This thesis studies the visual aesthetics of the twentieth-century American writer John Updike's short fiction. Exploring the related issues of form and vision, temporality and visuality, the thesis seeks to combine two analyses: a study of visuality in the short fiction of Updike, and a re-consideration of the short story as a genre. I shall argue that the two levels of analysis are interrelated, for it is at the point of the epistemological uncertainty in the act of ‘seeing’ that Updike offers something unusual to the short story form; it is also around this stubborn issue of the relationship between vision and knowledge that contemporary short story criticism seems to fall short. The thesis unfolds first with a negotiation for an understanding of the short story’s special narrative space and then with a formalist analysis of Updike’s short fiction and its respective involvement with three visual media: painting, photography and cinema. Exploring the complex interrelationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ through the lens of Updike’s visually rich texts, the thesis aims to come to a better knowledge of vision and form in the short story.

This study explores the literary representation of Palestine by Jewish American and Arab novelists within the emergent geopolitics of settler colonialism, thus challenging the notion that Palestine presents a unique situation that largely defies comparative approaches. It illustrates how postcolonial theory proves necessary but insufficient to engage the cultural and political specificities of the Palestinian situation, both as fictional representation and as otherwise knowable history. Here, recent developments in theorising settler colonialism provide a useful starting point. Drawing on the work of Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, with its revisionary challenge to postcolonial theory in relation to the need to distinguish between settler colonialism and metropole colonialism, this thesis argues that the case of Palestine problematizes the settler colonial paradigm. Overlaps and entanglements between the supposedly distinct forms of colonialism on the ground complicate the discreteness of the settler model. Hence, the focus on Jewish-American novel serves to suggest that the Zionist settler enterprise is inseparable from American imperialism, and therefore challenges conceptualizations of a purely settler phenomenon in Palestine. The study draws together New Historicism and postcolonialism, suggesting that engagement with the intersection of these two approaches is both valid and timely. The New Historicist return to history proves central to appraisal of the forms of power that continue to condition the authority accorded to a particular version of events, and to the evaluation of the writer’s responsibility to reality as well as the measure of truth embedded even in most fictionalized versions of history. Accordingly, the structure of the thesis identifies key historical moments in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, juxtaposing Jewish-American renditions of the Zionist settler project with Arab counter-narratives. The emphasis in the thesis on historicising rhetorical appropriations and restoring a Palestinian version of events challenges the perception transfer of settler narratives, which, to the privilege of settlers’ self-origination, has long relegated Palestinian people, land, and narratives to the peripheries of history and postcolonial debates. The first three chapters focus on three signal events: the 1948 nakba, the 1967 war, and the 1980s uprising. The first chapter compares and contrasts two versions of the 1948 events as represented in Leon Uris’s The Haj (1984) and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (1998; trans. 2005). Drawing on the revisionary work of the Israeli new historians, together with Palestinian commentators, the chapter explores the 1948 Palestinian exodus in terms of settlers’ violence and logic of elimination, which Uris’s narrative conceals behind a Western civilizational discourse. Against Uris’s legitimation of the master Zionist narrative, Khoury’s novel suggests an instance of ‘writing back,’ narrating the unspoken and replacing the monologism of the official line with the multiplicity of oral history. The second chapter extends this cross-cultural research to the 1967 war, suggesting the centrality of this event to paradigmatic shifts in Palestinian historical experience and self-representation as well as in the Jewish American writer’s relation to the state of Israel. Literary representations of 1967 Palestine, including Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (2000), Halim Barakat’s Six Days (1961; trans. 1990) and Days of Dust (1969; trans. 1986), Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns (1976; trans. 2003), and Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), articulate liminality, ambivalence, and the enabling of new possibilities and fresh perspectives. Each of these writers reveals a shared concern for the politics of the local in order to escape the burdens of diasporic existence, attempting to redefine what seems to be a borderless and geographically vague existence. While post-1967 narratives affirm the rise of a new focus for Palestinian writers, the third chapter shows how the greater visibility of Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1980s uprising finds literary form in US fiction. Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) illustrates the cultural limits that restrict a dialogic engagement with the emerging heteroglossia in US media following the appearance of a Palestinian voice and an anti-Zionist stance. However, this failed dialogism reveals how silence and dissimulation become forms of expression, unveiling the dynamics that manipulate the space permitted for Palestinians in Jewish American fiction. Recovering Palestinian literature from the margins of postcolonial studies, the final chapter charts ways of representing Palestinian (post)coloniality by drawing on the temporal and spatial specifications conceptualised in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2011) reinvent the traditions of walking and returning, previously manipulated in Zionist settler narratives, in order to articulate a political protest against settler colonialism and assert the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ claim to the land. Although focusing on the Palestinian case, this study seeks to open up the postcolonial to the historical and rhetorical specificities of the literature emerging from contemporary settler colonial situations, and the possible enactment of postcolonial passages in not-yet-postcolonial contexts.

