Iconology and Iconoclasm in Contemporary American Fiction: Pynchon, Coover, Nordan, Bender

In my dissertation, Iconology and Iconoclasm in Contemporary American Fiction: Pynchon, Coover, Nordan, Bender, I analyze how Lewis Nordan's and Aimee Bender's deformation and reformation of our culture's icons respond to their literary predecessors, postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover. The OED defines an icon as a "pictorial representation" that resembles, and is a "representative symbol" of what it represents. After a theoretical discussion that addresses a history of iconology, I divide icons into two categories: commercialized icons and communal icons. Commercialized icons have become commodified, co-opted into the market and implicated into monetary exchange. In this section, I analyze how Pynchon's, Nordan's, and Bender's protagonists covet icons because, to them, they are re-presentations of a fetish capable of replacing an absent or unknown patriarch. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas' patriarch manifests in the form of alternate histories to our nation's origin. Pynchon deforms her fetish of the Book and reforms it into Apocrypha. In Music of the Swamp, Nordan deforms Sugar Mecklin's fetish of music, magazines, and movie stars and reforms them into a biopic of his father's strange life. In An Invisible Sign of My Own, Bender deforms Mona Gray's fetish of numbers, such as the number seven, and reforms it into an axe, which is intended to be a sort of talisman to ward off Mona's father's mysterious illness, but by novel's end, her fetish turns against her. The last section discusses communal icons, which lend form to our Culture and Nation. In The Public Burning, Coover deforms the quintessential icon of Uncle Sam and reforms it into a critique of American hysteria during the Rosenbergs' trial and execution; in Wolf Whistle, Nordan deforms the historical account of Emmett Till's grisly murder and reforms it into Bobo, a resurrected entity whose song reconfigures racial hierarchies and race relations.