Figures of totalization: Paranoia, metafiction and cultural struggle in the United States, 1954 to 1974

The dissertation argues that metafiction's address to certain apparently ultimate questions of language and identity was in fact a response to the many-sided cultural transformation of the period. The ascendancy of the large organization was provoking new conceptions of individuality; the expansion of higher education was revamping the forms of cultural capital; and the civil rights movement was inspiring diverse critiques of existing social institutions. The distinctive gestures of Sixties metafiction took shape in response to these developments.;In the United States after WW II, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow and others presented metafiction as a new literature for a new society. These writers regularly sought to explode or undermine the conventions of authoritative discourse, emphasizing the idea that meaning is contextually determined, relative and unstable--an argument which generated narrative problems for the new writing to solve. Many writers chose to represent these narrative problems in terms of paranoia and schizophrenia, figures which suggested that the break with convention had left the contemporary writer in an untenable position. With these cultural tropes, metafictionists fashioned themselves a dilemma: either impose an illusory coherence upon experience, or meaning (and personal identity) will vanish.;My work undertakes a critical, historical revaluation of metafiction's subversive posture. The most influential accounts of metafiction continue to operate largely within the vocabulary and assumptions proffered by the metafictionists. Against this procedure, I argue that metafiction's elaboration of its characteristic dilemma helped articulate the common sense of an emergent social group.