published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Critics of the English novel, arguing that it is underpinned by liberalism, frequently claim that the crisis of realism disclosed in the work of many contemporary writers derives from a concomitant crisis of liberalism. Liberalism's dissolution is thus seen to prefigure the death of the novel. This dissertation contends that realism cannot be equated with liberalism and that the contemporary crisis of representation signals a broader crisis of metanarratives. / Focussing on selected novels of five post-war English novelists--B. S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson--I argue that their different responses to the crisis of representation show that it is not a crisis of liberalism alone. Johnson rejects realism for epistemological reasons; Lessing and Berger question it on political grounds; Murdoch and Wilson combine its strengths with a self-reflexive awareness of its weaknesses. I suggest that Murdoch's and Wilson's novels, which argue that fiction does not reflect reality but endows it with meaning and which are at once representational and metafictional, offer the most fruitful ways of acknowledging the crisis of representation while refusing to be paralyzed by it.

Adverse economic and social conditions during the 1930s prompted fears that Britain and its populace were becoming feminized. Mass unemployment, the collapse of the older forms of masculinist industry, and the sudden expansion of London's consumer culture were three major events that contributed to perceptions of declining masculinity and rampant feminization. Unemployment, it was feared, transformed muscular, self-reliant laborers into emasculate, dependent idlers. The demise of industry (coal mining, ship building, and iron/steel working) turned symbolic garrisons of imperial strength and power into derelict wastelands. London's consumerism in the form of cheap goods and escapist entertainment was thought to pacify and enfeeble the (male) inhabitants. These three pivotal events fueled apprehensions about the breakdown in traditional, patriarchal structures and heightened sensitivities to and furthered the use of masculine/feminine dichotomies within public discourse.The aim of my dissertation is to explore the ways in which complex networks of gender anxieties resonate in 1930s British fiction through the establishment and erosion of rhetorical gender/ed boundaries. Although fears regarding the political landscape, social unrest, and war were instrumental in shaping the literary responses of the decade, those fears were also informed by and articulated through a gender-conscious rhetoric. Emasculation imagery worked in concert with the complementary feminization imagery to capture the popular imagination. Apprehensions about women's potential to disrupt traditional boundaries (sexualized women, i.e. women taking men's jobs) merged with generalized fears of the feminine (constructed Woman, i.e. an undefined fear femaleness), and both were inscribed with the power to disrupt, threaten, and subsume. These "discourses of gender and gendered discourses," to adopt Lyn Pykett's phrase, played an integral part in shaping how the 1930s populace interpreted their rapidly changing world. By promoting gender to the center of my interpretive paradigm, I aim to identify how representations of the private realm interact with and contribute to the public/political narrative thrusts. / Department of English

This study proposes that modernity is constitutively based upon a synchronic temporality which perpetuates the present of the ego. Within this matrix, history is subject to the processes of subjectivization and the 'otherness' of the past disappears. Postmodernism, it is argued, designates the attempt to disinter a properly historical thinking, or historicity, from the recursive temporality of the modern. This attempt is predicated upon the retroactive temporality of the future perfect which, whilst also a synchrony, arises from a productive tension between the past, the present and the future. The self-divisive time of the future perfect expedites the discomfiture of the ego and its concomitant subjectivization of the past and, by so doing, registers the historicity of that past. The relation between the modern and the postmodern forms of temporality is expressed by the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and symbolic orders. It is argued, moreover, that this distinction is manifest in the narrative forms of the contemporary novel. Whilst the modern form of the contemporary novel replicates the structures of an egocentric repletion of synchrony, the postmodern novel displaces this imaginary problematic to the symbolic. By employing a variety of techniques founded upon retroactivity, postmodern novels are thereby shown to foster a disclosure of the structure of historicity. Within this rubric five novels are given extended consideration: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Banville's Doctor Copernicus.

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'The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001' explores the responses of postwar novelists to visual art by focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger and W.G. Sebald. In doing so, it opens up a new approach to understanding the relationship between fiction and art in the postwar period as a whole, for what distinguishes these writers is that they use an engagement with visual art in order to historicize their own work as distinctly 'postwar' fiction. This thesis shows that in the writings of these novelists, long running aesthetic issues in the study of the relationship between text and image are reformulated and transformed: medium specificity; ekphrasis; and visual representation as a model for literary realism. Drawing throughout on original archival research, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 traces what T.J. Clark terms the 'processes of conversion and relation' between art, its contexts and its commentators, and it is by studying these mediations that the literary consequences of the work of art for these writers are shown. With a historicizing approach throughout, and an interest in the ways in which postwar novelists mediate their engagement with art through history, this thesis contributes to a new understanding of the literature and art of the postwar era, or what Amy Hungerford has called 'the period formerly known as contemporary'. This thesis offers a revisionary account of a relationship previously subsumed under the dominant logic of postmodernism, which according to Fredric Jameson was defined by a 'waning of historicity'. In returning historicity as method and theme to the study of the relationship between literature and art since 1945, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 shows the diverse ways in which postwar writers historicized their writing, and reflected on their techniques, in dialogue with visual art. Concerning itself with the distinct challenges posed by focusing on what Hannah Ardent called the 'most recent' past, this thesis also develops new ways of thinking more broadly about the relationships between literature, art and history. Chapter 1, 'Reviewing Postwar Fiction', situates this thesis within recent debates in literary studies surrounding what Mark McGurl has termed a discipline-wide 'hegemony of history'. Chapter 2, on Samuel Beckett, argues that Beckett's postwar art criticism responds to a specific strand of Marxist humanist aesthetics developed after the war, and it studies Beckett's manuscripts to show the relationship between this criticism and the composition of The Unnamable. Chapter 3 discusses William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions, arguing that the novel pivots around some of the central cruxes of postwar American aesthetic debate: Clement Greenberg's theory of abstraction, and Michael Fried's identification of the problem of 'art and objecthood'. Chapter 4 discusses the work of the British art critic and novelist, John Berger. It shows that Berger's critical account of Cubism shaped the narrative forms of his novels A Painter of Our Time and G., and that these narrative innovations were central to his theory of the artistic and revolutionary 'moment'. Chapter 5 focuses on the relationship between photography, painting and aesthetics in the work of W. G. Sebald. It argues that aesthetic concepts such as 'the readymade' and 'objective chance' offer a better account of Sebald's engagement with art than accounts which draw on trauma theory. The thesis concludes with a short discussion of how the writers studied in this thesis have influenced the contemporary fiction of Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy.

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Bibliography: pages 174-184. / This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.

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