Timely meditations: Reclaiming the use-value of history in the postmodern novel

This dissertation questions the dominant critical assumption that the postmodern history novel continues to share a subversive ethos with poststructuralist historiography. Postmodern fiction has fundamentally changed since Thomas Pynchon challenged the authority of the established order of the sixties by subverting the truth-claims of "official" history. Since Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a wide variety of novelists have reaffirmed the use-value of history in the formation of individual, subcultural or national identity. This shift is first evident in subcultural identity politics in the seventies and continues in the context of multiculturalism in the eighties and nineties. Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin not only deconstruct Western history but reconstruct a tradition which provisionally centers subcultural historical experience. This study next explores fiction which interrogates the process of locating the "self" with reference to history. While early postmodernists ironize the individual subject's desire to "make sense" of the past, Bobbie Ann Mason and Don DeLillo legitimize this desire without sacrificing historical skepticism. Finally, I demonstrate how Whitney Otto and Steve Erickson incorporate the shift toward "micro-histories" in re-imagining the content, form and metaphysics of conventional national history.;By tracing an evolution from a poetics of deconstruction to a poetics of reconstruction, my dissertation does more than revise our understanding of the postmodern history novel. My study also offers a sustained critique of the tradition of modern historical skepticism, which forms the trajectory of historical thought from Nietzsche to poststructuralists like Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida. Beginning with Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History, the potential use-value of history has been largely ignored because the tradition has instead focused its energies on challenging the truth-claims of various reigning models of scientific historiography. Yet the very success of this skeptical enterprise has made it possible to go beyond poststructuralism's rhetoric of rupture to reconsider Nietzsche's suggestion that both critical and affirmative histories "are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture." I rehabilitate this function of history by developing a critical vocabulary which mediates between radical historical skepticism and the needs of history's "users.".