Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism By
Faceting: Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism by Kathryn Fleishman A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Namwali Serpell, Chair Professor Linda Williams Professor Stephen Best Summer 2019 Abstract Faceting: Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism by Kathryn Fleishman Doctor of Philosophy in English and Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Namwali Serpell, Chair This project offers a feminist reconsideration of the postmodern aesthetic across a set of American fictions since 1945. From our current perspective, postmodernism is both overdetermined and undervalued; we limit our readings by equating its sheen and sparkle with irony, paranoia, and superficiality. I present an alternative to two longstanding default modes of interpreting the postmodern: the excavatory, hermeneutic model inaugurated by Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, and the poststructuralist model, which celebrates a seemingly infinite profusion of references and surfaces. My project’s impact is threefold: I demonstrate how feminism refashions the postmodern aesthetic, I reanimate a quintessentially postmodern language of surface and depth in terms of our current crisis of reading, and I show how feminism is uniquely equipped to supersede, though not erase, that binary. Drawing together new debates in feminist, postcritical, and film theory, I present another approach to novels by Sylvia Plath, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as several films and the television series Mad Men. Feminist theory has a vexed relationship with postmodernism, both as an aesthetic category and in relation to its two major interpretive frameworks.
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