Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, August, 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.

In this dissertation I examine Vladimir Nabokov’s and Gary Shteyngart’s use of family metaphors to manage intersecting Russian and American literary and cultural continuities. Both authors fashion their relationships to literary predecessors and common cultural narratives in terms of disrupted filial relationships, describing both an attachment to the conservative narratives of the nation and a desire to move beyond their rigid structure. I articulate this ambivalence as a productive state of transnational subjecthood that allows these authors to navigate apparently oppositional national identities. Central to this reorientation is a critique of the hierarchical schema of the national canon, which frames literary culture as a determinative series of authoritative relationships. By reimagining these relations as part of a branching network of co-constituting associations, we open the space for transnational subjects to move within and overlap these networks.

This thesis identifies a trend in recent postmodern dystopian fiction for writers to metafictionally dwell on the place of literature in a future context. This trend springs from similar concerns present in the two most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet, unlike Huxley and Orwell, for whom the marginalization of literature is merely one symptom of the hegemonic control oppressing these future societies, the postmodern writers I identify situate the book’s future disappearance at the epicenter of culture’s demise. In Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), electronic technologies have virtually eradicated print literature and the novel’s protagonist, Lenny, mourns the changes in social interactions he sees this shift in technology bringing about. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), marginalized book-lovers see the devastation humanity continuously wreaks on the environment as a product of culture’s disdain for literature.