Mass culture and the postmodern historical imagination: Readings in contemporary American fiction.

Mass culture is changing the way we come to know and represent history. The unprecedented power and extent of mass culture have made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to gain access to the past without somehow engaging the language, imagery, and form of television, film, radio, popular music, and consumer culture. These conditions are registered in the fiction of Nicholson Baker, Don DeLillo, Bobbie Ann Mason, Marge Piercy, Walker Percy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed and others. In these texts one can examine the effects of mass culture on historical consciousness, and explore the consequences for narrative form of the fact that fiction is now immersed in and partially constituted by its mass cultural environment. By blurring or abolishing the distinctions between image and reality, inside and outside, self and world, mass culture threatens Enlightenment models of subjectivity and knowledge. Further, the televisual, spectacular forms of mass culture provide new challenges to narrative conventions. For these reasons, mass culture is often seen as a threat to "genuine" historical understanding, and its increasing influence construed as a loss. The evidence of the fiction suggests otherwise, however. Mass culture has motivated a vigorous investigation of the possibilities for historical understanding under postmodern conditions of knowledge. In the novels studied here, a narrative pattern emerges in which gestures toward "depth" of historical understanding are returned to the mass cultural "surface." As a form of skepticism endemic to contemporary mass culture, the historical imagination of the surface represents not a loss or effacement of history, but a significant means of engaging the past from within the culture of the image. Recent theories of postmodernism owe more to developments in architecture, the visual arts, and popular culture than they do to literature. This study concentrates on extended readings of fiction; further, it broadens the consideration of postmodernism in American fiction beyond the relatively narrow collection of authors and works usually gathered under the term.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104194/1/9034514.pdfDescription of 9034514.pdf : Restricted to UM users only