| In advancing a systems theory approach to literary analysis, this study identifies avant-garde work within postmodern literature. Following Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela's cultural systems studies, I posit the concept of literary interfaces (mediated meetings of distinct systems); this includes digital and visual-linguistic interfaces and interfaces of postmodern identity. In readings that couple social systems and drives, I move beyond postmodern formalist criticism without abandoning the significance of literary devices---analyzing innovative texts that reveal significant aspects of human experience.;I first identify the postmodernist avant-garde within culture. In response to theory on the avant-garde, such as Peter Burger's, I demonstrate that postmodernist work leaves behind the historical avant-garde's dialectics with the academy (concerns of distribution) and enters new historical and cultural relations. In the process of introducing systems narrative techniques, my consideration of Kathy Acker's novels and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow helps to locate the postmodernist avant-garde's position to the theory of postmodernism and to the sociopolitical dominance of postmodernity. Through these texts and those that follow, I explain the importance of systems approaches for avant-garde devices as a way of working between historic events, texts, and different types of media.;In considering Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon and Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia, I locate digital interfaces that interrelate materiality, form, and reading processes of print and new media. This sets up questions concerning the nature of the text and authorship within a transitional period in media and form.;Through Kenneth Patchen's Sleepers Awake, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing, and Eckhard Gerdes's Cistern Tawdry, I examine how visual-linguistic fiction underscores the graphic, including the written word, as material content for narrative, thus altering textual performance. I identify the formal, historical, and technological changes that influence this interface.;The third type of interface couples questions of identity and the social (e.g., gender and the socially constructed Other). I consider Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, and Harold Jaffe's short fiction. Examining utopian social drives and considerations of the psychologically abject, I analyze systems concepts of identity and community along with avant-garde cultural interventions. |
