"Event Narratives in American Historical Fiction and Film, 1970-2010" attempts to make sense of an attraction in the American literary imagination to the idea that history occurs in dramatic bursts of transformative change, or events. I address this question by analyzing recent literary and cinematic treatments of potential events in U.S. history such as the Rosenberg trial, Charles Lindbergh's 1941 anti-war campaign, and Hurricane Katrina. Novels such as Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, and films such as Tia Lessin's Trouble the Water and Sam Green's The Weather Underground, I argue, create an ultimately insoluble problem for themselves whenever they treat historical change as a violent succession of singular events. The problem that confronts all of these works is the difficulty of imagining the present as both continuous with and different from the past, and I show in four chapters how late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction and film grapple with this difficulty at the level of style, genre, narrative time, and narrative causality.

In the course of my analysis, a shift becomes apparent in the way these works---which I term media-event narratives---conceptualize and relate to their media environment. This shift, I demonstrate, is from a tendency in media-event narratives of the 1970s and '80s to see historical narrative as an intertextual discourse with no authoritative foundation, to efforts in more recent examples to find such grounds in the specific material capacities and limitations of distinct narrative technologies. Attending to this change allows me to develop a historical account of the exhaustion of postmodernist skepticism and subsequent emergence of a new cultural aesthetic that understands historical narrative as a pedagogical tool for teaching us how to reshape the social, technological, and ecological worlds we inhabit. In this way, I argue, contemporary media-event narratives begin to imagine a new vocation for historical narrative in American literature and cinema: one concerned less with deconstructing our historical knowledge than with leveraging this knowledge, however partial, into concrete action to produce new social realities. This project thus connects the study of literature to a number of other disciplines, including critical theory, philosophy of history, comparative media studies, including aesthetics. Furthermore, in thinking about how social reality is both reflected in and conditioned by literature, it also seeks to understand how the literary work is also constantly reinventing itself through its encounters with other visual, aural, and digital media forms.