Repetition in postmodern fiction: The works of Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme and Don DeLillo

This study examines the fictions of Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme and Don DeLillo in light of the body of creative and critical practices that have come to be known as "postmodernism." It is motivated by the assumption that any alleged radical break from a dominant cultural perspective in the fictional strategies of a "new" era necessarily involves some degree of reduplication. Thus, exploring what constitutes the postmodern self through fiction unavoidably involves considering the cultural politics of repetition.;This study contends that Acker, Barthelme and DeLillo realize that the seeming unity behind realistic fiction's depiction of the subject has always been a pose. Thus, they see the need to address the self and, almost simultaneously, to readdress it. The first address mimics the realistic novel's ploy of asserting an unequivocal self; the second re-images that self as a tenuous construct.;In sum, Acker's methodology calls for her narrators to attempt to embrace, critique, and then explode by excess the cultural roles allotted the female subject within a patriarchy. Barthelme attacks the integrity of the subject as formed within a patriarchal totality by exposing the hidden fragmented nature of the parts that compose that totality. And DeLillo attempts to unravel the syncretic narrative of social and technological progress underlying a postmodern capitalist totality by exposing how that totality actually denies the personal fulfillment that it contends to champion.