A postmodernism of reconstruction: The treatment of history and the fantastic in contemporary fiction

This dissertation addresses the debate on postmodernism's political function. Because theorists tend to conflate postmodernism with poststructuralist thinking, two extreme interpretations of postmodern politics emerge: either postmodernism offers a political critique because its anti-narrative stance subverts dominant ideology, or, conversely, postmodernism is politically impotent because it stresses only its own aesthetics and hence reinforces the status quo. Both positions need to be examined critically because both exaggerate the extent to which postmodern fiction rejects "traditional" concerns; rather, this fiction neither refuses all claims to representation nor returns to a strictly realist mode of representation.;Theorists of postmodern fantastic literature include under the rubric of the "fantastic" what they see as postmodernism's tendency to eschew the category of "reality" itself. This tendency, which has been labeled a "generalized fantastic," coincides with the way postmodernism and poststructuralism have been conflated. The project illustrates the difference between the "generalized fantastic" and an historically engaged use of fantastic devices by contrasting Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire with Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Since Pale Fire enacts poststructural concepts such as the deferral of meaning, Nabokov ultimately stresses textuality over "reality." In contrast, Kundera uses fantastic devices to assert the primacy of social actuality.;The subsequent chapters examine how other postmodern novelists likewise use the fantastic to question a world-view which imposes closed narratives in a variety of cultural contexts. A discussion of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea focuses on the link between traditional narrative forms and patriarchal domination. The treatment of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel extends this inquiry by exploring how Thomas's fictionalized Freud, like Murdoch's narrator, constructs a female character's subjectivity through an interpretive narrative. Finally, the last chapter focuses on Toni Morrison's Beloved and explores the postmodern treatment of history in an African-American context, arguing that multicultural authors whose background includes an oral tradition use self-conscious narrative strategies to preserve marginalized cultural traditions and restore devalued historical knowledge. Like the other authors, Morrison's use of the fantastic undermines reductive narrative forms at the same time that it re-establishes postmodernism's relation to social history.