Altered states: Authors, subjects, and sovereignty in postwar American fiction

Altered States examines how Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, and Kathy Acker redefine the intents and purposes of realism for the post-World War II American novel. These writers form part of a postwar literary and critical movement to revalue romanticism, a turn which some critics have characterized as a retreat into individualism and away from dissent or political engagement. I argue instead that this turn enables these writers to dismantle the conventional exemplarity of the novel's subject without abandoning the genre's tie to social commitment. Their alternative narrative mode mounts a collective assault on traditional realism and on its compromised subject, who is either rendered helpless or made overpowering, exerting a totalizing normative force. The alternative realism I outline is based on Thomas De Quincey's romantic-era model of "impassioned prose."; Chapter One shows how, between his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and its sequel, Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey assails his own representative subjectivity as he hones his theory of a "literature of power," creating a legitimate model of literary subjectivity that models freedom without abdicating it. Three major components of De Quincey's theory and practice of impassioned prose guide my three chapters on postwar American fiction: the authorial position he assumes; his evolving literary subjectivity; and the way in which his receding sympathetic subject corresponds to the impassioning of his prose.; In Chapter Two, I show how O'Connor and Vonnegut work against conventional realist narratives and sympathetic reading habits, exposing the pitfalls of an ostensibly moral faith in progress. They analyze authorial control while assaulting its cornerstone techniques of courting sympathy and offering redemption. Chapter Three examines Gibson's fiction as a test of whether the literary subject can be successfully reinvented and re-empowered without abandoning the familiar and popular plot-driven narrative form. Chapter Four shows how Burroughs's and Acker's more overtly political novels re-imagine both the exemplarity of the literary subject and the voice of the literary text, blending De Quincey's literary theory with Georges Bataille's theory of sovereign art.