Re -mapping postmodernism: Contemporary American women's fiction
Abstract
Current scholarship has not adequately addressed the specific differences of women writers' postmodernist strategies. My dissertation responds to this gap by examining the ways in which contemporary American women novelists combine innovation in narrative with social critique, using experimental forms to intervene in debates about postmodern theory and culture. I argue that current conceptions of postmodernism need to be revised in favor of a more inclusive definition, one that includes socio-political and what some have called “resistant” elements along with the aesthetic. While they critique cultural norms and “master narratives,” contemporary American women writers—particularly within the last decade—go further by offering strategies for constructing new possibilities. I discuss in detail four novels by contemporary American women writers—Toni Morrison's Jazz, Carole Maso's The Art Lover, and Elizabeth Dewberry's Many Things Have Happened Since He Died, which were published in the early 1990s, and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which preceded them a decade earlier. Drawing upon postmodern, feminist, and multicultural theories, I examine the narrative strategies of Morrison, Robinson, Maso, and Dewberry as interventions in discourses surrounding postmodernism and its relationship to aestheticism, mass culture, and subjectivity. I investigate, for instance, the ways in which these novelists avoid what some have argued is a pitfall of postmodern subjectivity, the erosion of the subject and agency, and analyze how they experiment with narrative form while foregrounding pressing material issues of gender, race, and class. Negotiating the spaces between seeming contradictions they point to a middle ground in debates about postmodernism—first, by addressing the place of gender difference within postmodernism and second by arguing for a politically engaged postmodernism. This dissertation thus seeks to open up a space for discussion of contemporary American women's texts as postmodernist and works towards a revised characterization—a remapping—of postmodernism.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Peterson, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature|Womens studies
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