Parody as cultural criticism in the postmodern American novel: Donald Barthelme, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Thomas Pynchon

I am especially interested in exploring how parody serves the satirical impulse operating in the works of these three authors.; According to Linda Hutcheon, parody and satire can be distinguished on the basis of their aim; the target of parody is the aesthetic world, whereas the target of satire is the social world. Such a schema fails to account, however, for the way postmodern novelists incorporate fragments of contemporary society in their work. It also fails to account for the perverse energy pulsating through these texts, an energy born of the interanimations between a number of contradictory conditions and impulses, one of which is the contradiction between the world and the text. It is as if the world itself is an enormous text from which these novelists crib their best material, however much they intend their writing to inhabit a pure, fictional space, a world apart, a world of art.; I have chosen these novelists because, as Regis Durand says with reference to Barthelme, each "captures and presents obliquely aspects of dots the cultural unconscious of America," that is, they provide insight into the forces operating in language and society. To be more specific, each of these novelists offers fruitful ground in which to explore the ideas of social and literary theorists whose work is relevant to the study of parody as cultural criticism. I have found particular support for my view of parody in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of parody does not signal a dead end to the novel, but on the contrary, is essential to its continuing growth because it "inserts dots an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)."; The introductory chapter presents the theoretical issues on parody, cultural criticism, and postmodernism which frame my study. Each of the three following chapters focuses on a particular author and examines his work chronologically. The concluding chapter is a preliminary exploration of some questions concerning women and parody, which arose in the course of this study.