Exploring the Interface: Post-Modernism and Changing Notions of Literature.

Although the term "post-modernism" is often used to describe a group of writers which remains fairly constant, critics have failed to define the term in any specific way. Most critics concede that certain writers, most notably Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelm, are "post-modern," but the term remains too general to be of any particular use in studying a specific literary impulse. By investigating the formal characteristics of several writers, and then determining what those characteristics indicate about the writers' literary philosophies and world views, this dissertation puts forward three major elements which aid in making the term 'post-modern' a useful critical category, while acknowledging that these writers do not share all of these characteristics all of the time. Rather, the dissertation discusses those elements which seem best to represent the most innovative and important aspects of this particular literary impulse. In formulating a formal and philosophical base for post-modernism, I have drawn upon not only literary critics, but scientists, philosophers and historians as well. The paper's three sections investigate the use of history and metaphor in the works of Pynchon, Barthelme and Fowles; images of the artist and concepts of art in post-modern writing and how these shape the styles of Nabokov, Vonnegut, Pynchon and Heller; and the relation between post-modern writing and new journalism. The dissertation shows that the new physics has contributed to a change in post-modern writers' concepts of both history and metaphor, evolving a non-linear, parallel and simultaneous view of history and a process of metaphor-making that is often double-faced and usually far more tentative than any other in the field of fiction. Similarly, self-reflection in post-modern literature becomes a statement of art's tentativeness, its demotion from the exalted position that it held in the modernist era. As the writer places himself in his own fiction, he questions his function as creator and challenges the reader's own responsibility in the work of art. In new journalism, too, the writer often places himself in his own reportage toward the same ends as the post-modern novelist. Both new journalists and post-modern novelists emphasize the inadequacy of the myth of the objective observer, and the need to recognize the nature and limits of our fictions.PhDModern literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158542/1/8125218.pd