Bridging the post /modern divide: Reading high modern and multicultural postmodern works side by side

Ronald Stephen Picard, Purdue University

Abstract

In the present study, I read seemingly divergent high modern and multicultural postmodern novels side by side in order to address several problems within the theoretical and critical debate over the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. Using the work of Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian McHale as examples, I note that most postmodern theories recognize a collapse of stable categories under postmodernism, but they also reinscribe categorical and opposing distinctions between it and modernism. My project questions the antagonism present in such theories in order to explore the postmodern possibility that the differences attributed to modernism and postmodernism may be complementary, coterminous, and interdependent. In the process, I posit a postmodern method of reading whereby one text may be used not only to delineate the limits of another but also to illuminate or reconstruct otherwise unspeakable perspectives lying latent in the other's silences, gaps, and contradictions. This methodology suggests the significance of intercultural encounters in this dissertation. Pairing Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust with Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises with Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and William Faulkner's Light in August with Toni Morrison's Jazz, my postmodern readings migrate back and forth across gender and racial lines in order to reveal the presence of marginal cultures within modern and postmodern literature and to demonstrate that different voices do not form separate but equal traditions; rather diverse traditions intertwine with articulations from historically dominant ones. In effect, these postmodern pairings uncover the presence of marginality within high modernism while resisting the urge to essentialize postmodern differences. Reading across the modern and postmodern strains in these novels and tracing largely fortuitous textual links, I reconstruct a shareable, contingent post/modern past for them. The textual echoes that I hear in the juxtaposition of these works suggest the possibility that white modern and multicultural postmodern works respond to shared historical contexts, and this study maps and remaps this common, though often conflicted, space.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Peterson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|Literature

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