Abstract
In his book Post-postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, the critic Jeffrey Nealon suggests that post-postmodernism signals “the never-ending end of everything.” He indicates that the term could lead to paradoxically definitive yet infinite additions of the prefix “post”, as we continually comply with the often reductive scholarly expectations to periodise, historicise, and coin words for new moments or movements in literary culture. Nealon’s emphasis on a position in relation to postmodernism is clear from the label “hyper postmodernism”, which appears elsewhere in his book but differs from other definitional possibilities for post-postmodernism such as Andrew Hoberek’s “antipostmodern” or Charles Harris’ “suspiciously lively” postmodern “corpse.”The potential oversight is that the DNA of postwar postmodernism is as subject to ambivalence and contradiction, from Jürgen Habermas’ obsoletion of “the new” and “alliance of postmodernists with premodernists”, to Jean-Franҫois Lyotard's “incredulity toward metanarratives”, to Frederic Jameson's insistence that a “celebratory posture” or conclusive “moralizing gesture” resists “freezing into place.” Post-postmodernism arrives as an extension of this: provocatively declaring a new literary moment despite the conflicting evidence of the understanding. The specificity of its timing is subject to interpretation, but the 1990s-2000s saw the emergence of widespread critical interest in the idea of writing after the perceived end of postmodernism. Then and now the additional prefix is applied to writers around the turn of the century such as Percival Everett, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, and this thesis positions these four authors together for the first time at the centre of this debate. I discuss how their most celebrated novels – Erasure (2001), The Corrections (2001), White Teeth (2000), and Infinite Jest (1996) – actively stage the problematic but appealing concept of post-postmodernism that each is considered evidence of. After untangling some of the theoretical concerns surrounding post-postmodernism, this thesis looks at details within these novels that dramatise hybridisation, multiplicity, and tensions between irony and sincerity.
| Date of Award | 1 Apr 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Jon Day (Supervisor) & Michael Collins (Supervisor) |