A book of her own: Postmodern practices in contemporary American women's experimental literature (Louise Erdrich, Lorrie Moore, Carole Maso, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Ishmael Reed)

My dissertation contends that contemporary American women's experimental literature is redefining the ways in which postmodernism, as literary practice, is a politically and aesthetically viable course for marginalized groups needing alternative modes of literary production. Focusing on Louise Erdrich, Lorrie Moore, and Carole Maso, I examine the purposeful employment of characteristically postmodern strategies in their fiction. I open the dissertation by offering a working definition of literary postmodernism by reviewing postmodern literary theory and exploring three works of the male postmodernist canon---Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Nabokov, Barth, and Reed felt compelled to enact a shift in the way American fiction was written because the received forms of the past did not accommodate their postmodern sensibilities. The explosion of conventional form in their selected texts, which stemmed from a mistrust of totalizing grand narratives, has since been taken up and successfully adapted by Erdrich, Moore, and Maso, who utilize postmodernism for specific political reasons. Writing against the received traditions of American literary realism and modernism, against grand narratives that lay claim to supremacy, universality or legitimacy, these three writers are engaged in re-imagining the conventional novel and how that might function to liberate voices-in-the-margin. Through the use of petite narratives, each experiments with the novel in order to provide a space where traditional concepts of identity can be deconstructed and reconstructed. Erdrich writes against the grand narrative of Native American identity in Tracks (1988), Moore writes against the grand narrative of female identity in Anagrams (1986), and Maso writes against the grand narrative of identity in the modern novel and, for that matter, against the modern novel itself (as a static, coherent, unified entity) in The Art Lover (1990). All three create experimental narratives that are indeterminate, dynamic, and open-ended to illustrate the tenuous nature of fiction and, consequently, identity construction. Analyzing these selected works in the context of postmodern literary practice, my dissertation provides a vocabulary with which to speak about contemporary American women's experimental fiction and realizes the potential of postmodern experimentation for marginalized writers.