| This dissertation illustrates the anti-rational impulse in three exemplary postmodern American fictions---Donald Barthelme's Snow White (1967), Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973). These fictions deploy various "anti-rational" strategies to confuse, disorient, and perhaps even terrorize readers. In these fictions, standard time and space are compressible; verifiable facts turn into the fantastic; autonomous individuals become automatons that can be anatomized, scattered, and reassembled; and events often occur with neither clear causes nor consequences. I argue that such fiction attacks our rational way of knowing the world. Most accounts of postmodernism conceive it as a departure from realist and to a lesser extent, modernist art; and they tend, however, to overlook the way these fictions mount a "Luddite" attack on our basic epistemological and ontological assumptions. Working within the general framework of existing accounts of postmodernism, this study resituates the focus of these studies by revealing how intensely postmodern writing attacks our rational epistemic machinery, tearing apart our assumptions about language, time and space, personhood, factuality, and causality.;Chapter 1 contextualizes the anti-rational impulse of postmodern fiction in various discourses on postmodernism and postwar reality. I argue that the anti-rational impulse of postmodern fiction is a critical response to postwar social reality. Chapter 2 shows how Barthelme's novel attacks familiar notions of progress, efficiency, and selfhood. Chapter 3 centers on how Coover's novel attacks the rational values of historical necessity and factuality through fictionalizing the Rosenberg case. Chapter 4 discusses how Pynchon's novel attacks our way of knowing the world by simultaneously presenting a rational technocracy and an ecology of charisma.;In all of these fictions, any rational explanation is rendered difficult. |
