(En)gendering the postmodern: The metafictional historiography of E. L. Doctorow and Joan Didion

Andrea Krause, Purdue University

Abstract

The supposedly gender-neutral "cognitive map" of the postmodern in fact privileges and institutionalizes as our cultural dominant male-gendered coordinate points, rendering invisible female-gendered involvement with/against the postmodern dominant. This study seeks to make visible and open for de/re/construction some of these un/misrepresented spaces on the cognitive map. Chapter One focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of postmodern cognitive mapping, identifying historiographic metafiction as the site and method at/through which such mapping is achieved and constructing a methodology of postmodern spatial historiography, a poetics of place, grounded in the writings of Jameson, DeCerteau, and Barthes. Chapter Two explores the invisibility of women from both the emerging map of the postmodern and the process of mapping. Only seemingly absent, women writers and feminist theorists, I suggest, are, indeed, actively and often subversively involved in shaping the postmodern map. In the following two chapters, I investigate specific instantiations of postmodern historiographic mapping. Male and female writers, as exemplified by E. L. Doctorow and Joan Didion, I argue, evidence conflicting agendas in mapping the multiply contested space of the postmodern. Male writers often empower their postmodern mapping by returning the phallus as privileged signifier. Adapting the Oedipus struggle as a system of signification in The Book of Daniel, Doctorow, for example, reinscribes on the postmodern map a meaning-granting paradigm powered by phallic libidinal energy and inaccessible to women. Negotiating essentially the same historiographic postmodern terrain as Doctorow and asking many of the same questions about historical subjectivity and map-defining narrative authority, Didion arrives at different conclusions. Practicing their own brand of oppositional agency and postmodern historiographic mapping, the women characters in Didion's novels A Book of Common Prayer, Salvador, and Democracy often opt to extricate themselves from narrative altogether, embracing instead postmodern indeterminacy. In concluding my analysis, I urge further exploration of postmodern women cartographers who practice perhaps the only truly postmodern dialectic of mapping, one that keeps the cultural dominant from becoming a new form of cultural domination.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Rowe, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|Womens studies

COinS