The discourse surrounding the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, the unknowable, and the unimaginable. Over the last seventy years the Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a rupture, or void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible tongue, beyond art, and beyond thought. In fact, though the terminology differs, it has consistently been rendered as Other. Thus it seems peculiar that very few studies have been conducted on Holocaust literature which is non-mimetic in nature; that is, the impulse of literature which is not concerned with mimicking reality but which routinely engages the Other, the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. Certainly there is no shortage of primary material. This thesis will establish a foundation for future discussion of the non-mimetic and the Holocaust, surveying a wide range of common themes and approaches to the genocide in Anglo-American fiction. By analysing this fiction, this thesis aims to examine contemporary relationships and attitudes to the Holocaust, revealing how the writers (and perhaps their societies) comprehend the incomprehensible, and in what ways Holocaust memory has changed and is changing, particularly in the modern era. The texts in this thesis are drawn from a wide range of authors and hierarchies within the literary sphere, as such in order to impose a structure of sometimes disparate narratives, I have proposed several themes. A number of theoretical readings have been consolidated into the thesis from mainstream Holocaust studies, trauma studies, science fiction studies, and more; with some texts receiving their first in depth critical analysis. Ultimately, this thesis aims to prove that non-mimetic fiction can relativise the traumatic occurrences without normalising them. Thus, though a vastly understudied body of work in this context, non-mimetic fiction is in fact a crucial component in our understanding our relationship to the Holocaust, and perhaps to traumatic events more generally.

This thesis is a reading of five Don DeLillo novels in relation to the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, beginning with Falling Man, and working backwards to The Names. It is an attempt to think about the philosophical aspects of DeLillo's work; in particular, the various ways in which it is engaged with the possibility of metaphysics and its relation to the ordinary. It examines the ambiguous status of metaphysics, and the nature of transcendence and the ordinary in his fiction, arguing that they form a dialectical relation, which guides, structures and informs many of the pressing spiritual, existential, aesthetic, ontological and epistemological concerns of his writing. This dialectic is illuminated by a parallel dialectic at work in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Wittgenstein's thought is useful for a number of reasons: it is a method or style of seeing rather than a systematic, substantive theory; though critical of metaphysics it is profoundly engaged with the inescapability of the metaphysical impulse, and the way metaphysical problems seem embedded in everyday language; and it is committed to the ordinary, but not in any reductive sense – it is not a defence of common sense or conventional beliefs. Understanding DeLillo's engagement with metaphysics as part of a dialectic with the ordinary, and viewing it through an encounter with Wittgenstein, will prevent recourse to traditionalist conceptions of language and meaning while at the same time resisting and critiquing the postmodern scepticism frequently invoked in DeLillo criticism. The thesis consists of a series of comparative readings that aim to further our understanding of DeLillo's novels and Wittgenstein's philosophy; readings centred around a set of closely related concerns that reflect different aspects of the dialectic between the ordinary and the transcendent: the paradox of the ordinary; the limits of language; looking at the overlooked; spiritual yearning; and the logical sublime.

This thesis explores the idea of queer witnessing as a form of multisensory embodied remembering. It suggests that the political potential of theories of performativity, where bodies and spaces are opened up to change through repetition, needs to be rethought through the notion of witnessing. Rather than assuming repetition means change, performativity is unpacked in order to stress which components are necessary for change to become imaginable and possible, and which reinforce the status quo. Bringing together Judith Butler's work on bodily performativity and Romi Bhabha's on postcolonial performativity, this project draws out the centrality of witnessing to the possibility of narrating past violence and to the instantiation of alternative forms of embodiment and belonging. Unlike the emphasis on the individual in trauma theory, the selected novels draw out the importance of witnessing as a communal act of infinite responsibility. The ethics that emerges from these texts is situated in the opacity of the narrative form and, thus, in the impossibility of a definitive story. It is through an encounter with epistemic limits that history is reformulated as an ethical mode of inter subjective storytelling. Each chapter focuses on the particular historical contexts of the selected novelsthe Caribbean in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), Morocco in Tahar Ben Jelloun's L 'Enfant de sable (1985) [The Sand Child] and La Nuit sacree (1987) [The Sacred Night], and the East coast of Canada in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees (1996) - in order to suggest that the potentiality of bearing witness is deeply intertwined with the specificities of colonial and familial violence. The narration of these histories becomes possible through an undoing of the self in relation to the other, where the boundary between self and other is conceived of as precarious and vulnerable. The possibility of hearing an other's story is not only the ability to understand referential language but also a willingness to communicate with the body through touch, smells and sounds. In sum, this thesis argues that the possibility of non-violent encounters and narrating unspeakable histories is situated in the ethics that emerges at the juncture of communal narration and bodily vulnerability.

