| This study of modern and contemporary literature examines death as a structural device for narrative voice and perspective. The focus is on the fiction of Nadine Gordimer, John Hawkes, and Maurice Blanchot, with attention to the acts of literary production, reception, and interpretation against an event of death in the text. In determining the limits of actual and fictional mortality in language, each writer contests the veracity of representation itself. Each relies on a presence of death as the metaphor for a narrative impulse, as each also disavows the force of that presence in a discourse of fiction.; The writers discussed here all challenge personal annihilation with the immortality of writing. Chapter One, "Death and Literature," will set forth the theoretical premise of a postmortem narrative in modernist texts by Rousseau, Proust, Mann, Woolf, and Zweig. The one speaking in these texts acknowledges death's inevitability and, in the act of writing, defers the end indefinitely. Beyond death, the narrative chronicles the anterior fact of the text's construction.; Subsequent chapters, beginning with, "Situation and Perspective," will each be devoted to focused discussions of the selected texts of Gordimer, Hawkes, and Blanchot, in order to determine the different gradations of a postmortem text. From South Africa, Gordimer's fiction argues for the end of apartheid, a political structure that systematically propagates death. In America, Hawkes's fiction writes of the dying consciousness struggling against death's imminence, as it reevaluates conventional modes of literary representation. Out of France, Blanchot's fiction asks, who receives the speech of the dead? In his work, the voice speaking of death goes on and on against the void, as it challenges the absolute silence of death.; In the concluding remarks, I will reconsider the dying in the narratives of Gordimer, the dead in Hawkes, and the already dead in Blanchot, and indicate how a successive reading of these texts results in a postmortem narrative. |
