Person, thing, place: Realism and postmodern realism in contemporary American fiction

This dissertation explores the embattled state of storytelling in late-twentieth-century American fiction and criticism. If a postmodern lesson is that no act of storytelling is “innocent” from an exercise of power, a staunch realist lesson may be that even “tainted” storytelling is an indispensable means of generating narrative knowledge. I propose the heuristic usefulness of “postmodern realism” in describing the conflict that takes place between the aesthetic ideals and practices of realism and those of postmodernism. It is a conflict between an imitative aesthetic and an anti-imitative one; between the realist impulse to narrate and the postmodern suspicion of emplotment; between the Aristotelian view of mimesis as a “healthy” and “natural” imperative forming the basis of all art, and the Platonic view of mimesis as a dangerous, “poisonous” illusionism; and between the realist politics of the common and the postmodern the politics of difference. In particular, I focus on the making of the subject in three areas of contemporary American fiction—the “ethnic” in Asian American fiction, the “woman” in fictions of female experience, and the “machine” in fictions of technology. In moments of representational conflict over the subject marked by the “difference” of ethnicity, gender, or non-human, postmodern realism aesthetically enacts the contemporary contestations over notions of identity, agency, knowledge, and subjectivity. Using theories of narratology, feminism, ethnicity, and technology, I argue that the contradictory operations of postmodern realism are ultimately revelatory of the normative “real” that dictates the representation of “difference” in contemporary American fiction.