A Crisis of Space: Identity, Subjectivity, and Materiality in Postmodern American Fiction

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Authors

Stottlemyer, Eric Matthew

Issue Date

2012

Type

Dissertation

Language

Keywords

Identity , Materiality , Postmodernism , Space , Subjectivity

Research Projects

Organizational Units

Journal Issue

Alternative Title

Abstract

The material world as it is represented in postmodern American novels accounts for subjectivity and identity in ways that remain critically unexplored. This dissertation, therefore, examines representations of space, the subject, and materiality in three postmodern American novels: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. For the protagonists in these novels, finding refuge in a material world attenuates the power exerted in socially constructed spaces. In this way, spatial relationships empower the individual character in a struggle against the discursive representations and socio-political forces that seek to define, limit, and determine identity performance as a means for maintaining social and political domination. Although these three novels contend with different subjects and time periods, representations of transience and spatial movement unify them, and in each novel transience is the means by which the subject disrupts discourses of power. Analyses of these novels indicate contemporary changes in how subjects are produced, and they also indicate how interpretations of subjectivity and identity as concepts have changed over the previous forty years.

Description

Citation

Publisher

License

In Copyright(All Rights Reserved)

Journal

Volume

Issue

PubMed ID

DOI

ISSN

EISSN