The dissertation presents an analysis of the construction of sexual difference in selected works of postmodern American fiction. The concept of postmodernism is used here to connote those texts which articulate a dialectic between the aesthetics of modernism and that of American consumer culture. The writers who are the subject of the thesis, striving to create a language which both represents and questions the formation of subjectivity in this culture, have produced new, stylized forms of realism. Each writer explores the tension within postmodern culture between· homogenization and the creation of the possibility of the expression of differences, and foregrounds the construction of sexual identity as the point at which this conflict is most radically staged. War - primarily the Second World War and the war in vietnam - is frequently the reference point for an exploration of the destabilization and reconstitution of sexual identity. The introductory chapter considers the inflections of the concepts of postmodernism and sexual difference in critical debates from the 1950s through the 1980s, with specific reference to the shifts charted by the works of Thomas Pynchon. In the next three chapters an analysis is made of Pynchon's extensive exploration, articulated along a trajectory from a self-conscious experimentalism to a new form of realism, of the fantasies of sexual identity which underpin contemporary American discourses of power. Particular attention is paid to his representation of the repetition of certain configurations of masculinity and femininity through the aesthetics of the fin de siecle Decadence, Modernism, Fascism and consumer culture. These configurations are also identified in the works of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason and Jayne Anne Phillips, whose writing is examined in the remaining three chapters as being representative of a new school of realist writing which 'emerged in the States in the 1980s. The project of postmodernist writers is assessed through an analysis of the way in which the stylistic concerns of these writers are bound to an exploration of gender in consumer culture.

This thesis addresses the formal narrative strategies of two American authors, David Foster Wallace and Mark Z Danielewski, in terms of their relationship to postmodernism. Wallace's novel Infinite Jest (1996) and Danielewski's debut House of Leaves (2000) are substantial works, with an encyclopedic employment of large amounts of information (Wallace's novel fW1S to around 1,100 pages, while Dani()1ewski's is a little over 700 pages) and complex structuring principles. These .Jwo novels also represent the most explicit and lengthy programmatic dialogue with postmodernism that these writers have produced. The only manner in which to engage in serious and close critical detail with this element of Danielewski's and Wallace's formal strategies is to study these works in close and lengthy detail. Therefore, Infinite Jest and House of Leaves are the basis of this study, with references made to other works by Wallace and Danielewski where appropriate. It is the contention of this study that, while it has been critically posited that Infinite Jest occupies a position that is interrogative of the tenets of postmodernism, no critic has yet outlined in extensive detail Wallace's crucial employment of specifically formal narrative strategies to dramatise this interrogation. Furthermore, critical positions on House of Leaves are only just beginning to consider that the novel might adopt an combative position towards postmodem tropes. This study suggests the essential importance of reading Danielewski's novel as a post-postmodern text by outlining how, through its formal narrative strategies, the novel dramatises and interrogates its own roots within postmodernism. "Form" in this study is taken to mean both the pervasive employment of particular spatial, temporal and paratextual tropes to construct a narrative with a particular "shape", as well as an interaction and hybridisation with other, non-literary forms. The critical analysis within this study reveals the remarkable similarity of the formal narrative strategies ofthe two writers, with both Wallace and Danielewski employing a number of formal structuring principles that underpin the spatiotemporal form of their works, principles that draw from (among other areas) mathematics, poststructuralism and cultural theory in order to enact an interrogation of postmodern tropes. This study also suggests that the formal employment of cinematic terminology, theory and technique within both Infinite Jest and House of Leaves is substantial and fundamental to the post-postmodern position of both works.

