The postmodern thing: Narrative, ideological intervention, and the return of the subject.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that postmodernism is more usefully conceived of as a practice of reading than as a cultural period or a type of text produced therein. Through discussions of theoretical and literary texts, I explore and model one version of postmodern reading, which is a mode of textual analysis and interpretation that focuses on the relation between the subject and the symbolic order, with particular attention to the ideological and narrative dimensions of this relation. I argue that postmodern reading is the most effective way to question and undermine the dominant ideologies of late capitalism and to move beyond the political impasses of many poststructuralist discourses. To the extent that my readings of specific texts can function as models of one kind of postmodern reading they may be said to constitute a theory of postmodern reading. I begin by discussing several current theories of postmodernism as a cultural period and show how these theories themselves include a notion of postmodernism as a kind of reading. I then address implicit and explicit critiques by Judith Butler, Rodolphe Gasche, and Derrida of the psychoanalytic subject, as elaborated in the work of Slavoj Zizek, which is central to my theory and practice of postmodern reading. I continue the discussion of the subject, but now as thematized in Samuel Beckett's Company, opposing my own postmodern reading of the subject to two modern readings by Carla Locatelli and Thomas Trezise. In this discussion, I focus on agency and reading as a type of ideological analysis. I next read Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and Christa Wolf's Cassandra as oppositional narratives, demonstrating the ways in which the texts of national and ethnic identity are constructed and resisted through complex processes of interpellation and identification. I connect these processes to reading and discuss how postmodern reading functions to produce the oppositional in literature. Finally, I offer a reading of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker as a model of ideological articulation. My concern in this regard is how the novel offers us a model for rethinking identity and the constitution of the social.