The Challanges of Contemporary American Fiction: The Trope of Failure
Open Access
- Author:
- Mraovic, Damjana
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 03, 2010
- Committee Members:
- Michael Francis Berube, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Michael Francis Berube, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Committee Member
Shirley Moody, Committee Member - Keywords:
- failure
postmodernism
American contemporary literature
happy endings - Abstract:
- My study challenges the understanding of postmodernism as a socially disengaged practice by examining the category of failure in contemporary American fiction. Failure resonates with poststructural theory, evokes historical traumas, and confronts dominant cultural, aesthetic, and political discourses. Failure is essential—although thus far unrecognized in American literary theory—to American culture and letters as much as is the American Dream. Failure, in other words, is sometimes useful. The fiction of “failure” is characterized by seemingly happy endings that reintroduce the simmering problems typical for the U.S. cultural and political space but also announce a possibility of renewal. The dissertation shows that the recent critical discussion about the “death of postmodernism” stems from an attempt to reach a historical closure—especially in the period following the Cold War and 9/11—and from understanding postmodernism as a practice disinterested in the social, political, and cultural. To investigate that theoretical premise, I pay particular attention to the works of Kathy Acker, Junot Díaz, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen.