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Ali Dissertation Revised Recuperating Deliberation in Early-Postmodern US Fiction by Alistair M. C. Chetwynd A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Gregg D. Crane, Chair Professor Patricia S. Yaeger, Chair (Deceased) Professor Sarah Buss Professor Jonathan E. Freedman Associate Professor Gillian C. White Acknowledgments This project took an aeon, and first thanks are equally to the English department at the University of Michigan for time and money, and my family and friends for never actually saying out loud that I should give it up and do something easier and more useful with my life. I’m also extremely grateful to each of my committee for stepping in to help me work on something a long way from any of their own academic interests. I really miss Patsy Yaeger: in particular her enthusiasm about getting to read bits of what she called a “weird” and “wonky” project. I’m grateful to her for feedback on sentence-level writing and the excellent, frequent marginal comment “Where’s The Joy???” Gregg Crane very helpfully took over after Patsy’s death, and his exhortations to be more precise, especially in talking about the relationship between fictions and philosophies, were always energizing: only Danny Hack’s Novel Theory course pushed me more forcefully in the directions my PhD work finally took than Gregg’s 20-second aside about how useful he found early pragmatism for thinking about literature, back in the second or third class session I sat in at Michigan. Sarah Buss was relentlessly generous in talking me through current analytical thinking on the philosophical questions I think postmodern authors were interested in, and one day I’ll finish my paper on Edith Wharton and akrasia in order to show the world just how much those conversations with Sarah actually influenced my thinking about literature’s forms of argumentation. Rob Chodat at Boston University was briefly an external committee member, and gave me some fantastically enthusiastic and detailed feedback on a minor chapter draft just at the point when I was feeling most hopelessly mired in departmental disinterest. Jonathan Freedman’s course on Fictions of Finance gave rise to my work on J R, which expanded to a 40,000-word triptych of articles on Gaddis’ archive before I actually got around to giving him anything else of my writing to read: I’m glad that he stuck it out as ii a committee member to get finally to see a version of that Gaddis work in full dissertation context. And Gillian White was one of the most interesting and generous interlocutors in the department for seven years before she last-minute stepped into the committee breach; I’m really glad she did, because her feedback in that short time was very helpful. I’m the penultimate finisher from the original 18-person 2008 cohort, and even though many of cohort left Ann Arbor long ago, they remain in the brain to go through the process with: for all the ever-widening geographical dispersion, a good set of cohort with whom to consider oneself essentially and irrevocably cohort. Thanks therefore to messrs Bruner, Cassel, Cleary, Fagan, Fasteland, Fisher, Gorwitz, Jeyathurai, Karageorgos, Linwick, Lucas, Mangrum, McAdams, McClain, Morton, Oches, Watkins. I still believe that one day more than half of us will be in the same room again. I mentioned above that Danny Hack’s Novel Theory course first revealed to me that the real questions underpinning everything I’d been thinking about since I was 4 or 5 was the double question of why it matters cognitively that prose fiction is made of words and what fictionality has to do with language, and that Jonathan Freedman’s Fictions of Finance course also gave rise to a whole series of non-dissertation publications on less abstract matters. I should also thus credit Kerry Larson’s course on historicism and historiography as the origin of the Doctorow chapter in this project, and mention the importance of classes and conversations with Yopie Prins and Gillian about lyric poetry: the Poetry and Poetics group, along with the philosophy department’s Aesthetics Discussion Group, were the places at Michigan I could most reliably learn something relevant to the study of prose. Third book will be about poetry, I promise. The English department staff I also owe many thanks for helping me navigate both the basic bureaucracy and the extra bureaucracy that came with being a foreigner. Thanks in particular to Jan Burgess and Senia Vasquez for the full 8 years of help, and to Denise Looker and Lisa Curtis for fussless resolutions of teaching-related admin. iii I did sometimes have to hop on a plane to feel like anyone around me found the same aspects of literature interesting and valuable: I wouldn’t have had the will to keep going without repeat jaunts to the Narrative conference and International Pynchon Week: the intellectual energy of the former