropes to put forth into the centre, interrogating the so-called objective history of ragtime America. Doctorow, locating himself in the interstices of contemporary knowledge and information production, tries to collect such tropes from the garbage to give a new form of history. The present researcher, by using Focauldian concept of genealogy and Benjamin’s illumination theory, brings the references of characters from the margin and silence, with their personal histories from the past events to show the tropes of garbage. This research reverses the concept of reading history and reads it from the perspective of marginalized and silenced groups which were unacknowledged by historical discourse and thrown into the garbage.