The dilemma of postmodern American fiction: An examination of the works of Tom Wolfe, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Toni Morrison

I am interested in examining the following problems: the relationship of postmodern art and theory to consumer culture and the claims made by postmodernists that theirs is a more progressive and egalitarian aesthetic and social practice than modernism, which is sullied by its deep connection to Enlightenment theory. Practitioners of postmodernism accept culture as the dominant sphere in which art and reception flourish and often eschew a deeper analysis of the relationship between culture and the political economy from which it springs, favoring instead Baudrillardian analyses of consumption and production.;But postmodern theories of culture have failed to produce social justice. Modernism and Enlightenment theories of a just society are thus invigorated by new debates over the failure of postmodern theory to intervene in social life. The question still remains: What would a progressive, aesthetic production look like that was beholden to neither modernism nor postmodernism, but forged instead a new, ethical cultural practice? Although this work does not deal directly with Marx's texts, all of the essays that follow are informed by Marx's analysis of political economy as a necessary material condition for understanding human activity. The work of Jurgen Habermas, Peter Burger, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson are thus primary to my understanding of the relationship between culture, its aesthetic production and reception, and political economy. I take seriously Peter Burger's contention that what is needed now is an examination of individual works to locate a progressive aesthetic theory.;In Chapter One, I lay out the contours of the recent debate using Habermas. Burger, and Jameson as a way to work through the relationship between modernism, postmodernism, commodity culture, and Enlightenment theories of progress. In Chapter Two, I critique From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe's attack on modernist architecture. In Chapter Three, I examine the work of Gilbert Sorrentino as an example of a new aesthetic practice that rejects both postmodernism's retreat into solipsistic ecriture and modernism's academic elitism. Finally, in Chapter Four, I examine Toni Morrison's Beloved as an example of a new ethical form that reconstitutes the historical horizon in its examination of slavery.