Douglas Coupland’s novels offer a broad critique of specific cultural conditions on the North American west coast. His primarily suburban characters suffer from identity crises, social fragmentation, family dysfunction, uncreative working conditions, a lack of meaning and a lack of political agency. In Generation X, Life after God, Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus!, the four novels on which I focus in this thesis, Coupland positions his characters on the edge in manifold ways: on the edge of madness, on the geographical margin of the continent, at the threshold of the end of time, and on the verge of great, transcendent truth. This thematic liminality defines the specific culture about which he writes: middle-class, young, North American, disillusioned suburbanites. The central questions this thesis raises are primarily psychological and political rather than religious. What, after God in this culture is dead, can replace the cathartic and transcendent psychological functions that religion once filled? What can stand in for the sense of agency and social connectedness that ideology founded on religious certainty once conferred? In teasing out Coupland’s answers to these questions I examine the multiple layers of spirit in Coupland’s imaginative universe: tendencies to romantic notions of environmental paganism, the residual effects of dominant and hierarchical religion, and his tentative probing into an altogether new basis of belief and agency. In the first chapter of this thesis, I examine the psychological crises of Coupland’s characters through the lens of Kristevan analysis. Julia Kristeva’s conception of the subject as founded on language, constantly in flux, and always threatened by the return of the abject is uniquely suited to illuminating the post-religious intrapsychic conflicts of Coupland’s characters. There is a remarkable parallel between their work: what Kristeva sets out in theory, Coupland’s characters play out in narrative. Chapter two reads the spiritual significance in Coupland’s locations with theoretical counterpoint from various postmodern thinkers, primarily Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard who have distinct visions of the future. The Louis Greenberg 9100531P PhD Abstract: Faith at the Edge 2 third chapter of the thesis looks closely at the apocalyptic themes in Coupland’s novels. Apocalypse in Coupland’s work refers both to the teleological, religious apocalypse of manifest destiny, and to the literal end of the world and the death of its people. The final chapter is a meditation on the potential for the post-religious religion which Coupland has knitted into his novels. I attempt to express this potential for belief more directly than Coupland has in order to test it against current philosophical and scientific discoveries and collate it with long-standing cross-religious mystical traditions. I find that Coupland’s novels do indeed contain the raw material for a coherent expression of a powerful, transcendent belief after God. I argue that fictional narrative, because it is constantly revised and never categorical, a wave-pattern of potentiality rather than a vehicle for singular, static meaning, is the ideal method for expressing and disseminating this new belief. Coupland’s very indecisiveness and refusal to settle on a definitive stance makes his deployment of narrative uniquely suited to the task of expressing this new belief.

Düsseldorf, Universiẗat, Diss., 2003.

Master of Arts - English / This paper takes as its base premise the idea that Douglas Coupland has both shaped generation X thought fundamentally while at the same time is continuously shaped by generation X cultural production. Through a postmodern lens, the paper goes on to look at the ways in which notions of identity, and apocalypse have come to play a central role in the thinking of generation X and then looks at the ways in which these themes and generation X as a whole have been affected by technology. The paper looks at three of Coupland’s novels: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture; Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Susan Richmond, committee chair; Maria Gindhart , Glenn Gunhouse, committee members. Electronic text (102 p. : col. ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed July 24, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-102).

Stuttgart, FH, Diplomarb., 2003.

<p>This essay examines the novel <em>Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture</em> by Douglas Coupland in an attempt to show how it is heavily postmodernist. Postmodernism is explained briefly to give an understanding of how it might be applied to the analysis of the novel. Then the analysis is divided into five different categories: characterization, language and style, setting and society, storytelling and thematic focus. Postmodernist literary theory is applied to various parts of the novel and the postmodernist features are highlighted and discussed. The conclusion is that <em>Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture</em> is indeed a heavily postmodernist novel.</p>

This essay examines the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland in an attempt to show how it is heavily postmodernist. Postmodernism is explained briefly to give an understanding of how it might be applied to the analysis of the novel. Then the analysis is divided into five different categories: characterization, language and style, setting and society, storytelling and thematic focus. Postmodernist literary theory is applied to various parts of the novel and the postmodernist features are highlighted and discussed. The conclusion is that Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is indeed a heavily postmodernist novel.

