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HALL, EMILY, PhD. Rejecting the Empowered Reader: Re-Claiming Authorial Agency in Twenty-First Century, Avant-Garde Fiction (2016) Directed by Dr. Ben Clarke and Dr. Jennifer Keith. 207 pp. This dissertation analyzes twenty-first century British avant-garde fiction and argues that a defining literary issue is the shifting dynamic between writers and readers. In particular, the dissertation examines avant-garde authors and the ways in which they conceptualize their readers and their own positions in the literary market place. Contemporary avant-garde writers often claim that their authority has been transferred to an empowered reading public. I explore how material changes including new publishing trends and digitization have re-defined and even blurred the distinctions between authors and readers. I then contextualize these concerns by historicizing anxieties about control, readers, and the marketplace to better show how notions of authority are contingent upon shifts in publishing practices, the expansion of the reading public, and the economic conditions of authorship. In order to demonstrate how these evolving dynamics impact literature, I use the novels of Gabriel Josipovici, Jeanette Winterson, and William Self to show how writers use their fiction to both critique empowered readers and to restore their authority. My study makes the following critical interventions: First, scholarly works on members of the avant-garde have long argued that these authors ignore writing about “real” issues in favor of abstract ideas about literature, beauty, and art. I counter these claims by illuminating how contemporary avant-garde writers are in fact responding to the same economic and cultural pressures as those authors who write for mass audiences. Second, the dissertation contributes to an emerging discussion about literary trends after the millennium. Critics recently have observed that contemporary British writers are aligning themselves with Modernist aesthetics and ideologies. My dissertation suggests that we can only understand this return to Modernism by juxtaposing Modernist and post- Postmodernist concerns about the influence of mass culture on literature and authorial agency. REJECTING THE EMPOWERED READER: RE-CLAIMING AUTHORIAL AGENCY IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, AVANT-GARDE FICTION by Emily Hall 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 2016 Approved by ________________________ Committee Co-Chair ________________________ Committee Co-Chair © 2016 Emily Hall APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by EMILY HALL has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Co-Chair ________________________________ Committee Co-Chair ________________________________ Committee Member _________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. PRIVILEGING THE READER: THE SEARCH FOR AUTHORITY IN POST-2000 LITERATURE ........................................................................1 II. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERARY MARKET PLACE, A HISTORICAL CONTEXTUALIZATION ................................................40 III. PHANTOM READERS, THE INVENTER READER, SPACE, AND AGENCY IN GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI’S RECENT FICTION .......................................................................................77 IV. “NOTHING IS SOLID: NOTHING IS FIXED”: DIGITIZATION, HYPERTEXTUALITY, AND COLLABORATIVE AUTHORSHIP INJEANETTE WINTERSON’S THE POWERBOOK ................................113 V. CRITIQUES OF AESTHETICISM, AUTHORIAL CONTROL, AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN WILL SELF’S POST-2000 FICTION ..................................................................................147 VI. “OUROSBOROS”: OR, THE FUTURE OF THE AVANT-GARDE ..............182 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................196 iii CHAPTER I PRIVILEGING THE READER: THE SEARCH FOR AUTHORITY IN POST-2000 LITERATURE It is difficult when the writer is serious and the reader is not. Again, this is a newish problem, reading having become a leisure toy instead of a cultural occupation. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects This dissertation examines the ways in which post-2000 avant-garde British novelists conceptualize readers. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, many avant- garde British writers have used fiction and non-fiction to explore the act of reading. While their concerns about reading and readers cut across numerous issues (competing forms of entertainment; the belief that readers are not reading “correctly”), at the center of this is the anxiety that writers have lost authority because novels no longer hold much cultural value. When I say that the novel has lost cultural value, I mean that in the twenty-first century, the British novel serves a different ideological function than in centuries past. In the eighteenth-century, the novel helped define the nation and its customs. As John Richetti notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel the function of the novel was to “accompany and to promote a shift in most people’s consciousness of life and its possibilities” (7). The development of the novel coincided with the shift from feudal society towards individualization. The novel reinforced this individualism not only because it “encourage[d] the isolation and self-enclosure of the silent reader,” but also because the stories frequently charted an 1 individual character’s growth and development (Richetti 7). Often, novels centered on “leaving home, making a break with the familiar world of childhood, finding your way and often enough a mate, seeking your fortune, acquiring an identity by making your mark in the world and ‘doing well’” and in this way they promoted a “middle-class myth of personal possibility, of the individual’s potential for growth and achievement” (Richetti 7-8). The British novel’s origins contrast with the contemporary novel’s aims and purposes. Novels may still discuss an individual’s experiences, but these extend beyond seeking fortunes or leaving home, and instead explore new tensions. While novels once taught a populace how to define themselves as British citizens and mythologized the belief that one could rise above circumstance, the contemporary novel fictionalizes recessions, global identities, and terrorism. If anything, the twenty-first century novel explores how nationalism has given way to globalization. At the same time the novel shifted away from defining national identity (at least to the extent that it did in the eighteenth century) it also lost its footing as an authority on a nation’s values and morals. Peter Boxall notes in The Value of the Novel (2015) that until the 1970s, writers and philosophers were treated as “guardians of a set of (western) cultural values” (2). Until this time, artists and writers created works that promoted a “given cultural, ethical, or moral doctrine or creed” (2). In turn, academic institutions “preserve[d] a set of cultural values from the perceived threat of decline” by championing art that promoted these values (3). However, after the 1970s when scholars observed how these works were limited and exclusionary, critics and writers suggested that literature and the arts should not uphold “moral purpose[s],” as these purposes were often 2 Eurocentric (9). These critics hoped that by refusing to assign a particular “value” to art, writers and artists could “give expression to new cultural possibilities” (Boxall 9). In the face of these new artistic possibilities, authors began to account for other experiences and to push generic boundaries. Academic institutions re-evaluated the literary canon and philosophers de-emphasized textual authority, as they argued that literary works should be read with a “skeptical attitude” (3). Boxall observes that critical discourse about challenging literary value continued into the 1990s, but by the early 2000s, the same critics who initially praised the de-emphasis of particular values, eventually admitted that this same de-emphasis compelled readers to “‘set aside the literariness’ of what they read” (4). As a result, Boxall suggests that contemporary readers struggle to assign literary value to particular works because they were encouraged to critique and even ignore literary authority. The novel no longer defines nations or reinforces particular values; instead, it functions as entertainment. This is not to say that reading was not a pastime in eighteenth century or nineteenth century, but that the novel’s purpose is no longer bound up in issues of manners making, nation building, or even establishing literary value. We can better see how issues of authority would arise within the last few years: if authors have long sought authority or respect for their position as a writer, then these issues would be antagonized by the novel’s new cultural position. If a writer is no longer considered a “guardia[n] of western culture” and is not expected (and indeed is discouraged) to make literary works for particular cultural purposes, then what is the role of the contemporary writer? As writers respond to both the novel’s shifting role in globalization and the idea that readers 3 consider reading as a

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