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What happens when fiction is considered as a space for art, and when art is considered as a space for fiction? This thesis addresses these questions through a practice-led study of the fictional writings of Don DeLillo. DeLillo has been publishing novels since 1971, each of which have engaged with aspects of art production and art criticism. The formal implications of this have played a polarising role in the criticism that has gathered around his work, with some critics reading DeLillo's fictional artworks as evidence of a highly post-modem and plural production, whilst others have seen these works as more modernist reflections on the writing process. In this thesis propose that by reading DeLillo's writing through the art-historical oeuvre of Thomas Crow, and his notion of the 'advanced-artwork', that a new model of practice can be defined, where writing becomes the site for the production of visual art, and visual art becomes the site for writing. The 'advanced-artwork', according to Crow is formed by multiple practices that operate within a single work, and incorporates elements of critical thought within its physical production - qualities in DeLillo's fiction that have energised his critics, but have yet to be analysed using an analogous model from another field. After a review of the aspects of DeLillo criticism that that set the ground for these questions, and a parallel review of Crow's art-historical writings, I address the potential for synthesising these areas on two fronts. Firstly, by a detailed study of DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra, reading it through art-theory and proposing that the novel fulfils many of the criteria of the advanced-artwork, as well as showing how this reading allows many of the problematic questions in existing DeLillo criticism to be addressed. My second means of approaching Libra in these terms is the practical component of my thesis. This takes the form of a vi sual artwork made up of wri ting, produced in response to an archive ofDeLillo's drafts and working papers. Using a manual typewriter, like DeLillo himself, I reproduce successive drafts of sections of the novel that are conceptually related to the questions that in the rest of the thesis I have addressed in theoretical terms. In using this dual method of questioning of art's potential relationship to writing, I have attempted to use the work of a single author to reflect on the possibilities of writing as a medium for contemporary art-practice, and the potential of art to become a site of literary criticism. But by grounding my critique of DeLillo's fiction in the raw materials of the medium I have also attempted to question the space of the page in wider terms, as an expansive site of inter-disciplinary practice that allows its component parts to be set in critical discourse.

I read Neal Town Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle to interrogate what types of links they make to US countercultural writing, postmodern discourse in American culture, and perceived uninterrogated links to the term America itself in images of modern progressive liberalism. Postmodernist readings of literary texts came under increasing public scrutiny in intellectual debates of the 80s and 90s. My analysis is to situate and reconsider these fictions within debates happening in the North American academy at this time and the more recent one concerning the demise of poststructuralism in the humanities. Linking together works of Sean McCann, Michael Szalay, John Guillory and Mark McGurl I locate Cryptonomicon as constitutive of the postwar drift from the modernist aesthetic yet simultaneously developing within Sacvan Bercovitch’s model of dissensus. Through reference to McGurl’s work in particular, my thesis will offer the first sustained critical reading of Cryptonomicon relevant to the University’s new teaching standards of diversity and research excellence. Through Lauren Berlant’s concept of an intimate public I argue The Baroque Cycle develops a richly aesthetic form of criticism that challenges the consensus view of culturally affirming alternatives to American sociopolitical and economic life. In addition, each chapter charts specific aspects of the impact of European critical theories that presided over the marriage of intellectualism and professionalism in the North American academy. More specifically, and throwing particular focus on resistances to theory and canon change, I discuss how the politics of the classroom developed within the literary culture wars brought with it a renewed emphasis on what postwar professors taught in the classroom.

This study draws on poststructuralist narratology in order to examine a trilogy of novels by the Italian-Canadian author Nino Ricci, in the context of diaspora and multilingualism in general, and Italian-Canadian writing more specifically. The novels by Nino Ricci, Lives of the Saints (1990), In a Glass House (1993) and Where She Has Gone (1997), which were translated from English into Italian by Gabriella Iacobucci in 2004, narrate the personal experience of an Italian family before and after they emigrate to Canada and are characterised by the use of codeswitching (the passage from English to Standard Italian dialect and vice versa).