L'imaginaire de la fin évolue et s'actualise sans cesse, au gré du temps. Chez Douglas Coupland et Chuck Palahniuk, il se conjugue au singulier. La fin est intime, personnelle, elle ne concerne que le sujet, et lui seul. Néanmoins, elle interpelle les mêmes traits intrinsèques à tout imaginaire de la fin. La fin est transitive, elle est achèvement d'une chose et commencement d'une autre. Le temps de la fin, quant à lui, est toujours aussi harassant à négocier: passé, présent, futur cohabitent difficilement. Enfin, devant tant de désordres, la langue et l'imaginaire sont à leur tour happés par la confusion. À ces trois constantes s'en ajoute une quatrième, à l'œuvre autant dans Generation X que dans Choke: une sursollicitation de l'imaginaire qui provoque un brouillage important dans la perception du réel. Récits de la fin, Generation X et Choke sont aussi des romans du renouveau. S'ils disent que le monde menace l'individualité du sujet et qu'il est responsable des graves dysfonctionnements qu'il connaît, les romans de Coupland et Palahniuk nous disent aussi que l'homme peut être sauvé, s'il le désire. Il n'en tient qu'à lui. Résultat d'une clairvoyance du monde, d'une amère déception, puis façon de fabriquer du sens, la fin chez eux ne renvoie non pas à une fin du monde, à sa clôture, mais bien à son renouvellement, subjectif. Réaction, elle permet la survie, objet de pensée, elle incite à la perdition. Car si l'homme peut renaître, son monde et son imaginaire, eux, sont voués au désordre. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Coupland, Palahniuk, Fin, Imaginaire, Temps.

This thesis considers four novels written by Douglas Coupland: Generation X (1991), Shampoo Planet (1992), Microserfs (1995), and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), and demonstrates how each of these novels provides a discursive space in which Coupland examines the members of Generation X: those born between 1965 and 1980. Frederic Jameson's theories about postmodernism, which he equates with the concept of late capitalism, offer a theoretical lens through which this demographic can be interpreted because Coupland's characters struggle to find meaning and sincerity in a realm where advertising and consumerism are omnipresent and nearly all aspects of life are commodified. The ultimate consequence of the alienation and apathy that result from such rampant materialism is the emergence of an idiom that privileges irony. For Coupland, the prevalence of this irony is the most problematic aspect of postmodern society. Consequently, in portraying how the members of Generation X cope with late capitalism and its concomitant irony, Coupland's first four novels function as a trajectory that demonstrate how he and his characters grapple with and eventually repudiate it.

Experimental novels written from 1984-2000 by authors associated with Generation X collectively struggle with common sense notions of masculinity in their various decades at the end of the twentieth century. Relying on confessional, first-person narration, first novels written by white men stage a critical engagement of outdated patriarchal norms in an effort to produce a more progressive masculinity based on sentimentality. In the 1980s, McInerney and Ellis novels, Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero chronicle the struggles of empty, yuppie men who cannot make connections with their peers due to their emotionally devoid lives. By the 1990s, Douglas Coupland proposes a new, sentimental masculinity with his protagonist Andy who narrates Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Andy creates sympathetic connections with his peers through the act of confessional storytelling. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club does similar cultural work as Coupland’s novel by creating an anti-sentimental, nameless narrator so bereft of emotion that he creates a hypermasculine alter-ego and violent groups to avoid the emotional emptiness of his life. Finally, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) produces the most progressive, evolved masculine narrator, Dave, who spends the entire novel coming to terms with the death of his parents while raising his brother as a son. The novels, in both content and form, become more complex and richer reflecting the development of their protagonists and their philosophical arguments for progressing into sentimental men.