The American origins of the postmodern self

This dissertation explores the metaphor of self-fragmentation in works by three "postmodern" writers. The postmodern, fragmented self is the latest stage in the evolution of the idea of the self in American writing. Novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Philip K. Dick explore such fragmented selves. Besides sharing an emphasis on the fragmented self, I argue that each author is concerned with the idea of vocation--the need to form an identity established around one's life's work, mission, or calling--and with a connection between the concept of the nation and the representative self. Indeed, vocation and nation are linked by a frequent invocation of national mission as the legitimation for personal vocation. In treating three notions of "fragmented" subjectivity and linking them to crises in the idea of vocation, this dissertation describes the complex relations between contemporary fiction's representation of fragmented or exploding identities and a contrary belief in a sense of personal vocation and national mission.;The novels discussed in the dissertation are Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Morrison's Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987), and Dick's early science fiction novel Time Out of Joint (1959). In these works, ideas of vocation and national mission are still active, despite a postmodern sensibility that would fragment the self or cast it into an inhospitable landscape. I explore the idea of the fragmented or exploding self as it appears in these works and as it is linked to the expression of ideas of vocation and national identity beginning in Puritan writings by Thomas Hooker and Cotton Mather and developed in writings by Enlightenment figures Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. I also extend this discussion of identity to more recent deployments of notions of vocation and humiliation in Perry Miller's discussion of the "errand into the wilderness," in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's theory of a black matriarchy and the debate inspired by his report, and in Fredric Jameson's conception of a schizophrenic postmodern identity.