This report offers analysis of two contemporary zombie apocalypse novels that imagine the future for the United States. By considering how Max Brooks’ World War Z and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One participate in critical conversations regarding postmodernity, this report reveals that these authors use the zombie apocalypse narrative to express concerns about social and cultural pathologies, as well as possibilities for utopian reform in the twenty-first century. By imagining the zombie horde as the radical other, the novels engage in discussions regarding racial and class inequalities in contemporary America. Ultimately, my analysis of these two texts reveals a disturbing tendency to imagine the zombie apocalypse as the solution to America’s persistent social and political dilemmas. / text

This dissertation examines the way in which contemporary fiction is highly concerned with sovereign power and the state of exception, as described by Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception. While in the last decade Agamben’s work has provided a new locus for the study of state power, I argue that disquiet over the reach of state power into everyday life has existed in fiction since at least the 1980s. Reading James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo and William Gibson alongside Agamben’s theories of state power and the state of exception sheds light on fictional representations of modern developments in power, the state and the corporate world. Through close analysis of philosophical and fictional texts, I draw out the complex politics of contemporary novelists and underscore the importance of both fictional and theoretical representations of contemporary political power. The dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter One examines what I contend is new about Agamben’s work on power which is that, unlike Foucault, he accounts for the kind of power that may produce a concentration camp, and examines the place of this power at the heart of contemporary politics. Through analyses of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale¬ I examine the ways in which Agamben’s theories move us towards a clearer understanding of representations of state power in contemporary fiction. In Chapter Two I discuss sovereign power in Rushdie’s postcolonial India and England, and I describe how the national identities of citizens of, or migrants to, those countries take shape in a society whose very fabric is affected by power that is frequently unrestricted by the law or by democracy. In Chapter Three I consider the “aftermath” of sovereign power in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro. In particular, I argue that he represents the extent to which sovereign power conditions culture and society, and how contemporary art and intellectual thought have failed as effective countermeasures to the power that may produce the state of exception. In the final Chapter, I consider the ways in which violence constitutes a form of resistance to sovereign power in the novels of William Gibson and Don DeLillo’s White Noise; further, I assess Gibson’s new narratives of space as potential counters to the state of exception. While Agamben’s work provides an opportunity to highlight the extent to which sovereign power and the state of exception are at work in contemporary novels, I contend that fiction represents these phenomena and their significance more completely than Agamben is able to. The use of figurative and experimental language and narrative techniques is highly effective in conveying the nuances and the experiential realities of state power, thereby moving the reader’s understanding beyond the abstract and the conceptual.

This dissertation examines the way in which contemporary fiction is highly concerned with sovereign power and the state of exception, as described by Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception. While in the last decade Agamben’s work has provided a new locus for the study of state power, I argue that disquiet over the reach of state power into everyday life has existed in fiction since at least the 1980s. Reading James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo and William Gibson alongside Agamben’s theories of state power and the state of exception sheds light on fictional representations of modern developments in power, the state and the corporate world. Through close analysis of philosophical and fictional texts, I draw out the complex politics of contemporary novelists and underscore the importance of both fictional and theoretical representations of contemporary political power. The dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter One examines what I contend is new about Agamben’s work on power which is that, unlike Foucault, he accounts for the kind of power that may produce a concentration camp, and examines the place of this power at the heart of contemporary politics. Through analyses of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale¬ I examine the ways in which Agamben’s theories move us towards a clearer understanding of representations of state power in contemporary fiction. In Chapter Two I discuss sovereign power in Rushdie’s postcolonial India and England, and I describe how the national identities of citizens of, or migrants to, those countries take shape in a society whose very fabric is affected by power that is frequently unrestricted by the law or by democracy. In Chapter Three I consider the “aftermath” of sovereign power in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro. In particular, I argue that he represents the extent to which sovereign power conditions culture and society, and how contemporary art and intellectual thought have failed as effective countermeasures to the power that may produce the state of exception. In the final Chapter, I consider the ways in which violence constitutes a form of resistance to sovereign power in the novels of William Gibson and Don DeLillo’s White Noise; further, I assess Gibson’s new narratives of space as potential counters to the state of exception. While Agamben’s work provides an opportunity to highlight the extent to which sovereign power and the state of exception are at work in contemporary novels, I contend that fiction represents these phenomena and their significance more completely than Agamben is able to. The use of figurative and experimental language and narrative techniques is highly effective in conveying the nuances and the experiential realities of state power, thereby moving the reader’s understanding beyond the abstract and the conceptual.

