| This dissertation attempts to stage a creative encounter between a Deleuzian theory of the event and postmodern fictional narratives. More specifically, it situates subjectivities represented in postmodern texts in relation with concepts of chance, choice, and change. I aim to demonstrate how works by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Edmund White, and Nicholson Baker approach the subject as an "encountering" at the surface between self and other, inside and outside, and before and after. The postmodern imperative of interconnectivity dramatizes a potentialization of subjectivity through what Brian Massumi calls the event's "openness to being otherwise" ("Like a Thought" xxxiv). Accounting for such openness, particularly in novels rife with repetition, requires a critical appraisal of the present as a changeful operation, where subjectivities are properly expressive of their singular becomings along the lines of their capacities to affect and be affected. It is ultimately my project's contention that chance and choice themselves need to be rigorously theorized in order that we better understand the mechanisms of containment and resistance, but most importantly the conditions for emancipatory change within the postmodernism of a new millenium, and beyond. |
