| This dissertation develops a theoretical method of psychogeographical literary criticism and attempts to test it on the specific genre of postmodern fictions of detection, and on a pair of specific texts of that genre, The New York Trilogy (1990) by Paul Auster, and London Fields (1989) by Martin Amis. Amis is included deliberately and specifically for his transatlantic influence, since psychogeography as a practice and philosophy is more advanced in the United Kingdom.;Setting and spatiality have long taken a back seat in the analysis of fiction to their cousins: plot, character, and theme. However, a focus on fiction through the lens of "psychogeography," defined broadly as the nexus of consciousness and the physical environment as "read" by the senses, reveals the significance of spatiality as the ground for events and character. The study employs postmodern theories of literature, knowledge, and ontology from thinkers such as Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, David Herman, and Brian McHale, among others.;The psychogeographical method unearths a number of important narratological points. First, the organic human viewpoint, including the massive power of the human brain, can no longer be neglected in understanding literature. The power of the human observer in space elucidates the multiple and bundled nature of the fictional point of view, the importance of the body as part of setting, the facile ability of the mind to switch between character viewpoints and heterocosms, and the constructed, disseminated, fragmented, and simulated nature of human observation of space.;Postmodern fictions of detection as a genre are discovered to be reliant on their troping of traditional epistemological stories of detection with ontological moves that transgress zones. The New York Trilogy contains an incipient psychogeographical agenda in its consideration of the physical and natural world beyond its program of linguistic deconstruction, leading to an "ontological deconstruction." London Fields is also grounded in a psychogeographical mode, built around an understanding of the corporeal nature of human experience of reality as marked with innocence and experience, and the body as a pre-apocalyptic corpse.;The conclusion considers the post-postmodern mood as defined by a psychogeographical Weltanschauung, an omniontological world of worlds. |
