published_or_final_version / Transport Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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"Language as Disclosure in Five Modernist American Works" comprises a series of Heideggerian readings of James's The Turn of the Screw, Williams's In the American Grain, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Each text is taken as a single and separate performance of poetic language. The readings do not interpret or explain the texts but attempt to follow them in a thinking, to map what shows up and in what relations. The attempt is to get past the roadblock of "ambiguity" that characterizes modernist texts, not by deciding the undecidable but by exploring it. The dissertation explores the nature or function of language. In James literality works to indicate, to evoke, to found and maintain as well as to violate or subvert a human order. Language borders and opposes the abyss in the story, and it is at this border and in this conflict that reality originates. Williams too revises the notion of origin as he proposes a new "method" of "composition" whereby a poet in the act of asserting and proving himself sets forth not only his own potency but that of his ground, his locality, his period and his time. In the Faulkner story representative language has become disconnected from life, is irrelevant, ineffectual, dysfunctional. However, in spite of its explicit indictment of words, the work discloses a new ontology, a new standard of value, and an originary function for words. In the Hemingway story language or the work of art (the bullfight, here) is the site, the occasion, and the agency in and by which "facts," things that actually happen, rise into appearance upon the horizon of death. In these modernist works we find the function of language to be, in some sense, disclosure. With the Barth story we pass into a milder postmodern atmosphere, but we find the same antagonists, language and not-language. Ostensibly language is impotent; thematically the rational paradigm is overwhelmed by objectivity. I claim, however, that language diminished and exposed is still working by modernist standards to provoke into view the potentiality that representative language cannot express.

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This thesis examines the effects of television and entertainment culture on American fiction. Focusing primarily on the novels of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, with a secondary focus on the films of American film director David Lynch, the thesis proposes that post-postmodern fiction, fiction in which the familiarizing trends of postmodern fiction are reversed, is a response to the powerful influence of television and other forms of electronic media on American culture.

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This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker