Speak it to pieces: (Post) modern allegory and the ends of the novel

In the modern period allegory replaces realism as the method of organizing narrative for those writers interested in innovating the novel form. The dissertation explores the crucial, but critically submerged, role of allegory in modern and postmodern American fiction. By allegory, I mean the disjunction between representation and reality, which is opposed to the traditional realist view of a unity between a representation and its referent. Modern allegory is characterized formally in the novel by fragmentation, repetition, and the abstraction of traditional plot forms into spatial patterns, especially collage montage. Although they are presented as self-referential, these figurative patterns nevertheless allude to other, unpresentable contents, as evidenced in close readings of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and John Hawkes' The Cannibal. Significantly, both novels feature the mother's body as an allegory of modernity.;Despite stylistic and thematic continuities in the modern allegorical tradition, there is a significant shift in the function of allegory at around mid-century. I pinpoint this pivotal shift in Jacques Lacan's critical revision of the Freudian universe in linguistic terms; and his redefinition of the unconscious as "the discourse of the Other," or literally, as allegory. I argue that when Lacan's own allegory transforms the embodied humanist subject into the abstracted subject of Structuralism, he makes allegory the properly scientific mode of self-representation for a constitutionally divided symbolic subject.;Lacan also makes allegory's identification with "femininity" explicit, revealing a fundamental relation between the structure of allegory and the construction of sexual difference that was suppressed in Modernism. Lacan redefines the religious motivation of allegorical desire in sexual terms, redirecting the aim of modern allegory; and simultaneously theorizes and initiates the allegorical impulse we recognize in Postmodernism. I delineate this post-Lacanian impulse in the postmodern novel through readings of the comic oedipal quest of Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father; and the different cataclysmic sexualities of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School.