| This dissertation considers the implications of a global, postmodern culture on the contemporary fiction of both Ireland and Italy and seeks to newly engage two seemingly disparate national literatures in dialogue with one another. While both cultures do share a similar religious background, I argue that comparisons between Irish and Italian contemporary literature instead arise from the pressures of a worldview based upon hyper-globalization and changing social norms. In reinterpreting Yeats's question, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?," I argue that values of wholeness and unity previously found in a modernist discourse are in themselves no longer valid points of argument, and that Yeats's poetry itself demonstrates the symptomatic nature of this perspective; instead, one must now consider the fragments of narration, narrative, and narrative discourse found in 21st century literature in order to create new forms of identification.;Furthermore, I seek to provide a more thorough understanding of contemporary literary criticism in this dissertation with respect to the Irish and Italian literature published right before and soon after the turn of the millennium. In doing so, I show that there is a difference in the way that postmodern literature has been understood and/or appropriated by the two national discourses. While Italian postmodern literature demonstrates a generally linear progression of development beginning with Pirandello and continuing through both Pulp and "Cannibali" literary styles in order to arrive at a contemporary global/postmodern discourse which reflects technology, music, consumerism and fragmentation, Irish contemporary literature lacks such a linear tradition of postmodern discourse; this could be attributed, as I argue, to a resistance to deep literary change, as well as to the "weight of tradition" as theorized by such scholars as Joe Cleary.;Topics of examination concern postmodern representations of technology, media, alienation, fragmentation, and communicative control in the works of writers such as Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Barry McCrea and Patrick McCabe (Irish) and Niccolo Ammaniti, Aldo Nove and Rossana Campo (Italian). Critical analysis focuses upon Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, which provides the most relevant postmodern analysis of the ways in which literature and society respond to the contemporary global worldview. |
