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Scanned Using Book Scancenter 5131 Sentimental Postmodernism and the Politics of Identification Kimberly Chabot Davis Washington, D.C. A.B., Harvard University, 1990 M.A., University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty ofthe_Uni.Yersity of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia January 2001 © Copyright by Kimberly Chabot Davis All Rights Reserved January 2001 11 Abstract This cultural study analyzes the politics of a hybrid genre that I call "sentimental postmodemism" and offers a reception study of its audiences. I examine contemporary popular texts from literature, film, and television that invoke two seemingly antithetical sensibilities-:-the sentimental and the postmodern. Offering an alternative to the nihilism and political apathy associated with postmodemism, sentimental postmodernist texts foster sympathy, embrace "feminine" values, and highlight the political stakes of identity formation. Focusing on such texts as Jane Campion's film The Piano, Manuel Puig's Kiss ofthe Spider Woman and its film and musical adaptations, and the television series n Northern Exposure, I examine how different American audience groups negotiate the conflicted treatment of gender, race, and sexual identity at work in these texts. Because sentimental postmodernist texts employ melodrama's essentialist stereotypes while also engaging in a postmodern questioning of identity politics, they speak to people caught between competing conceptions of the self. Contemporary debates about identity politics are highlighted by this hybrid genre and its reception. Furthermore, audiences of sentimental postmodemism experience emotionally powerful political identifications that call into question existing theories of identification in literary and media studies. Many scholars have conceptualized identification as an unconscious process of self-recognition that :;olidifies unitary identities among spectators and readers. My study questions this essentialist and ultimately apolitical vision of the power of identification in contemporary cµlture, offering a more flexible model of identification that takes into account 111 postmodern notions of identity as fluid, ambiguous, and impure. While most audience studies investigate how reading is affected by a single axis of identity such as gender or class, my interviews with audiences underscore that the self is a web of multiple affiliations and ideologies, resulting in identifications that often exceed the boundaries of identity. lV Acknowledgments I owe a huge debt to my dissertation advisor Rita Felski for li:er astute readings and unwavering support of my project, for her incredible generosity with her time, and for the example of her own work. Her intellectual sustenance and broad knowledge of cultural studies has been indispensible to me. When I got bogged down with details, her clear critical vision helped me to see the forest through the trees, to understand what was truly at stake in my argument. Sara Blair played a key role in pushing me to focus my argument and to situate my ideas in critical context; I am grateful for her unflinching, honest criticism as well as her cheerleading. I would like to thank Eric Lott and Krishan Kumar for making my defense such a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Thanks to my fellow dissertators Candace Caraco, Dorri Beam, Tricia Pirlon, and Karen Sosnoski for helping me to shape early drafts of the project, and for making me feel part of an intellectual community. I am indebted to Virginia Zimmerman for providing much-needed moral support and for her insightful critiques of multiple versions of my abstract. This dissertation could not have been written without the emotional support of my husband Jon. He pulled me through numerous stress meltdowns and has always valued my career just as much as his own, despite the embarrassing disparity in our wages. With his help, I can now translate my academic-speak into more accessible cocktail party language. Although my son Joshua arrived at the eleventh hour of my dissertation odyssey, he helped me to finish it. I am grateful to him for the realization that my V dissertation does not wholly define me, and that I am as multiply-located as the subjects of my ethnographic study. Of course, this study would not have been possible without the generous participation of the many viewers and readers who took the time to share their interpretations and personal narratives with me. Those conversations have greatly enriched my understanding of how people inhabit their identities. I dedicate this project to them. 1 Introduction "Cynicism is not revolutionary." --Amiri Baraka Nihilism, alienation, apocalypse, dislocation, fragmentation, irony, self- reflexivity, parody, anti-foundationalism, the "death of the social," and a "waning of affect" --all of these terms have been associated with the cultural zeitgeist of postmodernism. Many literary critics discuss postmodern aesthetics as an extension of high modernist and avant garde techniques of defamiliarization, a disruption of the total immersion fostered ht realist texts. 1 By foregrounding their own construction through the tactic of self-reflexivity, postmodern texts have been called "writerly" because they challenge a reader to construct meaning, to "rewrite" the text in a sense.2 Many critics see postmodernism as an extension of post-structuralism, a philosophy that questions and demystifies Enlightenment foundations. Tobin Siebers argues that postmodernism "embraces a world of images and surfaces; it is distrust~! of politics and deliberately shuns ideas of depth psychology" (31 ). The concepts of presence and essence have been replaced by surfaces, and the real has been replaced by images.3 Social dislocation and the fragmentation of the self are key themes in postmodern literature and film, in which a cynical, ironic sensibility pervades. Postmodern film, in particular, has abounded in narratives of apocalypse.4 This nihilistic sensibility and political detachment has led Fredric Jameson to conclude that contemporary culture is suffering from a "waning of affect" (Postmodernism 16). 2 Given these descriptions of postmodemism, sentimental postmodemism may seem to be an oxymoron or an impossibility. As Winfried Herget points out, "irony, above all, is alien to the sentimental purpose" ("Towards" 7). As opposed to the "writerly" and ironic texts of highbrow postmodemism, sentimental and melodramatic texts aim for total immersion by engaging readers emotionally rather than intellectually. Post-structuralism's critique of the metaphysics of presence strikes at the heart of melodrama's worldview.5 Sentiment and melodrama rest on the very foundations-- essentialist identities, in particular--that postmodernism appears to attack. Through the use of excessive symbolism, melodrama searches for plenitude and depth and refuses to accept a world without transcendence and meaning (Brooks 22). The utopic humanism of sentimentality and melodrama seems incompatible with the cynical, nihilistic vision often ascribed to postmodemism.6 Although the sentimental and the postmodern may appear to be at odds with one another, many contemporary texts in literature, film, television, and musical theater have nonetheless combined these competing worldviews. I argue that this generic and aesthetic mixture--of surface and depth models, of irony and sentimentality, of avant garde and melodramatic aesthetics--creates a productive tension that accomplishes important political work. My analysis of the political significance of the sub-genre that I call "sentimental postmodernism" focuses on the following key texts--Kiss ofthe Spider Woman (novel, film, and musical), The Piano (film), and Northern Exposure (television).7 These hybrid texts work both within and against postmodemism to offer an antidote to the nihilism, emotional disconnection, anti-popular spirit, and masculinist 3 values of many of its fictional and theoretical texts. Jean Baudrillard and Lawrence Grossberg have argued that the "constant deconstructive cynicism of the postmodern sensibility" (Grossberg, We Gotta 282) has fostered political apathy. 8 In the face of such a crisis, sentimental postmodernism uses affect in the service of politics by providing people with "mattering maps" (Grossberg, We Gotta 82) that are essential to political engagement.9 'iinlike cynical postmodern parodies that treat the world of the "real" contemptuously, sentimental postmodernist texts insist that identities, feelings, and personal relationships matter. These texts locate hope for change in the micropolitical sphere of self/other relations, in the way that we construct our identities and interact with our social "others," perhaps even to the point of identifying with them} Many of the political gestures of these hybrid texts.can be linked to their strategic combination of the critical distance of high art with the emotional engagement and identification fostered by popular genres. Although these texts provoke intense identification with their characters, the reader or viewer is also encouraged to think critically rather than be sutured unconsciously into the text's ideology. By engaging readers and viewers both affectively and intellectually, these mixed-code texts encourage audiences to rethink old paradigms while still acknowledging their emotional power. Because sentimental postmodernism satisfies traditional desires as well as upsetting entrenched thought patterns, it could be called progressive or
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