Tragic knowledge in postmodern novels (Philip Roth, Bernhard Schlink, Kazuo Ishiguro)

In this dissertation, I read postmodern novels through modern philosophies of tragedy. Skeptical thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Walter Benjamin recuperate tragedy's premodern logic to contrast it to the progressive narratives of the Enlightenment. Distrusting the power of knowledge, they advocate ancient tragedy as an aesthetic weapon against it. The novelists of the late twentieth century continue this tradition in fictional form, I argue, by representing plots and protagonists who are determined by events that precede them. Prolepsis functions in these novels to create histories that function as a secular version of fate. With this temporal inversion, they invite their readers to identify ambivalently with protagonists who have no hope of a happy ending. They elicit difficult sympathies that resemble tragic eleos and phobos, and they put those affects to similar purposes as ancient tragedy did: to do the cultural work of a polis whose limits are in flux. With the hypothesis that the novel functions for the global community as tragedy did for the ancient city-state, I read novels that include Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled , Phillip Roth's American Pastoral, and Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.