Following World War II the novel faced a crisis in its mode of address. How could the human and humane function of language and artistic representation be lent to the depiction of historical terror or trauma? Who has the right to speak on behalf of – or to assume the voice of – victims of such real atrocity? And to what extent can a writer attend to another's pain without aestheticising extreme vulnerability, or losing the reader to indifference or repulsion? The difficulties confronted by the writer of fictional works when addressing such issues as war, rape, domestic abuse, colonisation, slavery, even genocide are not rooted in an inadequacy of syntax; rather they are borne out of the disjunction between the idealistic assumptions that linked language to a sense of humanity, intelligence and the pursuit of goals beneficial to society as a whole, and the extremity of recent acts of human atrocity as conducted not by the savage Other but by modern societies with which the reader would otherwise identify. Since the mid-twentieth century a number of writers have responded to these challenges by forgoing the traditional dialogic form of the novel and electing characters that cannot or will not speak in order to convey, through their speechlessness and – at times – their damaged physicality, the extent of the violence and oppression to which they have been subjected, and the difficulty of assimilating such violence into the stories by which communities, indeed whole nations, define themselves. The unexpectedly large cast of mute characters suggests that silence has a vital role in the literary portrayal of historical trauma. The prevalence of silence in contemporary fiction related to the Holocaust, for example, shows how this group of writers recognises the extent to which this event tested and continues to test literary exploration. Writers the world over continue to refuse to ignore these subjects – indeed, the broken images and fragmented forms common to many of the novels studied in the following pages can be seen as an apt response to the chaos of war and human aggression – but, as is evident from the number of contemporary works of fiction incorporating a mute character, silence has become an accepted and effective tool for the portrayal of historical events of terror or trauma that continue to challenge the ethical boundaries of the imagination.

This MFA thesis, More Stories About Disappointment and TV, is a collection of short stories. I see them as being interconnected, if only in the loosest possible sense. I have certain ideas and themes that recur throughout my work, which I hope gives the stories a sense of cohesion without making the collection feel too monochromatic. The stories vary in narrative approach and point of view. My stories are character-driven literary fiction, to put it broadly, though they often incorporate characteristics of genre fiction. Some of them are more realistic than others, but they almost always have elements of the weird, the fabulist, and/or the absurd.

This thesis investigates the problem of historical representation in the context of the contemporary turns to trauma and memory visible in cultural theory and in wider popular culture and contemporaneous with post-Cold war ‘end of history’ discourse. Rather than apply the theories of trauma to readings of contemporary texts, the present study proposes that trauma theory be seen as part of the wider cultural tendency towards memorialization, characterized by a privileging of the notion of witnessing, an emphasis on the punctuality of the traumatic moment, and the fetishization of the historical trace. This thesis argues that what unites these various features of memorial culture is a notion of history that emphasises both the impossibility of comprehension and representation and yet a sense of proximity to a literal past through the traces that remain. If postmodernism designates a ‘crisis of historicity’ which delegitimizes the authority of representations of history, to think history through the prisms of memory and trauma reasserts a notion of historical truth, albeit relocated in the traumatic memory of the survivor, in the ethical imperative to bear witness, or in an aesthetics of the aporia. The parallel discourses of history as trauma and history as memory conflate the problems of historical representation with problems of historical witnessing, and in doing so conceptualize a notion of an historical event with no actor, proposing instead a passive subject without agency and thus without politics. The thesis is organized through close readings of four key texts, each of which can be read to be in dialogue with wider memorial culture, but which also problematize the orthodoxies of contemporary trauma theory in its application to the literary text—Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. Focusing on notions of witnessing, testimony, traumatic memory and the trace, and drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière, this thesis sets out to resist the theoretical creep that would see all history as trauma and all text as testimony, and instead reasserts the necessary role of fiction and the imagination in constructing a relationship to the past.

This thesis engages with what has become a ubiquitous term in masculinity studies: “crisis”. I argue that the invocation of “crisis” which implies catastrophe, disaster and trauma, and the favorable reception of this invocation both in academic and popular thinking about men, has resulted in a rush to defend and reauthorize aspects of the masculine ideal. The defense of traditional masculinity risks re-entangling men with masculinity and masculinity with patriarchy. The retying of these categorical knots challenges the deconstruction of gender that feminism and early men’s studies carried out in the second half of the twentieth century in the name of equal rights and in the name of freeing both men and women from having to conform to rigid gender stereotypes – particularly in the home. In recent work by J.M. Coetzee, John Banville and Ian McEwan the male protagonists are fathers who are forced to address a crisis of authority and legitimacy. In the first three chapters I argue that fatherhood in these novels is the site wherein the masculine ideal is least likely to be deconstructed and as such, it is in the context of the relationship between father and daughter that I argue heteromasculinity is most powerfully constructed, maintained and defended. In the fourth chapter I consider Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home which provides a queer take on male crisis and father-daughter relationships and which represents female masculinity as a counter to the pressure to reauthorize heteromasculinity for the next historical turn.