In this thesis, I examine representations of tourism and terrorism in three post-9/11 American novels: Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I read the novels from a postcolonial American Studies theoretical perspective, and argue that tourism is an allegory for intercultural exchange between a transnational culture related to America and three terrains stereotypically a,ssociated with terrorism: Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The arguments I make about the texts' representations of tourism and terrorism are directed towards a discussion of the significance of literary aesthetics in the post-9f11 context including formal structure, narrative voices, framing devices, language, metaphor, and allegory. I argue, first, that the representations of tourism are informed by and reproduce American liberal anxieties about terrorism and the various cultural, military and geopolitical phenomena generated by 9f11; and, second, that these liberal anxieties are inextricably bound up with concerns about neoliberalism and America's role . within global capitalist culture. Chapter One introduces the key components of my project; situates my work within the growing body of postcolonial American Studies interdisciplinary work on post-9/11 literature; and discusses the texts as transnational, hybrid entities that are, nevertheless, centrally concerned with American issues. Chapter Two examines Hosseini's The Kite Runner as a melodrama that privileges neoliberalism as a form of morality. Chapter Three argues that Abu-Jaber's Crescent is a confused American text that attempts to destabilise stereotypes about Iraq and Arabic culture, but remains invested in those same stereotypes at the formal level. Chapter Four argues that Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist self-consciously mobilises a series of conflicting allegories as a way of problematising its own representations; I argue that its formal manipulation is the repository of its most significant commentary on post-9/11 culture.

H. P. Lovecraft is a seminal writer in twentieth-century American gothic, and among the many authors influenced by his work is Stephen King, the best- . known contemporary horror novelist. Between them, these two figures define modern American gothic horror fiction and they have one obvious common trait: they are both influenced by similar geographical roots and make the notion of place an integral PaIt of their writing. As New England is their native region, their works often focus on its landscapes and specificities. Its comparative antiquity and initial centrality to America, as well as its climate and topography, predispose New England to literary gothicising. In fiction of the gothic genre the past tends to encroach on the present, and in harking back to the country's history, Lovecraft's and King's fiction connects to wider American societal anxieties. Both authors synthesise their lived - often regional - experience of place with gothicised notions of setting to create their own fictional topographies through which they engage with wider American gothic tropes. I select and examine four of the most illustrative topographies both authors use to achieve this in their work: first, the wilderness and related notions of America as virgin soil; second, the small town - a particular favourite of both Lovecraft and King - as an ostensibly idyllic setting harbouring decay and corruption; third, the subterranean and the submarine, drawing the reader's attention to what is under the surface; and last, the threshold and its connotations of the liminal and transgression. Comparative analyses of Lovecraft's and King's work are rare, and virtually no in-depth study has been undeltaken with specific reference to their construction of gothic settings. This is surprising in the face of the spatial turn in modern scholarship. I address this neglected aspect of gothic criticism in my thesis and show how Lovecraft's and King's gothic topographies lend themselves to engaging with American concerns and anxieties, such as crises of identity and authenticity, feelings of guilt, and the fear of transgression.

This thesis addresses postmodern nostalgia in the fictions of JG. Ballard and Douglas Coupland. By reading them alongside the work of Svetlana Baym, Fredric Jameson, Waiter Benjamin and Linda Hutcheon among others, it firstly builds upon and questions Baym's categories of restorative and reflective nostalgia. By taking two authors whose work chronologically straddles the postmodern moment to date, the thesis also demonstrates that nostalgia is one issue over which any consideration of postmodernism as a monadic cultural paradigm can be problematised. It proceeds from the supposition that early postmodern fiction is decidedly antinostalgic in tone, whereas recent examples are characterised by a less militant perspective. By placing the authors' texts in dialogue with each other, the piece emphasises nostalgia's ineradicability and its hidden role in anti -nostalgic agendas. To support these claims, the thesis argues that nostalgia is not an indivisible phenomenon. Alighting on and defined by objects which can be set against each other, nostalgia is often pitted against itself in other forms, presupposing a multitude of mutually hostile nostalgias. The nostalgic objects on which the thesis focuses are: colonialism, the North American frontier, the Suburbs, nostalgic consumer objects and Apocalypse. These have been selected over other foci because they are the most pervasive themes in the work of both authors. Colonialism and the North American frontier are exceptions as they are rarely directly pitted against each another in the authors' work. However, they both serve to ground the nostalgic perspectives of both writers, and as such are addressed separately in chapters devoted to a single author. The concluding chapter focuses on the role postmodern irony plays in Ballard and Coupland's work. Explicitly combating nostalgia, irony is exposed as an integral component of any contemporary nostalgic narrative, potentially refining it in the service of a more circumspect contemporary nostalgic.

‘[T]he language of self': Strategies of Subjectivity in the Novels of Don DeLillo' explores the manner in which both self and society are constructed in the writer's longer fiction. Divided into two sections, the first, entitled Dasein, examines the way in which the language of self forms a Mobius strip comprised of two opposing yet omnipresent urges: that of connection and isolation. Coining the term enunciation, the thesis describes the manner in which each character's subjectivity is an historically contingent attempt at negotiating this tension between isolation and connection, self and other. The second section of the thesis, entitled 'das Man', then proceeds to explore the impact of this language of self within a wider social context, examining the manner in which it interacts with other linguistic and quasi-linguistic binaries – such as language, image, capital, waste, power and terror – likewise characterised as adopting the form of a Mobius strip. Through such a methodology, the second section of the thesis is thus able to explore the interaction and shared genesis of public and private conceptions of subjectivity, illustrating how it is this same tension between connection and isolation which governs the form that social interactions and institutions adopt in the novels of Don DeLillo.