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This thesis examines the evolving intellectual agenda of Richard Brautigan throughout his artistic career, and through his engagement with the contemporary counterculture, towards a rationalisation of the very mechanisms of consciousness and awareness. His analysis of social precepts, the concept of moment within models of history and time, and the processes of concurrent perception encapsulate the social struggle for self understanding and identity inherent within his cultural environment. At the centre of his literary technique lies a dichotomy in which his attempts to transcend the restrictive infrastructures of narrative codification are constrained by the capabilities of a readership that can only receive information transmitted in a conceivable manner - adherent to those same codes and signifiers that he wishes to deconstruct. The following work seeks to explore this dichotomy and to assess how successfully the author managed to mitigate it. Brautigan's relationship to both the Beats and the emergent counterculture is explored as the genesis of his intellectual dissatisfaction with existing concepts of meaning and truth. From his appropriation of postmodernist techniques is drawn a hypothesis that the author sought to present a model of consciousness that accurately depicts its pro active construction of signification from a chaotic and limitless source of stimuli. By subverting time and history to the microcosm of the moment, Brautigan illustrates the latent power of the single point of awareness in defining its own reality. Once this has been established, the subsequent chapters of this work seek to examine the aesthetic methods the author uses to articulate his thesis. His utilisation of genre is explored with specific reference to the theories of Northrop Frye, his use of comedic constructs is analysed in light of their Surrealist content, and his appropriation of Zen Buddhist principles is examined with particular attention paid to his use ofHaiku and the fusion of Haiku with postmodernism. Central to each of these approaches is an application of Jungian analysis to determine Brautigan's use and subversion of archetypal images. The author's idiosyncratic presentation of autobiographical data is then investigated to assess how successfully he manages to reconcile the process of consciousness, and its potential to liberate, with his own identity. Finally, his engagement with gender politics is examined to illustrate the limitations of his hypothesis and the point at which it fails to satisfactorily apply. The crux of Brautigan's aesthetic agenda is therefore defined herein as the diagnosis of perceptual methods intended to promote enhanced self awareness and a more complete state of informed consciousness. This thesis strives to first establish this hypothesis contextually within the author's work, then to examine the methods utilised by Brautigan to expound upon it, and finally to apply the hypothesis to instances of self-representation and sociological issues apparent within the texts to ascertain how sound an intellectual proposition it is.

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This thesis shows how Bowles's style and themes have developed from a number of sources, including Dada and Surrealism and Edgar Allan Poe, but moved beyond them to a writing which is unique and radical. The thesis traces the progress of Bowles's work from his examination of representative Western characters undergoing immensely testing journeys into their deepest selves, to his fascination with altered states of perception and Moroccan culture. It argues that Bowles has recognised a double division within humanity; from the natural world itself, and from a true and authentic relationship to our unconscious. As a result of this double division, the self and society which Bowles examines are distorted and corrupted. The thesis explores how Bowles has consistently worked to undermine the system of values and perceptions which permit such divisions to exist. In order to do this, he attacks the self, as the centre of our own importance within the world, and society, because it conditions us into an acceptance of values and ways of seeing life. Much of his fiction aims to disintegrate and destroy these two key areas in order that he might expose their failings and suggest alternative ways of existing. In particular, Bowles has grown more interested in preserving elements of Moroccan culture as remnants of a more open, less rational way of life. This thesis, therefore, examines the final balance between a destructive urge and a desparate need to preserve and learn from what remains when the distorted and corrupt has been stripped away.

Critical responses to John Irving's fiction have generally adhered to the well-rehearsed notion that there is an unbridgeable divide between certain literary forms and traditions. The oppositional thinking that has tended to dominate twentieth-century literary criticism has consequently produced a distorted and rigidly binaristic view of Irving, as either realist or postmodemist, populist or experimentalist. This thesis sets out to establish a more complex language or framework for discussing Irving's work, which, rather than erasing or ignoring those features that appear anomalous when placed within the narrow parameters of a single literary tradition, is more able to accommodate and analyze the tensions and contradictions that arise through the juxtaposition and interaction of multiple literary codes. In particular, this approach is designed to facilitate a more complex and fluid exploration of the deployment of metafictional strategies in Irving's novels, as I argue that his work demonstrates the acute interest in the issue of fictionality that is characteristic of metafictional writing, without either rupturing the reader/writer contract or rejecting the referential function of literary fiction. Irving's work thus both explores and reasserts the capacity of narrative fiction to convey different kinds of truth.