Narrative situations: The aestheticization of discourse in postmodern American fiction

In this dissertation I argue that much recent fiction reflects significant modifications in the deployment of conventional narrative devices such as plot and character, and that these modifications can be read in terms of a heightened emphasis on narratorial discourse in postmodern literature. In the opening chapter, I employ Fredric Jameson's Marxist reading of postmodern culture to situate the "discursive turn" of the postmodern novel in terms of the cultural logic of the contemporary moment. Moreover, I argue that many contemporary novels reflect what Jameson terms an "aestheticizing strategy" (Political Unconscious 230), in which the discursive level of the narrative text has become autonomous and "rewrites" other levels of the narrative representation in its own terms. In my second chapter, after noting that the employment of narrators who are also characters in the stories they tell is a dominant narrative technique in the fiction of the late 1940s and early 1950s, I argue that the intrusive narrators of more recent fictions by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and John Barth can be traced to the popularity of these earlier "first person" narrators. Employing the narratological categories proposed by Gerard Genette and Gerald Prince, I argue that while in early postwar fiction narratorial references to the place, time and process of narrating contributes to the production of psychological realism, the essayistic and digressive intrusiveness of narrators in more recent fiction functions to undermine conventional realism. In my third chapter, I analyze the relation between discursivity and postmodern plot in more detail; in particular, I note that while typical features of plot, such as causal and temporal connections between events and traditional forms of closure, are waning, the form of the contemporary novel is becoming increasingly "spatialized." These modifications in conventional narrative plot I link to Jameson's characterization of postmodern cultural production as "schizophrenic" (Postmodernism 26). In my fourth chapter, I argue that discursive models have superseded traditional psychological models of the subject, such that the latter is conceptualized as a function of language; this shift from conventional psychological models to a grammatical model is reflected in experimentation with narrative distance and mood in much recent fiction. In my discussion of the modifications in plotting and representations of the subject in postmodern fiction, I focus on texts by a number of authors, including John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity's Rainbow is discussed at length throughout.; Keywords. Postmodernism; Postwar fiction; Narrative voice; Thomas Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow.