POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND POST-MODERN LITERATURE: A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO 'GRAVITY'S RAINBOW' (PYNCHON, CULTURE, FICTION, SOCIOLOGY)

In this dissertation, I hypothesize that there is a unique consciousness that has arisen in America and other highly industrialized societies beginning with the turn of the century, but especially since World War II. The focus is on the presence of self-referentiality. Thomas Pynchon's text Gravity's Rainbow is analyzed as an exemplar of this cultural consciousness, in the form of a novel, or what I term "reflexive fiction." Reflexive fiction is not strictly a "type" of fiction: as it deals frequently with the nonrational, it defies categorization. Self-referentiality, however, is unique to neither the twentieth century nor to fiction. The existence of ancient self-referential paradoxes has long been pondered and analyzed, for example, in the fields of mathematics and logic. What does appear to be unique to the "post-modern" condition is the shift in the metanarratives that occur in the science and culture of our day. My thesis is that there is a correlation between the metanarratives in such diverse areas as mathematics, logic, physics, fiction, and criticism that take the form of a self-referential critique. These metanarratives implicitly and explicitly challenge the dominant methodologies and metanarratives. The text can therefore no longer be read as a closed system: both author and reader are interrelated in a critical discourse. But the critical metanarratives themselves have experienced a crisis, and Pynchon and others are struggling for a new consciousness, a post-modern consciousness, whose critical self-referentiality is combined with a global awareness of how the new "world system" operates. This "metafictional" perspective signals a cultural companion of post-industrialized society and coincides with changes in the world economic order.