The intention of my thesis is to examine the ways in which the concept of tragedy in postmodern American fiction has been rewritten and, further, to establish whether 'tragedy', as we normally understand the literary genre, is possible in a postmodern age. I will demonstrate that tragedy has not completely vanished but has been rewritten. To this end my research will encompass a variety of narrative developments in American fiction that illustrate specific uses of tragedy, and yet, in their varying application of literary forms and the approaches to philosophical, theological and ideological concepts, face the tragic consequences of human history. My thesis will examine some of the various types of literary writing from the late 1960s through to the 1990s. The texts on which I will concentrate are Kurt Vonnegut's, Slaughterhouse-Five, E.L. Doctorow's, The Rook of Daniel and Billy Bathgate, Cynthia Ozick's, 'The Shawl' and Rosa, and Tim O'Brien's Northern Lights and The Things They Carried. These novels encompass various 'tragic' experiences, which, I will argue, do fall within the specific criteria of 'tragedy', or at the very least, are a set of occurrences that can be perceived as 'tragic'. The novels deal with significant historical events such that they may be seen to determine individual characters' lives. The themes that I have chosen cover the survival of the central character or characters and the specific effects on those individuals within an arguably tragic set of circumstances. As a result, I will refer to my own interpretation of 'postmodern tragedy' in the context of other various definitions of tragedy which have been recognised in the past, and provide an overview of the subject matter. These include the Dresden bombing in Slaughterhouse-Five, incorporated within a science fiction form; the survival by various means of a boy who becomes a part of the criminal underworld of the 1930s in Billy Bathgate; the effects on the fictional Isaacson children whose parents are executed as spies during the American Cold War in The Rook (d' Daniel; the Holocaust in the Second World War and its horrendous after-effects in 'The Shawl' and Rosa; the battle for survival of two brothers in Northern Lights, one of whom is profoundly affected by the psychological impact of the Vietnam War; and lastly, a focus on the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried. The thesis begins with an introduction to some of the concepts of tragedy and the varied implications and difficulties that arise in defining what a 'tragedy' is, and what is perceived to be 'tragic'. The problems of providing a definition in the realms of the postmodem narrative may be seen to centre on the fact that tragedy can refer to works of art, real-life events and world views, or even structures of feeling. In all of my selected novels it should be noted that none of the central characters reach the point of an untimely end; the various endings in themselves are often inconclusive. However, I will reveal that all of my chosen novels illustrate my interpretation of postmodem tragedy. My research focuses on the differing ways of seeing tragedy at work in each of the novels; as well as the specific difficulties in representing various historical subjects, such as the atrocities of war. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that the concept of tragedy has been rewritten in a postmodem age and has taken on a new meaning in relation to the role of the survivor.

This thesis focuses on the culture and literature of Cold War America and seeks to challenge accepted notions and assumptions about this era and its culture, pointing ultimately to the possibilities for transgression or escape from enforced homogeneity. Using feminist theories, urban theory, and a cultural materialist approach, this thesis employs the work of Judith Butler (1993, 1999), Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 1995, 2001, 2008) and Beatriz Colomina (1992, 2004), and draws on the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, to undertake an examination of subjectivity and its relation to built and landscape environments of the Cold War, enabling an investigation that includes literary texts and criticism, visual and media culture, and cultural, architectural and technological discourses. This study of identity examines the way in which bodies react to and are shaped by their surroundings engaging with sights (Disneyland, The Monsanto House of the Future & the Playboy Mansion), places (New York City, Southern American states and suburbia) texts, and objects (television & cook books). Racial, sexual and youth identities are examined in chapter one, through the street spaces of Ralph Ellisonʼs Invisible Man (1952), the works of the Beats, Hubert Selby Jrʼs Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), and Salingerʼs The Catcher in the Rye (1951) illustrating how street identities manage to complicate the purported containment of the era, and blurring the distinction between public display and private spectacle where transgressive personae can find authenticity of selfhood from within their urban location. Chapter two considers suburban gender identities and their manufactured proscription through architecture and technology as presented in Richard Yatesʼ Revolutionary Road (1961), John Cheeverʼs short stories, Vladimir Nabakovʼs Lolita (1958), John Updikeʼs Rabbit, Run (1960) and Sloan Wilsonʼs The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), each examined in order to question containment, surveillance and gender proscription in this space. Finally, I examine the tensions between traditionally conformist selves and racial and sexual Others in the landscapes of Southern states, in the works of Tennessee Williamsʼ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Flannery OʼConnorʼs Wise Blood (1952). Using imagined spaces and landscapes this section considers a different form of spatially-determined identity, identity formed in an essentially hyperreal space – and exposes the contradictions of conformity and transgression. This thesisʼ original contribution to knowledge is based in the application of a theoretical feminist framework to established Cold War cultural criticism. In bridging the gap between existing theories of feminist corporeality and cultural criticism, my work will extend and challenge accepted notions of Fifties conformity and homogeneity in new and dynamic ways.