and the friendly fellows of the latter generally kept my academic batteries charged for 6 months or so at a time. So thanks to the people of each. MFA soccer was the most pleasant constant in my life over the last 5 years: I hope it never ends, and will plan all future travel back to Michigan around two free hours on Friday afternoons. Then more concrete debts: Michigan travel money allowed me to discover that I love doing archival research. I should officially register my thanks to Rackham and the English department for smoothing my way to go and discover—and write up, and publish—things no one knows about Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Brooke-Rose, Hatcher Polite, and others in Austin, DC, Detroit, New York, and especially St Louis, where the special collections people at WUStL have probably put more hours into my academic career than anyone else alive. Special thanks especially to Joel Minor and Sarah Schnuriger there (and sociability-wave to friends and peers in WUStL English). Finally, all my grandparents died during the course of this work, as did two excellent family dogs, Kez and Chester, and various fish in Wales and Ann Arbor. Of all these sympathetic organisms I suspect only Grandpa would have been bothered either way about whether or not I got the degree done, and since the stories he wrote for me when I was 3 or 4 were the origin of all this wanting-to-know-what-fiction-can-do, I’ll reserve special late thanks to him: A) fellow doctor, B) I did indeed correct such Americans as called me english. So take away any of the people mentioned above and this dissertation wouldn’t have been written. You’ll note if you read it that that might not have been a bad thing. I promise I’ll do better for the book. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii List of Appendices vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: John Barth and the Anti-Nihilist Capacities of Anti-Mimetic Prose 49 Chapter 2: Deliberative Rationality Amid Economistic Rationalization: Gaddis’ J R 92 Chapter 3: Daniel’s Mockery, Doctorow’s Satire: A Postmodern Fiction Against Postmodern Parody 148 Chapter 4 - A Coda: “The World (This One)”: Pynchon’s Deliberative Ontologies 204 Appendices 223 Works Cited 247 v List of Appendices Appendix A: A History of the Consistent Premises of Criticism on Postmodernism and Antimimetic Fiction 223 Appendix B: Definitions and Vocabulary Choices About Context 233 Appendix C: Relevant Antifoundational Philosophies 238 vi Introduction This project begins from a simple problem. We don’t have precise explanations for how anti-realist fiction can make constructive arguments that validly influence readers’ beliefs about the real world. The standard account of fiction’s mind-changing work relies on the trope of immersion: when we read, our minds go “into” another world, we observe its objects and events, vicariously experience it, interact with its characters as if they were other humans, and eventually our minds come back out, allowing us to adjudicate the relationship between that world and our own. What, though, of fictions that refuse to let us get immersed, that remind us constantly of their fictionality, textuality, conventionality? The standard argument in this case, closely associated with the term “postmodernism” for reasons I’ll examine later, tends to be that such fiction, by interrupting the assumptions that guarantee the immersive experience in conventional fiction, achieves a negative argument, invalidating those assumptions, and hence challenging the ideology associated with them. If the conventional immersive novel has, since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, been associated with the development of bourgeois individualism, the presumption that we can take an objective stance on the structures and movements of cultures, societies, and ideologies, the presumption that human mental experience is linear and discursive, and so on, then anti-mimetic fiction can argue that none of this is true, and can point to at least some of the sources of the false consciousness. Yet this leaves anti-mimetic fiction’s philosophical capacities and commitments entirely supervenient on those of the realism it rejects. All non-realist experiments then bear a single rhetoric. Both its advocates and its detractors have seemed content to agree on this, even as throughout a half-century’s concerted investigation of the genre they have disagreed on so much else. The current project demonstrates the limits of this consensus, and takes steps toward an understanding of prose fiction that allows for individual antimimetic 1 forms (those that render the fiction explicit about being only words on a page and won’t let the reader get immersed in ‘another world’) to entail equally individuated constructive arguments in response to identifiable historical contexts.
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