Posthistory: Negating and negotiating representations of history
Abstract
This dissertation breaks new ground in the debates surrounding contemporary theories of "the end of history." I survey and critique the contemporary theories of posthistory advanced by Lutz Niethammer, David Bennett, Frederic Jameson, Francis Fukuyama, and Gianni Vattimo. I offer instead a theory of posthistory that foregrounds discursive practices that undermine notions of authorship and identity, employ bricolage to collapse time, space, and hierarchy, and assert that the past is not something we discover as much as it is a signifying formation we construct retroactively, a botched product of memory and desire. While "history" provides a form of sadistic pleasure dependent on control, "posthistory" ultimately endorses a form of ironic masochism brought about by our submission and passivity. I seek not only to explore the diffusion and reconfiguration of identities encouraged by posthistory, but to identify and critique the signifying formations that enable and result from those reconstructions. My questions are not, "Is history obsolete?" or "What is the most productive or emancipatory conception of history?" but instead, "In what ways do desire and ideology structure a specific conception of history?" or "In what ways are desire, identity, and enjoyment sewn together in posthistory, this new form of historical representation?" What follows my opening chapter on historiography is a series of readings exploring various forms of posthistory. Chapter two explores Vizenor's Heirs of Columbus which seeks to (de)construct identity and the conceptual systems that govern these identities. Chapter three focuses on Art Spiegelman's Maus. Spiegelman conceptualizes history as bricolage while simultaneously imposing an Oedipal scenario upon it. Chapter four reads The Handmaid's Tale as a historical compilation of fragments from the past rather than a dystopia or prophecy about the future. Chapter five investigates Barton Fink, a film that seeks to contest and parody the desire for closure in historical narratives and invokes and identifies the masochistic pleasure that comes from looking at a painful past. Chapter six concludes my project by examining posthistory's potential for cultural intervention and evaluation.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
O'Donnell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Literature|History|American literature|Canadian literature|Motion Pictures
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