The hotel in postmodern literature and film

The Hotel in Postmodern Literature and Film This thesis examines postmodern literature and film set in hotels. It argues that the hotel— in its fictional and cultural manifestations —is a privileged site in the playing out of postmodern anxieties. In particular, it demonstrates that novels and films set in the hotel use this space to explore concerns of multiplicity (both in narrative and subjectivity); the uncanny; gender; the (post-Freudian) unconscious; and the search for intimacy and authenticity in a globalised late-capitalist society. The argument is informed by a number of postmodern theorists, whose work is outlined in the introduction and the first chapter. Fredric Jameson's infamous experiences in the Bonaventure Hotel, Marc Auge's theory of "non-places," Anne Friedberg's notion of the "mobilized and virtual gaze," concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's work such as territorialisation and the monad, and Deleuze's theories of cinema are used throughout the thesis to facilitate an investigation of the hotel's function within the primary texts and within postmodernity in general. Postmodern thinking on the hotel is largely based on male spatial experience. I use feminist theorists such as Friedberg, Janet Wolff, and Alice Jardine to counter this and to explore the notion of a "room of one's own" in the hotel. A range of hotel-based literary and filmic texts from the last half-century are examined. Whilst I largely use postmodern narratives, I also draw on some modernist texts (such as the film Last Year at Marienbad) because of their close relationship to postmodern thought. Relevant works by film-makers such as David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola are analysed, along with written texts by Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Steven Millhauser, Michael Cunningham, Michel Houellebecq, Lucy Frost and Marion Halligan. Through detailed readings of these texts, I explain why explorations of postmodern concerns are repeatedly housed in the hotel. The hotel narratives analysed in this thesis provide evidence that the hotel is a key site in the interaction of subjectivity and space in postmodernity, and is an "analogon" (to use Jameson's term) of contemporary experience. Movement from home is a dominant experience in postmodernity and the narratives analysed in this thesis evoke both the anxieties and pleasures of being away from home. Stories of the hotel highlight the complexity of homeliness in postmodernity where, as Auge claims, home is "everywhere and nowhere.