The dissonant reconciliation of the avant-garde

My dissertation contends that Theodor Adorno's theory of aesthetics reveals how avant-garde fiction can instantiate a form of cognition that can liberate the human mind from programmatic instrumentality. Avant-garde fiction's resistance to conceptual subordination produces a mimetic experience in the audience that enables conceptual understanding to serve particular existents. That mimetic experience can seal the breach between reason and material existence that the ascendancy of instrumental reason seemed to render inescapable (as Adorno and Max Horkheimer explain in Dialectic of Enlightenment). Adorno's category of reconciliation provides the key to my approach to avant-garde fiction.;Chapter One traces an awareness of the inherent nihilism of Western rationalism to St. Augustine to illustrate that the contemporary avant-garde inherits its project from antiquity and contrasts Augustine's theological solution with Adorno's secular one. Examining Augustine's work also helps distinguish Adorno's employment of theological resources with Walter Benjamin's.;Chapter Two examines Jean-Francois Lyotard's misunderstanding of Adornian reconciliation to demonstrate that Adorno offers a rational way to transcend the excesses of rationalism. To demonstrate that works adhering to traditional aesthetic forms prove socially affirmative, I examine Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. I then reveal how Samuel Beckett's negation of conventional forms in Endgame compels mimetic reason.;Chapter Three explores the first and last novels in Beckett's trilogy to reveal how a dialectical tradition of the avant-garde inherits a theological project. By contrasting Adorno's reasons for valorizing the avant-garde with Georg Lukacs' denunciations of it, I explain how avant-garde novels manifest their own civic identities.;Chapter Four reveals how Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew declares an end to modernism while also reactivating the concept of modernism through parody, precisely what Fredric Jameson declared impossible. Against Jameson's contentions about a totalizing postmodernism, I argue that Sorrentino's novel manifests resistance to a reified culture.;Chapter Five examines William Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own to reveal how the war between philosophy and art that Plato launched can be ended. I explore how Gaddis' novel suggests but undermines identities with ancient and modernist material to compel a cognitive process suggestive of what justice can be for a culture without absolutes.