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Metafiction and the Maximalist Tradition in Contemporary American Literary History

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Metafiction and the Maximalist Tradition in Contemporary American Literary History BURNS, DANIEL WARREN, Ph.D. Exceptional Scale: Metafiction and the Maximalist Tradition in Contemporary American Literary History. (2015) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 305 pp. This dissertation reexamines the narrative practice of self-reflexivity through the lens of aesthetic size to advance a new approach to reading long-form novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whereas previous scholarship on the maximalist tradition relies on the totalizing rhetorics of endlessness, exhaustion, encyclopedism, and excess, I interpret the form’s reflexive awareness of its own enlarged scale as a uniquely narrative “knowledge work” that mediates the reader’s experience of information-rich texts. Thus, my narrative and network theory-informed approach effectively challenges the analytical modes of prominent genre theories such as the Mega-Novel, encyclopedic narrative, the systems novel, and modern epic to propose a critical reading method that recovers the extra-literary discourses through which scalarity is framed. Following this logic, each chapter historicizes prior theories of literary scale in postwar U.S. fiction toward redefining cross-national differences that vary across the boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Chapter two addresses the scholarly discourse of encyclopedism surrounding the Mega-Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph McElroy. Posing an ethical challenge to popular critiques of metafictional aesthetics, both authors, I argue, contest one of the critical orthodoxies of realist form—the “exceptionality thesis”—which rests on an assumed separation between an audience’s experience of fictional minds in a literary work and its understanding of actual minds in everyday life. In constructing a suitably massive networked platform on which to stage identity as a pluralistic work-in-progress, Gravity’s Rainbow and Women and Men, I contend, narrativize those operations of mind typically occluded from narrative discourse, and so make literal their authors’ meta- ethical visions of a “multiplying real” as much a part of our world as the novel’s own. Chapter three focuses on the mise en abyme as a discursive practice in the labyrinthine narratives of Samuel R. Delany and Mark Z. Danielewski. My analysis posits The Mad Man and House of Leaves as immersive case studies on the academic reading experience by interrogating the satirical strategy of “mock scholarship,” in which a textual object at plot’s center is gradually displaced by the intra-textual reception history that surrounds it. Subtly complicating an increasingly imperceptible line between fact and its fictional counterpart, Delany and Danielewski, I assert, propose new forms of knowledge production through a multiplicity of potential “research spaces” that micromanage the interpretive process while exceeding the structural contours that frame it. Chapter four considers the problem of literary canon formation in the polemical epics of Gayl Jones and Joshua Cohen. Across vast surveys of the stereotypes that mark their marginalization, Jones and Cohen transgress the metaphorical borders constructed between individual voice, collective identity, and the literary institutions that reify “ethnoracial diversity” as a belated form of cultural capital. Explicitly foregrounding the ideological gaps, errors, and omissions against which canonical classification is typically defined, Mosquito and Witz, I suggest, promote not so much a representative widening of the canon’s historically restrictive archive as a complete dissolution of the exclusionary practices it honors and preserves. EXCEPTIONAL SCALE: METAFICTION AND THE MAXIMALIST TRADITION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY by Daniel Warren Burns A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by __________________________________ Committee Chair © 2015 Daniel Warren Burns APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Daniel Warren Burns has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair . Committee Members . ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee members for their encouragement and generosity during the development of this project. Over the course of two critical theory seminars and in countless conversations beyond, Christian Moraru’s guidance as a mentor and friend has had an immeasurable impact on my project’s development. Noelle Morrissette’s steadfast support absolutely matched the sweeping influence her two American Literature seminars had on my thinking about African American literary history and visual culture. Steve Yarbrough’s History of Rhetoric (Enlightenment to Contemporary) course was so compelling that I nearly changed majors. Indeed, thanks to Steve’s characteristically “encyclopedic” knowledge of American literature, philosophy, and critical theory, I did not need to make that disciplinary switch. Parts of this dissertation were delivered as conference papers. I am grateful to the panel chairs at the following events for their kind acceptance and insightful comments: Brendan Beirne, for his 2012 Midwest Modern Language Association panel “The Short Fiction of George Saunders” where portions of the conclusion were presented; Michael Hoyer and Mike Benveniste, for their 2013 American Comparative Literature Association panel “Projective Worlds: Overlapping Generic Topologies in Twentieth- Century Fiction” where an early version of chapter one’s Joseph McElroy section was presented; and Garrett Eisler and the Modern Language Association Discussion Groups on Jewish Cultural Studies and Jewish American Literature, for their 2014 panel on “Jewish Monsters” where chapter four’s analysis of Joshua Cohen’s Witz was presented. iii This study has also benefited from my fellow literature graduate students and friends from UNCG. For their lasting commitment to community, I am indebted to Mercer Bufter, David Cook, Jason Cooke, Cindy Flowers, Joe George, Zach Laminack, Cheryl Marsh, Leah Milne, Craig Morehead, Matt Mullins, Andrew Pisano, Sally Smits Masten, Pete Scisco, and Erin Wedehase. Special thanks as well to the inspirational Scott Gibson and Aaron Chandler, who provided timely feedback at different stages of my drafting and defense process. My amazing family deserves the greatest appreciation for encouraging me every step of the way: Patti, Oona, and Thomas; Mom and Dave; Dad and Collin; Ryan and Angie; Jeremy and Meghan; John and Erin; Margaret Erickson; Tom and Brenda; Matt and Cristie; and Hunter and Lessah. For their long-term investment in my work and me over many years, love also to my extended Clemson family: Mark Charney, Doug Grigsby, and Karyn Kingsbery-Grigsby. Finally, I would be remiss in not recognizing my wonderfully supportive colleagues at Elon University, an institution whose confidence in a novice writing and literature instructor led me to undertake doctoral studies in the first place. My return to Elon during the writing of this dissertation brought that relationship full circle. For their loyalty over the better part of a decade, my deepest gratitude goes to Paula Patch, Megan Isaac, Kathy Lyday, Paul Crenshaw, Rosemary Haskell, Janet Warman, Scott Proudfit, Michael Ennis, Pat Jones, Sophie Adamson, and Olivia Choplin. This dissertation is dedicated to Patti Burns and Vicki Hansing. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: ON DIFFICULTY AND THE DISCOURSE OF AESTHETIC SIZE .....................................................................................1 Size Matters: Toward a Topological Approach to Maximalist Metafiction ............................................................................9 At Large: Reading Long-Form Contemporary American Literary History .....................................................................................17 The Scalar Turn: Critical Review ..............................................................27 The Scope of This Project: Chapter Outline ..............................................33 Notes ..........................................................................................................43 II. LIFE SENTENCES: MULTITUDINAL IDENTITY AND THE SATURATED SELF AT SCALE ...........................................................51 Individuation and “the Multitude”: Encyclopedic Fiction in Pynchon and McElroy ............................................................................58 Thomas Pynchon’s Critical Mass ..............................................................66 “An Attrition of Self”: Gravity’s Rainbow ................................................79 Joseph McElroy’s Multiplying Real ..........................................................94 “This Community of Us”: Women and Men ............................................107 Notes ........................................................................................................120 III. WORKS SITED: MOCK SCHOLARSHIP AND THE RESEARCH SPACE OF POSSIBLE WORLDS ..............................128 Multiplicity and “the Mock Scholarly”: The Literary Labyrinths of Delany and Danielewski .....................................................................137 Samuel R. Delany’s Paraliterary
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