University of Texas at Tyler Scholar Works at UT Tyler English Department Theses Literature and Languages Spring 4-3-2017 "Our attachments are our temples": Addiction, Recovery, and the Metamodernist Movement Ashlie M. Contos University of Texas at Tyler Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/english_grad Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Contos, Ashlie M., ""Our attachments are our temples": Addiction, Recovery, and the Metamodernist Movement" (2017). English Department Theses. Paper 10. http://hdl.handle.net/10950/562 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Literature and Languages at Scholar Works at UT Tyler. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Department Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholar Works at UT Tyler. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “OUR ATTACHMENTS ARE OUR TEMPLES”: ADDICTION, RECOVERY, AND THE METAMODERNIST MOVEMENT by ASHLIE MEGHAN CONTOS A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Literature and Languages Carolyn Tilghman, Ph.D., Committee Chair College of Arts and Sciences The University of Texas at Tyler May 2017 © Copyright 2017 by Ashlie Meghan Contos All rights reserved. For Catherine Brook Contos 1991-2005 who died of a heroin overdose at the young age of 23 Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. − Rainer Maria Rilke Acknowledgements I am endlessly indebted to the brilliant, kind, and supportive professors at the University of Texas at Tyler who made me the scholar that I am today; without their tireless dedication to my intellectual cultivation, I would be a far smaller-thinker and -dreamer than I am today. I want to thank Ron Howard at the University of Texas at Tyler’s Robert R. Muntz library for always being able to find the sources I needed and always going the extra mile to find the most obscure texts. Forever and always, I am filled with gratitude for my family, my partner, and friends who keep me grounded, joyous, and always willing to question. Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Somewhere Altogether Different That We’ve Already Been Before: A Brief History of the Metamodern Movement ............................................................................................................ 4 Make It New (Again): The Rebirth of Modernism in the Twenty-First Century ........................ 5 Postmodern Theories: Violence and Power ................................................................................ 8 Postmodern Culture: Art as Insurgence and then Commodity .................................................. 12 They Came of Age Under Postmodernity ................................................................................. 15 A Brief, Concise Definition of Metamodernism ....................................................................... 16 Chapter 2 Hungry Ghosts, Tantalus, the Evil Wolf: the Contemporary Reality of Addiction ...... 18 Chapter 3 Of Human bondage: The Metamodern Novels of Foer, Smith, and Wallace ............... 30 Chapter 4 “My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met”: Trauma and the Self in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ............................................................................................................ 41 “I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted to hear mine”: Finding Emotional Connection via Suffering.................................................................................................................................... 43 9/11 and Hiroshima: Local and Global Narratives of Violence and Loss ................................. 48 “Everyone was losing everyone”: With the Loss of Language Comes the Loss of Connection50 Surmounting Our Boundaries: The Universalizing Nature of Foer’s Novel ............................. 54 Chapter 5 “People making a connection across continents, across seas”: Redevising Immigrant Relationships in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.................................................................................. 56 The Colonized in the Colonizer’s World: the Iqbal Father & Sons .......................................... 58 Smith’s “juvenile delinquent…determined to beat the rest”: The Upbringing of the Millat Iqbal61 Familial and Social Correlations to Addiction: Samad and KEVIN’s Impact on Millat .......... 69 “We are split people”: Smith’s Return to Emotive and Relational Exploration ....................... 74 Chapter 6 “No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable”: Addiction and Recovery in DFW’s Infinite Jest ....................................................................................................................... 76 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and Addition: Examining the Boyhoods of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately ......................................................................................................................... 77 “Freedom of Choice and the Choice of Freedom”: Negotiating the Freedom of Choosing the Addiction or Recovery .............................................................................................................. 83 Believing Even When We Don’t – An Example of a Double Bind within Metamodernism: Don Gately and Higher Power Issues ............................................................................................... 89 Finding Agency through Stories: Wielding Word to Tell Our Personal History ...................... 92 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................... 99 Curriculum Vitae ......................................................................................................................... 105 i Abstract “OUR ATTACHMENTS ARE OUR TEMPLES”: ADDICTION, RECOVERY, AND THE METAMODERNIST MOVEMENT Ashlie Meghan Contos Thesis Chair: Carolyn Tilghman, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Tyler May 2017 There is currently a profound debate occurring across the globe regarding the nature of addiction: whether or not addiction is a disease. Within the last decade, addiction research and publications have flooded the market, which challenge the disease model for understanding addiction. This new research suggests that addiction is a learned behavior thus addiction begins as a habit that, if continued, becomes an ingrained behavior, but it is not a disease, like diabetes or heart disease. Concurrently, there is much discussion within academia as to what is presently occurring in literary and critical theory trends. Although there is still much debate about the beginning and end of (post)modernism and the definitions of both eras, researchers are now observing a shift in literary aesthetics, critical theories, and cultural dynamics. Leading scholars of this new movement, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, assign the term “metamodernism” to this shift because the prefix “meta” signifies the fluidity of the movement: it is at once between and beyond (post)modernism ii It is with these two contemporary shifts in mind (both of which are decidedly influenced by previously held ideologies) that I will examine how contemporary authors and their fiction depart from preceding paradigms. I will draw a parallel between certain predominate characteristics of postmodern literary styles and critical theories (i.e. irony, play, cynicism, paranoia, etc.) and the discomfort that most addicts experience (i.e. shame, anxiety, cynicism, paranoia, etc.). I will then analyze how metamodern authors–specifically David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith–and their novels continue postmodernism’s experimentation with form while moving away from postmodernism’s detachment to again explore modernism’s themes such as authenticity and sincerity. These attributes–sincerity, vulnerability, etc.–ultimately enable the addict to cognitively and behaviorally reframe their engagement with their addiction, and I will argue that these very qualities also push the literary community out of the postmodern refrain. iii Introduction Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be. […] I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. -- David Foster Wallace Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism. -- C. Jung Metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate! -- Luke Turner I stumbled upon David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, and metamodernism in my first year of graduate