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Cultural Reproduction in Contemporary American Fiction

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Cultural Reproduction in Contemporary American Fiction CULTURAL REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION By ALEXANDER JAMES PAUL MORAN A Thesis Submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor Of Philosophy School of English, Drama, & American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham June 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis traces the ways in which David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead react against the historical, institutional, and formal limits imposed upon contemporary fiction and culture. It argues that in order to counteract such constraints, they embrace and co-opt older forms and values as enabling for their fiction. In order to map these processes and relationships, I read these five writers as engaging with and reflective of the concept of cultural reproduction. Building largely from the definitions of cultural theorist Raymond Williams, the lens of cultural reproduction is a means to acknowledge what Williams terms the ‘limits and pressures’ of the contemporary – such as the inheritance of postmodernism, creative writing programs, technological changes, and commercial demands – and also to outline the ways these writers display agency in reaction to such limits. I discuss Wallace’s work as an exploration of the ways culture is reproduced habitually, and use the ideas of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in order to explicate this. I outline that Franzen’s attention to these processes is distinctly melodramatic, and discuss his nonfiction and later fiction as instances not of his stated realism, but of melodrama. I then discuss the ‘genrefication’ of contemporary American fiction in the works of Chabon, Egan, Whitehead, and the differing reasons they all provide for their turn to genre. This focus on cultural reproduction acknowledges the differing relationships these writers have with numerous influences on contemporary fiction, and the autonomy they all display in reacting to this contemporary milieu. Dedication To Mum. I’m sorry you couldn’t quite make it to see this. I don’t think you would have enjoyed reading it anyway, even if you almost certainly would have described it as either “super,” or “very clever.” Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my wonderful supervisors, John Fagg and Sara Wood, for putting up with me for three years, although I am sure to both it feels much longer than that. Your dedication, patience, and support have been really much appreciated. I really lucked out on having two people who complement each other so well. I would especially like to thank John for responding to me so quickly when I was thinking of starting this, and then making it all as simple as possible to get it moving. Obviously, without the relentless and overwhelming love and support of my parents throughout my life, I would not have made it anywhere near this far. Thanks for everything, dad. Thanks to my brother, Patrick, for seeming to have almost unquestionable confidence I could do this. Cheers Pat. I would also like to thank my Uncle, Derrick, for his encouragement throughout. It really is much appreciated. Thanks so much to Edward Jackson for his general support throughout this whole process. It’s weird to think we’ve only been in the same room for about four hours. Technology is pretty great. And finally, thanks most of all, to my wife, Bonnie, for encouraging me to do this, even when it seemed very unlikely it would ever get started. I really have no words to describe how grateful I am. I do, however, have 80,000 others you probably do not want to read. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 The Co-optation of Limits in Contemporary Fiction 11 Chapter Structure 17 CHAPTER 1: THE NEED FOR HABITUAL CHANGE IN THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE 22 Wallace and Pragmatism 33 Meredith Rand: Smoking for Affect 39 Clichéd Unto Death: The Supersedure of Meaning and Function in Modernity 51 Chris Fogle’s Awareness Over Thinking 58 Defamiliarisation: Wallace’s Beef with Readers 65 Conclusion 75 CHAPTER 2: SEEKING A HOME FOR FICTION: MELODRAMA IN THE WORKS OF JONATHAN FRANZEN 77 The Melodramas of Public Intellectual Life 88 The Tensions of Realism 91 From Postmodernism to Melodrama: Rejecting Mr Difficult and Coming Home 101 Melodramatic Heightening 110 The Melodramatic Pursuit of Sincerity 118 Freedom from Sincerity 126 Seeking Permanence in a Plastic World in The Corrections and Freedom 130 Conclusion: Ontological Ambiguity 141 CHAPTER 3: THE CULTURAL REPRODUCTION OF GENRE IN THE FICTION OF MICHAEL CHABON, JENNIFER EGAN, AND COLSON WHITEHEAD 146 Shades of Genrefication and Michael Chabon’s