The desacralization of America before and during the twentieth century poses a particular problem for society in terms of teleology, that is, purposive behavior and the perception of ultimate ends. The rage for order in a world with God withdrawn results in various kinds of responses, including paranoia, anxiety, longing, and nostalgia. The sense of such spiritual loss or absence is one element of the connection between T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Thomas Pynchon's V. Both works also exhibit a strong impulse to move between or beyond the binarity which fragments twentieth-century experience. / Both modernism and postmodernism respond to the decentering which results from desacralization, searching for authentic responses to the spiritual loss and to the changed estate of man. The Waste Land and V. appear to be "bridge pieces," both modern and postmodern, demonstrating a drift toward destabilization and displacement of language, the speaking subject, the controlling consciousness, the transcendental signified, and chronology. / In The Waste Land Eliot attempts to incarnate in language, even in his simplest diction choices, the fusion of contrarities, producing something other than the poles of the opposition, but his attempt results in irresolution. Pynchon poises deliberately between such contrarities, denying that the unavailable insight can be so incarnated; he intentionally prolongs the hesitation between literal and figurative meaning in metaphor, heightening ambivalence, deferring closure. / Both authors force the audience into a wary, uncomfortable, ready state, using strategies that place them within the carnival attitude as delineated by Mikhail Bakhtin, and possibly within the tradition of Menippean satire. Carnival play in both works demands that the reader participate in the co-creation of the work with the author, foregrounds the experience of reading and writing as process, and encourages the subversion of conventions. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-04, Section: A, page: 0975. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77144 |
| Contributors | Pettijohn, Viki Spencer., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 219 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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