The novel that forms the heart of this thesis, The Family Wound, is based on the tragic life of my aunt Mai Thuy Phan. The main character struggles to find her identity in a world torn apart by war and loss. In essence, the novel is a Vietnamese saga. Mai is caught between personal family obligations and the general historical conflicts of the Vietnamese war. The central theme of the novel is the conflict between a predestined fate and the human desire to forge one's own path in life. Even though Mai's story takes place in the late twentieth century, she has much in common with older, traditional Vietnamese ways and women. It does not matter how hard Mai fights against the odds, she cannot break free from the cycle of her lot in life. She has been victimized by war and bounded by the harsh cultures and traditions which have oppressed Vietnamese women for centuries. The novel not only dramatises the main protagonist's experiences and perceptions of Vietnam, but also illuminates Vietnamese life and social structures. Following the novel is a commentary setting out the historical and personal circumstances of the author. This is done in part to draw out the linkages between the author and the novel's heroine, and between the novel and other Vietnamese writings. In turn this helps explain the larger significance of the novel's title. While the image of 'family' wound initially refers to the way in which Mai's family is harmed by the events of war and separation, its more symbolic meaning has to do with the wound inflicted upon the human family by the barbarous actions of all involved in the Vietnamese conflict. Underlying the novel is a sense of the need to bring peoples together to heal such wounds. The novel closes with Mai becoming a Buddhist nun: her journey is one of the spirit, not of the flesh.

This thesis brings together the two genres for which Nin has become so (in)famous: her autobiography and her erotica in what I have termed 'auto/erotica'. By reading her autobiography and her erotica in and against each other I attempt to explore her development of a feminine aesthetic, or 'womb writing' as a strategy of resistance with which to challenge dominant discourses of 'woman' and the 'feminine', and her exclusion from cultural production. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, this thesis explores the role of the border in the cultural production of bodies and sexual difference within Western discourses of sexuality, with particular reference to the discourses of psychoanalysis, modernism and pornography/erotica. My focus is on the trope of the borderline within Nin's texts, which, I argue is less a marker of radical difference than a site of instability offering the possibility of 'other' or 'between' spaces of resistance. This study engages with the politics of gender and genre by drawing on various feminist rewritings of autobiographical theory and Jacques Derrida's 'The Law of Genre' and the Ear of the Other in order to explore the tension between the 'auto' (the selfsame) and the 'graphy' in the formation of the 'bio' and gender identity. I explore how the threat of the other within the selfsame, the tracing of the differance of desire, affects the generic self-identity of 'autobiography' and 'erotica' as representations of (sexual) identity. Nin utilises the radical instability of the autobiographical genre to put into question the 'genre' of gender identity, the gendering of genre and the undecidable border between the 'body' and the 'text', the 'life' and the 'work'. Drawing on various psychoanalytical feminist film theories of the female spectator and the masquerade I explore how Nin performs the 'feminine' or 'woman' of (male) Surrealist and mainstream heterosexual pornography/erotica in order to emphasise the gaps, to hold at a distance, the female from the feminine. The concern of this thesis is the 'ob/scene' margins of 'erotica' and the trace of 'otherness' that threatens the single and self-identical body/text. The 'outworks' or prefaces of Nin's work not only disrupt fixed generic boundaries but also echo the desiring subject's fantasy of gender identity, wholeness and unity. By drawing attention to the role of vision in the constitution of gendered subjectivity and the (re)production of the phallus as the primary signifier of desire, I explore how Nin's erotica undermines a position of phallic certainty by drawing attention to the out-of-sight spaces, of 'ob/scene' pleasures that disturb and disrupt the illusion of 'masculine' phallic mastery. I argue that it is in the 'inter view', this dialogue or movement between (at least) two genres - autobiography and erotica - that other possible representations might be glimpsed.

Throughout this thesis I attempted to examine the various ways in which 'new media' writing found on blogs and the internet have added functions to their (internet-based) forms, and then discover if it would be possible for the print novel to assimilate those same techniques. The novel that came from the conclusion of these findings, entitled Hereditation, is an epic saga that spans the course of over five hundred years, and features a number of techniques and formatting that are either directly adapted from, or are closely related to, similar techniques that might be found in prose on the internet. The Critical Commentary covers my attempts to decipher the various components of online fiction, and then looks at the ways that these components can be implemented into printed fiction (with special reference to the aforementioned novel). The Commentary also includes a number of 'Blog Entries', far more personal insights into the process than most, as well as presenting an appendix that encompasses a history of the use of the internet as a means for presenting fiction. The thesis attempts to ask whether it is possible to use the information gleamed from the internet as a way of enhancing print fiction, both without resorting to genre fiction stereotypes (such as writing a Science Fiction novel to shoehorn in techniques) and without sacrificing the traditional flow and format of print fiction itself.