This thesis is a study of the white male anti-hero in post-World War II United States fiction. It is my intention to analyse the manners in which surrounding sociocultural systems are integral to both the construction of deviance and social responses to it. Varying attitudes towards the deviant during this period were shaped by a wide variety of factors, such as the increasing assimilation of psychoanalysis into popular consciousness, the Sexual Revolution and counter-culture of the 1960s, the rapid rise of consumerism and mass culture and the growth of sociology and criminology as diagnostic tools in managing deviance during these years. This will frequently involve a heavy emphasis on the pertinence of these issues to post-World War II concepts of masculinity, as the rise of second-wave feminism opened up the interrogation of gender roles and their accompanying pressures and privileges. I will also examine the presence of deviance as a matter of narrative form in the work of authors such as William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the relationship between the formal experimentation of artistic movements and the response to the relevant facets of post- World War II society contained within them. I argue that deviance in the post-World War II United States novel is most commonly represented as both a reaction to and an extension of sociocultural formations, which the figure of the anti-hero simultaneously embodies and repudiates. It is my intention to examine nine texts from this period, and to analyse the manners in which deviance is represented within the context of post-war United States culture, drawing upon a variety of contextual and theoretical approaches as appropriate. I hope to move towards establishing a shared basis between these nine novels, which differ widely in terms of context, concerns and narrative form, in terms of their treatment of deviance.

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The postreligious space of Douglas Coupland's fiction provides the backdrop for a disenchanted consumer collective nursed on advertising slogans rather than Sunday school parables. This thesis seeks to examine the ways in which Coupland resacralizes the currently secular concepts of epiphany and apocalypse in order to reinvest the lives of his suburbanite protagonists with a sense of wonder and the desire for transcendence. Coupland's fictional subjects represent a collection of fragmented subcultures that are dissatisfied with the bypassing of the "real" for a diet of shiny, happy, yet artificial, products. As their only collective reference points are media generated, the television and mall have become sanctuaries that inscribe a virtual grand narrative that provide little in the way of religious support. The subjects of Coupland's fiction move beyond what Jameson describes as the "waning of affect" in a depthless, zombie culture as they shun irony, cynicism and passivity to experience what Coupland deems "moments of transcendence and epiphany". This thesis also seeks to place Coupland in context alongside five other postmodern authors in order to contrast Coupland's subjects' desire for reenchantment with the often apathetic, "blank" inhabits of the depthless spiritual landscapes of fiction by Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Don Delillo, Martin Amis and Chuck Palahniuk. The thesis is divided into two sections: epiphany and apocalypse, with three chapters in each section. The first chapter focuses on how the epiphany's metaphysical and ideological presuppositions are problematic for postmodern fiction. Both the Christian and the modernist epiphany are largely absent in postmodern fiction, yet Coupland frequently uses the epiphany, investing it with ideas from both traditions, yet rewriting it for a postmodern context. The second chapter is the discussion of three quasi-initiation stories, Ellis's Less Than Zero, McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Coupland's Shampoo Planet. This serves as a contrast between Coupland's use of epiphany as postreligious sacred experience, McInerney's problematic attempts to place an epiphany in a postmodern context, and the complete absence of epiphany in Ellis's work. Chapter Three is a discussion of the progression from momentary, singular epiphanies in Coupland's Generation X to the extended epiphany, or conversion narratives, of Life After God and Hey Nostradamus! This chapter also investigates Coupland's problematic relationship with postmodem "knee jerk" irony and how it must diminish if the epiphany is to manifest itself in the lives of his protagonists. Chapter Four offers a discussion of the postmodem concept of apocalypse as nihilistic end-time fear, with a specific focus on Don Delillo's White Noise, contrasting it with the Judeo-Biblical notion of apocalypse as a redemptive, hopeful structure that reveals truth and unlocks transcendence. Chapter Five discusses. Coupland's engagement with both ideas of apocalypse, but emphasizes his privileging of the supernatural, purposeful nature of the cleansing Judeo-Christian visions of apocalypse. This chapter explores the saviour/destroyer technology of Coupland's Microserfis and the futuristic apocalyptic visions of Eleanor Rigby. The last chapter is a discussion of Martin Amis's London Fields, Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor and Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma. All three apocalyptic novels have a female prophetess that predicts the doom, destruction and apathy of the future, yet Girýfriend in a Coma is the only narrative to envision a surpassing of the "filture" for a glimpse of "eternity" itself, invested with hope and redemption.

