Subversive discourses in selected writings of Nathanael West, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Edward Albee

This dissertation is an examination of the way discourse operates subversively in selected texts of Modern American literature: Miss Lonelyhearts, The Glass Menagerie, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, andWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf; for a British perspective on the American workplace, I examine subversive discourse in The Loved One. In each text, the dominant ideologies of mid-twentieth century America---white, male, capitalist, and Christian---are shown to create a workplace environment that signals the exclusion of disaffected and marginal individuals and their discursive associations while simultaneously reaffirming beliefs in socio-economic progress and equal opportunities for success. Drawing off concepts of "subversion" as set forth in various postmodern critical discourses, particularly gender and cultural theory, my approach will reconsider these canonical texts, authors, and figures in light of subversion as a focus of ideological and cultural critique. Foucault's concept of power, especially with regard to surveillance in an organizational environment, and Bakhtin's concept of carnival are used in this analysis to understand the tensions between discourse and counter-discourse in the workplace; by extension, the same concepts generalize to the home setting, where domestic dramas concomitantly play out.; An important focus of this dissertation is the centrality of failure, what it means to be an unsuccessful breadwinner or frustrated homemaker. The working men of these texts are depicted as being unable or unwilling to produce or perform and have become the focus of workplace and community scrutiny. How others cope with the presence of a failure in their midst is a key consideration. The subversive nature of these texts' discursive engagement with these, and related, issues reveals a series of cultural critiques that demonstrate the damaging effect of the dominant occupational ideology's insistence on gender bifurcation and the rigid hierarchies of masculinist capitalist environments.