This thesis engages with what has become a ubiquitous term in masculinity studies: “crisis”. I argue that the invocation of “crisis” which implies catastrophe, disaster and trauma, and the favorable reception of this invocation both in academic and popular thinking about men, has resulted in a rush to defend and reauthorize aspects of the masculine ideal. The defense of traditional masculinity risks re-entangling men with masculinity and masculinity with patriarchy. The retying of these categorical knots challenges the deconstruction of gender that feminism and early men’s studies carried out in the second half of the twentieth century in the name of equal rights and in the name of freeing both men and women from having to conform to rigid gender stereotypes – particularly in the home. In recent work by J.M. Coetzee, John Banville and Ian McEwan the male protagonists are fathers who are forced to address a crisis of authority and legitimacy. In the first three chapters I argue that fatherhood in these novels is the site wherein the masculine ideal is least likely to be deconstructed and as such, it is in the context of the relationship between father and daughter that I argue heteromasculinity is most powerfully constructed, maintained and defended. In the fourth chapter I consider Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home which provides a queer take on male crisis and father-daughter relationships and which represents female masculinity as a counter to the pressure to reauthorize heteromasculinity for the next historical turn.

This study investigates the subject of illusionism in contemporary American fiction. A recurrent yet under-examined theme, the history of stage magic in the U.S. suggests how an earlier age domesticated the seeming sorcery of market capitalism, credit, limitless self-(re)making, and ethnic vanishing. Such conditions provide antecedents and analogues for the writing of fiction in a world of digitalized knowledge, work, identity, and financialization. Self-reflexively illusionist fiction today represents itself ambivalently as magical entertainment. Is its function to mesmerize audiences or alert them to ideological sleight-of-hand? If the enchantments of literary art screen the machinations of power, how do novelists preserve fiction's capacity to inspire wonder, affective experience, and ethical commitment? Chapter One argues that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian presents illusionism as integral to imperialism and commodification, as well as to its own artistry. McCarthy indicates the instrumentalization of aesthetics under late capitalism yet seeks through moments of enchantment to transcend it. Chapter Two shows that in Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien, fiction’s "magic" lies in transcending social differences and inspiring empathy, but that the historical residue of racism in American illusionism obstructs the effort to imagine otherness. Both novels reframe the worth of fiction as therapeutic. Chapter Three argues that the figure of Harry Houdini embodies literature's status as primarily entertainment, inspiring wonder rather than critique. Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay celebrates escapistry, but seeks through Houdini to restore a utopian dimension to entertainment. / 2017-11-04T00:00:00Z

This dissertation defines and analyzes the primary attributes of a new sub-genre of contemporary fiction: the Henry James novelization. Novels by Colm Tóibín, Cynthia Ozick and Alan Hollinghurst, among dozens of others, turn James into a fictional protagonist, while drawing upon his distinctive literary style, treatment of human psychology, and personal history. James as represented in these fictions is secretive, cripplingly self-aware and obsessed with others' opinions. Above all, he is preoccupied with controlling narratives. Because these works combine biographical and thematic approaches, the Jamesian author-protagonist displays aspects of James's own life, while sharing attributes of his own fictional creations. Thus a principal character type in these works is the addictive personality, as authors like Tóibín invoke the history of alcoholism in the James family, as well as the manipulative yet self-divided creations for which James was famous. The Introduction traces the literary representation of historical authors from the Greek epic through the postmodern novel and explains why Henry James is such an attractive subject for novelization. Chapter One discusses Colm Tóibín's The Master, which represents James gathering material for The Golden Bowl and other late novels. Both Tóibín's James and James's Maggie Verver display personalities that bear the imprint of family pathology, specifically, alcoholism and abuse, and both inhabit communities where moral culpability becomes difficult to assign. Chapter Two treats Cynthia Ozick's "Dictation," a novel about the composition of The Jolly Corner which portrays the Jamesian author as one among various technologies of writing. As James loses control over his narrative, The Jolly Corner becomes a trauma dream in which Spencer Brydon uncannily prefigures the alcoholic in recovery. In Chapter Three, Alan Hollinghurst replaces James with a flawed stand-in, shifting the focus to James's legacy and the state of humanities study today: Nick Guest is engaged in writing a dissertation on James and a screenplay adaptation of The Spoils of Poynton. At the end of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest has learned the lesson taught by all these novelizations: that James's texts remain deeply, urgently relevant.