Pastiches 151 The Genrefication of Literary History 161 The Value of Escape in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay 169 Compromise Aesthetics in Kavalier and Clay 176 Jennifer Egan: Contemporising the Gothic and Gothicising the Present 182 Managing the Gothic: Reclaiming Authentic Experience 194 Colson Whitehead, The Post-Apocalyptic, and the Micropolitics of Popular Culture 199 Zombie Pretexts, Racial Context 217 Conclusion: The Reclamation of Genre 226 CONCLUSION 228 WORKS CITED 232 Introduction Charlotte Swenson, one of the protagonists of Jennifer Egan’s novel Look at Me (2001), is a former model who has recently undergone facial reconstructive surgery after a horrific car crash. This event, and the transformative effect that going from a career as a famous model to being someone utterly unrecognisable has on her life, makes Charlotte of great interest to a new reality web platform called PersonalSpace. PersonalSpace aims to film people as they live normally, signing up what they term ‘Ordinaries’ and ‘ExtraOrdinaries,’ of which Charlotte is deemed to be the latter. In developing this new venture, the person in charge, Thomas Keene, wishes to base Charlotte’s narrative upon certain literary models. Thomas implores Irene Maitlock – the person writing Charlotte’s story – to ‘“Show us the buried logic. What I don’t want is, I was bringing cookies to Aunt Susie and I got run over by a tractor. This is not a Raymond Carver story, if you’re familiar with his work”’ (2002, p.256).1 Thomas does not want a minimalist narrative, in the manner of Carver, but a story with a clear plot and causality. Irene posits that what he desires is akin to classical literature, specifically Aeschylus, an idea which Thomas finesses somewhat: ‘“Tragedy, okay. Yes … But not Greek. Too cold. Has to be something warmer”’ (p.256). When Irene suggests drawing upon what she vaguely terms the ‘“Nineteenth century,”’ Thomas immediately believes he has found what he is looking for: ‘“Bingo. Hardy. The Brontës. Tolstoy. Sad things happen but they happen for a reason”’ (p.256). Thomas and Irene then go back and forth listing authors who embody the style they are aiming for; when Irene cites Émile Zola, Thomas responds, ‘“Exactly. Stendhal. Or Dickens, for God’s sake”’ (p.256). Thomas believes contemporary literary conventions, such as minimalist realism, do not depict reality in the way he wishes PersonalSpace to do so. As a result, he wants to recover the moral structure that he believes is evident in nineteenth-century fiction. 1 All quotations are from this edition. 1 While Thomas essentially seeks a caricature of these realist works and their narrative logic, many contemporary authors share a share a similar belief that recent fiction is lacking the vitality it once offered. Egan, in this parody and in her genre-hopping writing, is one of several recent American writers who suggest that fiction need not be constrained by any particular institutional or interpretive frameworks. In particular, American authors have used their fiction to explore and address the limitations imposed by the legacy and influence of postmodernism, the role of university creative writing programs, technological advances, the constraints of market logics, and the marginalisation of genre fiction. In many cases, Egan and other writers included in this thesis point to the possibilities available for fiction writers in mining and revivifying past forms. The inheritance of postmodern fiction is something that two major American writers, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, are especially concerned with. Across novels, short stories and numerous essays, Wallace suggests that fiction, and wider culture, has developed a series of unthinking, detrimental habits due to this inheritance. Similarly, Franzen perceives his literary forebears as valorising difficulty above all else, and attempts to overcome this problem by returning to and recovering realist forms. For both writers, limits are seen as liberating for artistic possibilities. In his much cited essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ (1993), Wallace speaks of his concern of what happens if ‘rulelessness becomes the rule,’ which he believes would mean ‘protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent’ (2009, p.68, italics in original). His fiction is in many ways an active embrace of the liberatory potential of limits, where play, experimentation, and engagement with those limits enables change. In a related but distinct move, Franzen chooses to work within the limits of the realist mode as a means to address his specific concerns over the inheritance of postmodern fiction, and the encroachment of technology, both of which he perceives as responsible for creating a disconnection between writers and readers.
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