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For many years the novels of Robert Kroetsch have been canonized as paradigmatic Canadian postmodern and postcolonial texts. This thesis argues that Kroetsch’s texts are antimodernist works which reveal his reaction against modernity. This thesis explores each of Kroetsch’s novels in chronological order, from the unpublished text When Sick for Home to his most recent novel The Man from the Creeks, arguing that Kroetsch’s novels should be viewed as texts that demonstrate his antipathy towards modernity, which is manifested in Kroetsch’s nostalgic idealization of the imagined organic wholeness of a world existing prior to modernization. Throughout this thesis I discuss the parallels between the writings of Robert Kroetsch and Marshall McLuhan, emphasizing the antimodernism that underpins their works. I argue that their antimodernism signals their participation in a tradition of the critique of modernity. By foregrounding the idea of the modernist critique of modernity, which comprises an important element of artistic modernism, I question the privileging of the qualifier “post-” in constructions of the Canadian postmodern canon. In foregrounding the antimodernism evident throughout Robert Kroetsch’s fiction, I interrogate the construction of Canadian postmodernism in his own works and those of other Canadian critics including Linda Hutcheon. Through my analysis of the recurring motifs of the wilderness and the rural environment in Kroetsch’s work, I locate his fiction within Western antimodernist tradition, interrogating cultural nationalist constructions of Canadian postmodernism as an autochthonous phenomenon.

This dissertation analyses the protagonists in The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin, and looks at the extent to which they confront the Jungian archetype of the anima. I demonstrate that individuation and wisdom are not achieved in these characters until they confront the anima archetype within their individual psyches. I analyse the experiences and behaviour of each protagonist in order to identify anima confrontation (or lack thereof), and I seek to prove that such confrontation precipitates maturity and wisdom, which are goals of the hero's journey. The essential qualities of the anima archetype are wisdom, beauty and love. These qualities require acceptance of vulnerability. I argue that the protagonist is far from anima integration when he displays hatred and fear of vulnerability, and conclude that each protagonist is integrated with the anima when wisdom, beauty and love are evident in his character. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This dissertation analyses the protagonists in The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin, and looks at the extent to which they confront the Jungian archetype of the anima. I demonstrate that individuation and wisdom are not achieved in these characters until they confront the anima archetype within their individual psyches. I analyse the experiences and behaviour of each protagonist in order to identify anima confrontation (or lack thereof), and I seek to prove that such confrontation precipitates maturity and wisdom, which are goals of the hero's journey. The essential qualities of the anima archetype are wisdom, beauty and love. These qualities require acceptance of vulnerability. I argue that the protagonist is far from anima integration when he displays hatred and fear of vulnerability, and conclude that each protagonist is integrated with the anima when wisdom, beauty and love are evident in his character. / English Studies / M.A. (English)