| Focused on John Barth and his 1973 novel LETTERS, the first chapter considers the perspective of the American novelists of the 1960s and 70s who emphasized the metafictional aspects of their work, which some have suggested is a symptom of the decadence of the novel form. LETTERS presents itself as a kind of omnibus of threats to the novel, dramatizing them within its plot, in its authorial stance and through its formal structure. The novel reveals a deep distrust of the reading public, whose changing tastes, desires and attention spans it blames for the novel genre's weakened status. The novel's problematic handling of the explicitly gendered figure of the reader reveals this elitist response as at heart about how changing conceptions of the novel as a narrative technology pose a problem for notions of authorship and literary authority. Despite Barth's clear traditional commitments, however, his manipulation of these issues, being particularly idiosyncratic and focused on the bodily dimensions of reading, sets the stage for a widened and less overtly damning representation of the discourse.;Centering on the futurist 1980s science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, the dissertation's second chapter explores the implications of the fact that these popular fictions, which often portray "post-textual" societies, are themselves novels. An analysis of the first cyberpunk novel, William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), and its sequel Count Zero (1986), reads these texts as grappling, through their depiction of the media culture of a networked surveillance society, with the sense that the novel may no longer be adequate to the complexities of the world as it is becoming. This futurist perspective blinds cyberpunk to the fact that its idealistic conceptions of the media of the future are rooted in older discourses of power and control, which the novels are thus unable to avoid reproducing.;The third chapter is a study of a phenomenon known as steampunk, a radical fan culture and art/engineering movement that grew up around a small cluster of madcap neo-Victorian scientific fantasy novels. In its self-proclaimed "non-Luddite critique" of technological progress, steampunk, by means of its imagined counter-historical narratives, short-circuits the entrenched opposition between traditional forms and new media that characterizes Barth and Gibson's novels. Reading the core steampunk texts and several related novels, notably Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995), through the lens of the wider culture they have engendered, I consider the possibility of understanding the problems of contemporary fiction and of modern communications technologies as springing from a single source, namely the persistence of teleological narratives that focus on utility and thus tend to dismiss the complexity, irreducibility and objecthood that constitute the work itself.;Picking up the several threads of these three analyses, the dissertation's conclusion draws on scholarship on the gothic to demonstrate that the ironic distance favored by these novels and their fans masks a radical instability underlying the categories through which we understand and enjoy narrative media. A reading of postmodern horror fiction and film, focusing on Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental haunted-house novel House of Leaves (2000), reveals a repressed fear of artistic productions when regarded as complex material artifacts rather than simply conduits for the communicative will of their creators. It thus becomes clear that the discourse on the death of the novel may be understood as aimed not at the preservation of traditional literary values, but at the protection of our awareness of the permeable boundary between media forms and subjective human experience. Idealist conceptions of media, whether old or new, can and have been used to efface the distancing materiality of this boundary and to thus allow structures of power to transgress the individual will. In its irreducible physicality and relatively clunky "interface," the continued presence of the novel stands as a pointed reminder of the complex interactions of body, text and mind, with the potential to complicate and disrupt discourses of seamless communication and control. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
