| This dissertation examines the troublesome generic status of the postmodern text and the implication for literary authority. Such texts, I argue, tend to break down the traditionally assumed boundaries between literature and criticism, boundaries which render criticism secondary to fiction and so protect the authority of the literary text. The collapsing of generic boundaries links the concerns of postmodern American fiction to poststructuralist theory, a link writers like Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth are anxious to break.;Given that that authority is not absolute, that it is produced by reading, my intention is not to establish a more "correct" reading of these texts than the authors or their critics provide. Instead, I study the ways that their authority is made to seem absolute and the motives behind such ruses. The issue that concerns me in this dissertation is not to what extent the critic is successful in recapitulating textual authority, but what motivates that activity in the first place. Too often, what motivates is not so much a concern for liberation from the repressive fictions of the culture, but a desire to bury the disruptive in the service of an essentially repressive ideology.;These two writers, whose works are frequently held up as examples of postmodernism, devote at least one volume of non-fiction to marking off the boundaries between literature and criticism in order to protect their own claims to authority. In my introduction, and more extensively in individual chapters on each author, I try to establish the similarities between poststructuralist theories and these writers' metafictional texts in order to examine the sources of those claims to authority. Each writer, concerned about the status of literature in contemporary culture, relies upon the metaliterary to establish the "proper" reading of the individual text and of literature in general. However, it is precisely the metafictional elements of the two texts I study, Pale Fire and Lost in the Funhouse, which undermine the possibility of any absolute authority. |
