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

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This dissertation interprets how two antebellum American works of fiction, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Martin R. Delany’s Blake, represent the relationship between conjuring and resistance to oppression. It is unclear how we should conceive of this relationship: on the one hand, historical slave conspiracies and revolts in the Atlantic world demonstrated the unequivocal power of conjuring for assembling collectives; on the other hand, many slaves who turned to conjuring to ease their suffering later dismissed the practice as nonsense in their autobiographies. My close-readings of these two texts are supported by a wide-range of historical and cultural materials, including the vast literature on conjuring, the Peruvian discourse on the saya y manto, and the discourse on fetishism. I conclude that acts of conjuring drive plot and explain a character’s actions or inactions under circumstances in which resistance to oppression involves obtaining or preserving freedom for presently or formerly enslaved people. In addition, this dissertation provides a method for reading conjuring in Benito Cereno and interprets a form of conjuring in Blake that readers have neglected.