Where Do We Go From Here? Conclusions and Community in the Postmodern American Novel
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Authors
Knox, Paul D.
Issue Date
2010
Type
Dissertation
Language
Keywords
Acker , DeLillo , McCarthy , novel , postmodern , Pynchon
Alternative Title
Abstract
Where Do We Go From Here?: Conclusions and Community in the Postmodern
American Novel challenges the orthodox view that whatever is postmodern tends towards
fragmentation, an assumption that grounds both primarily theoretical texts like JeanFrançois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and principle works of literary
scholarship like Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism. My argument analyzes
four novels that together span thirty-three years of the postmodern American novel:
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Don DeLillo’s The Names (1983), Kathy
Acker’s Don Quixote (1986), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). The
communities each novel presents differ in composition, duration, and location yet share a
common feature—the possibility for communication that carries with it the potential for
cohesion. Because scholars have not considered the moments of cohesion in postmodern
fiction, the prevailing understanding of the postmodern American novel and of
postmodern theory remains inadequate. Fragmentation may be an important element of
anything postmodern, but so too is community.
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In Copyright(All Rights Reserved)