This thesis reads the representations of black masculinity in three contemporary American novels, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003) and Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), and demonstrates that all three, in their different ways, connect black manhood with the traumatic history of slavery. Male identities threatened and problematised by slavery are, the thesis suggests, inherited by modern African–American culture. Considering the ways in which these identities resurface in these contemporary novels thus offers insight into the ways in which black masculinity, while apparently condemned to recycle the paradigms of the past, can be seen to re-make and redefine them. In its analysis of Henry Townsend in The Known World, a figure who follows the established discourses of white power, the suggestion is that even as he enacts these ideological forces he simultaneously undermines them through his rejection of hierarchical definitions based on the laws of property ownership. The desire to become a slaveholder and be accepted by upper-class white society is an attempt to constitute his manhood according to the legal framework underlying the institution of slavery. Even as he does this, however, Henry cannot entirely leave his past behind and he finds himself torn between white southern definitions of masculinity and those associated with his slave past. Similar tensions can be seen in the hustler manhood of Moses Washington in The Chaneysville Incident. While attempting to resist the power structures through his criminal activities, he finds himself imitating the agrarian capitalistic principles underlying the practice of slavery. Like Henry, Moses perpetuates the discourses of slavery, embracing the power structures that created slavery as a paradigm on which to model his masculinity. The hypothesis is that both Henry’s and Moses’ expressions of masculinity are actually following definitions of manhood inherited from both the discourses of white power and the Africanised self-definitions of African-Americans evolving since slavery, and, therefore, cannot be viewed as alternative masculinities for African–American culture. In contrast to this reading of Henry and Moses, the thesis goes on to suggest that the figure of Mutt in Corregidora can be regarded as an attempt to delineate a paradigm of masculinity that breaks more effectively with the past. Instead of imitating abusive models of manhood, the novel ultimately resists such violence and rejects processes of emasculation. This thesis, therefore, offers an insight into how the historical emasculation of African–Americans has shaped and is still shaping definitions of black identity.

This thesis consists of two related parts, which together present fictional narrative as a response to the terror of death. It begins with 'The First Thing that Happens', a critical reading of two novels each from authors William Maxwell ('They Came Like Swallows', 1937; 'So Long, See You Tomorrow', 1980) and Per Petterson ('In the Wake', 2007; 'I Curse the River of Time', 2010). The protagonists of these novels are examined in relation both to the existential and psychoanalytic concerns of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (and their later development in Terror Management Theory), and the distinctive psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Becker's concepts of the "immortality project", the "vital lie of character", and "heroic status", together with Abraham and Torok's concepts of "introjection", "incorporation", and "unspeakable grief', reveal the largely covert and culturally embedded mechanisms of defence by which Maxwell and Petterson's characters sustain death-defying illusions. This first part of the thesis concludes by noting the binary function of narrative generation as both a confrontation with mortality and evidence of the subject's death-defying will. There then follows 'The Next Thing that Happens', a work of fiction that narrates a response to death terror through the story of its central character whose encounters with mortality have been radically constitutive of his identity.

This thesis focuses on the US literary left of the 1930s, tracing precursors in pre-WWI anarchism and the bohemian culture of 1920s Greenwich Village, and following the careers of key authors, beyond the Depression, into popular and mainstream culture post-WWII. The free verse of Michael Gold, the ‘proletarian’ novels and short fiction of Robert Cantwell, Tillie Olsen and Erskine Caldwell are read as instances of a kind of modernism from below. As such, they are held up for consideration alongside the more politically conservative modernisms of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence, as well as the work of two writers also on the left but more securely situated in the official canon: Ralph Ellison and George Oppen. The emphasis throughout is on form, understood as fluid and subject to self-conscious experimentation: the politics of the works considered are in this sense embodied in the transformation of pre-existing forms and structures. For this reason a multidisciplinary approach is adopted, with attention being paid to contemporaneous production (with some overlap of personnel) in music and visual culture. There are considerable difficulties involved in the attempt to harness the techniques of ‘high’ cultural thinking to the needs of an organised left with close links to the labour movement: problems of intention; matters of tone; issues of distribution. These difficulties are worked through in order to answer two fundamental questions. First, how did this historical project, riven by contradiction from the outset, manage to achieve even the limited success that it did? Second, why should a place be maintained in contemporary criticism for its recovery? Ultimately, an argument is made for an inclusive critical practice sensitive to the traces of exclusion and absence as figured in the non-representational, whilst at the same time resisting the temptations of obscurantism, superficiality or idealization.

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This thesis will explore how the American writer Thomas Pynchon creates a functioning, working theological model for the “preterite” communities and spaces with three of his novels: Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland and Against the Day. Building on John McClure’s postsecular reading of Pynchon in Partial Faiths and religious readings of the texts by Dwight Eddins and Kathryn Hume, this thesis expands on the themes and theories presented in these critical works. In this thesis I posit that the theological material of Pynchon is largely underrepresented in Pynchon criticism, and what work there is does not engage with Pynchon as a complete religious writer. Through a socio-historical perspective, this work endeavours to express how important religious modes are to a variety of topics in the corpus, from politics, to history and Pynchon’s engagement with power structures and oppression. In exploring how religions inter-relate with both each other and more secular concerns, I analyse how Pynchon, across these three texts, fashions a dialogue of resistance that endorses the importance of spirituality. I build on McClure’s theories of a “partial” conversion narrative within the texts, and take this further to express a total commitment to spiritual systems that effects Pynchon’s wider concerns with resistance, liberation and transcendent spaces and possibilities. This thesis explores Pynchon’s valorisation of pluralism and a heterodox approach to religious consumption, but also how he critiques it, creating a double quality that constantly shifts and morphs the spiritual discourse of the text. I argue that Pynchon’s ‘serious’ take on the spiritual dimensions within these novels shows him building a complex ethical and social system around preterition and resistance, and that resistance within the text is reliant on such spiritual discourse. Through this reading, this thesis posits that Pynchon’s spiritual framework cannot be considered as a mere aspect of his work, but core to a plethora of his social and political concerns.

The work of William Gibson has had a profound influence over the way that technology is viewed in modern society, but since the mid-1980s criticism of his work has been largely based on Cyberpunk manifestos and interpretations of the genre in which his career began. His first novel Neuromancer (1984) has been critically regarded as the pinnacle of his career due, in part, to his later works not evoking the same resonance with the thematic discourses of Cyberpunk. The themes of the Cyberpunk genre have been used to interpret Gibson's subsequent output, despite the novels' movement away from Cyberpunk motifs such as implanted technology and futuristic urban landscapes. The insights into his early works revealed by the changes in his narrative style and content have remained unstudied due to the dominant influence of the Cyberpunk discourses over approaches to Gibson's texts. This thesis examines the entirety of Gibson's fiction output to assess the relevance of a Cyberpunk-based approach to his later works, focussing primarily on his novels and the processes applied by other critics to their study. It uncovers new overarching motifs in his work that are used to reinterpret Neuromancer in a way that unites it thematically with his later texts. This thesis argues that his novels consistently address three main issues: these are the use of technology as a metaphor for the unconscious mind, change being a signifier of authenticity, and his association of information with the nature of God. It is these motifs that define Gibson's construction of narrative and identity. Their study reveals that his work consistently relies on introducing aspects of the unknown into technologically controlled environments. This thesis presents an approach to Gibson's work that reassesses core assumptions previously used in the study of this influential modern author.