Postmodern pirates: Metaphoric experiments in the novels of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker

The main thesis is that the often-noted resistance to interpretation by the experimental novels of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker has to do with the radical functioning of metaphor in the texts. These are metaphoric narratives that employ strategies of piracy to eschew narrative closure. In the first chapter, I link the sub-genre of metaphoric fiction to the Romance tradition in American literature, and I discuss contemporary debates about metaphor and narrative. My starting point for thinking about experimental fiction in the ensuing chapters is to be Donald Davidson's post-structuralist notion of metaphor, with its explicit rejection of the reigning cognitivist model. The second chapter, drawing on further theoretical materials, places Donald Barthelme's novels in the literary contexts of modernism and postmodernism, as represented respectively by Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. Moreover, through textual interpretation, I show that Barthelme's work is best understood in the light of Borges', metaphoric labyrinth. The third chapter examines the novels of Thomas Pynchon, on the basis of my extended development of the concept of "piracy." I propose that this particular term will shed light on the nature of the intertexts created by all three experimental writers. In the fourth chapter, on the work of Kathy Acker, I take a close look at one particular strategy of piracy: literary plagiarism. I conclude my argument by situating the metaphoric narrative in relation to what I see as the two main competing paradigms of postmodernist fiction.