Siga este enlace para ver otros tipos de publicaciones sobre el tema: American fiction Postmodernism (Literature) Realism.
Tesis sobre el tema "American fiction Postmodernism (Literature) Realism"
Crea una cita precisa en los estilos APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard y otros
Consulte los 50 mejores tesis para su investigación sobre el tema "American fiction Postmodernism (Literature) Realism".
Junto a cada fuente en la lista de referencias hay un botón "Agregar a la bibliografía". Pulsa este botón, y generaremos automáticamente la referencia bibliográfica para la obra elegida en el estilo de cita que necesites: APA, MLA, Harvard, Vancouver, Chicago, etc.
También puede descargar el texto completo de la publicación académica en formato pdf y leer en línea su resumen siempre que esté disponible en los metadatos.
Explore tesis sobre una amplia variedad de disciplinas y organice su bibliografía correctamente.
1
Oxoby, Marc C. "American literary fiction in a televisual age /". abstract and full text PDF (free order & download UNR users only), 2005. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/dissertations/fullcit/3209131.
Texto completoResumen
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005."August, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-227). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.
2
Potkalitsky, Nicolas J. "Refracted Realism and the Ethical Dominant in Contemporary American Fiction". The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563283222402333.
Texto completo
3
Harker, Ben. "Critical oppositions : realism, postmodernism and the reception of contemporary American fiction". Thesis, University of York, 2000. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10885/.
Texto completo
4
Coughran, Christopher John. "Literary ecology and the fiction of American postmodernism /". [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18752.pdf.
Texto completo
5
Mason, Francis Andrew. "Narrative and postmodernism : politics and contemporary American fiction". Thesis, University of Southampton, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.386656.
Texto completo
6
Mathews, Peter David 1975. "Strategies of realism : realist fiction and postmodern theory". Monash University, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8656.
Texto completo
7
Kavanagh, Matthew. "Second nature: American fiction in the age of capitalist realism". Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=18440.
Texto completoResumen
Second Nature: American fiction in the age of capitalist realism During the 1990s the global triumph of capitalism has made it, paradoxically, all the more difficult to see. Not only is capitalism increasingly derealized (e.g. cyber-capital), its very ubiquity renders it unremarkable, to the point that it appears a neutral part of objective reality. This dissertation examines how American writers have responded to the 'spectrality' that results from the mediation of everyday experience through the market. I discuss formal strategies in the work of Bret Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, William Gibson and others to represent the unrepresentable: what Slavoj ?i?ek calls the impersonal and anonymous function of the global market mechanism. Chapter one provides a formalist reading of Ellis's American Psycho, a novel whose claustrophobic narrative represents the world of late capitalism at the level of its concept ("This is not an exit"). Lacking any sense of a horizon, Patrick Bateman experiences the world as radically closed. Because he is incapable of recognizing an elsewhere, he cannot imagine an otherwise; demonstrating no awareness of antagonism, Patrick acts it out in increasingly brutal and frenetic outbursts of violence. Where American Psycho presents Patrick's sadistic violence as a symptom, my second chapter suggests that Fight Club's consensual beatings treat violence as a fetish. Palahniuk's novel aims to domesticate antagonism by staging it as a piece of masochist theatre. Its limits, however, are painfully apparent. Fight Club's strategy of fetishistic disavowal has pathological effects, namely, the narrator's split personality. Chapter three discusses DeLillo's critique of cyber-capital: a vision of the market as a perpetual motion machine, one capable of circulating solely on its own momentum without reference to anything beyond itself. Inevitably, though, antagonism reasserts itself in the form of a collateral crisis—the subject of CosmopoDeuxième nature : la fiction américaine à l'époque du réalisme capitaliste Au cours des années 1990, le triomphe mondial du capitalisme a paradoxalement rendu les choses plus difficiles à voir. Le capitalisme est non seulement de plus en plus déréalisé (p. ex. : cybercapital), son ubiquité même le rend imperceptible, à un point tel qu'il semble être un élément neutre de la réalité objective. La présente dissertation aborde comment les auteurs américains ont réagi à la « spectralité » qui fait en sorte que l'expérience quotidienne est de plus en médiatisée au sein du marché. J'examine les stratégies formelles des œuvres de Bret Ellis, Chuck, Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, William Gibson et autres auteurs afin de représenter ce qui ne peut être représenté : ce que Slavoj ?i?ek appelle la fonction impersonnelle et anonyme des rouages du marché mondial. Le premier chapitre se veut une interprétation formelle de l'œuvre American Psycho d'Ellis, un roman dont la narration claustrophobe représente le monde du capitalisme tardif au niveau de son concept (« This is not an exit »). Souffrant d'un manque de perspective, Patrick Bateman vit une expérience du monde très fermée. Puisqu'il est incapable de reconnaître ailleurs, il ne peut s'imaginer autrement; faisant preuve d'un manque de connaissance de l'antagonisme, Patrick présente des excès de brutalité frénétique de plus en plus violents. Bien qu'American Psycho présente la violence sadique de Patrick comme étant un symptôme, mon deuxième chapitre laisse entendre que les raclées consensuelles de Fight Club traitent la violence en tant que fétiche. Le roman de Palahniuk vise à domestiquer l'antagonisme en en faisant une pièce de théâtre masochiste. Toutefois, ses limites sont affreusement évidentes. La stratégie de Fight Club de manque de foi pathologique a une incidence, entre autres sur le dédoublement de personnalité du narrateur. Le troisième chapitre aborde
8
Stanford, Amanda Theresa. "Outsized reality : how 'magical realism' hijacked modern Latin American fiction". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7847.
Texto completoResumen
Creative Portion abstract (75%): Literary Fiction Manuscript Souvenirs of the Revolution Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, betrayal, sexual deviance, rigid morality and a fatal subservience to moral correctness drives the Montelejos clan: complex and self-serving, innocent and deluded, larger than life, an illustrious family line in its final decline. Mariabella Montelejos, who tries to sell her only daughter for the price of a new carriage during the bloodiest part of the Revolution. Her daughter, Portensia Montelejos, who leaves her mother’s body to moulder in the front room after soldiers come at the point of a gun. Gloria Vasquez, celebrated beauty, practising witch, and tormentor of her step-sister, Teresa: ill, gullible, naive, awoken to her destiny by the surreal birth of her daughter. Paulina, a child who once communed with the holy, made an empty vessel by the abuse of her father – and revered as a living saint as she lies dying in a Pueblano convent. The men of the family, weak and susceptible to the mandates of their dying class, are no match for the machinations of such women. Evil abuser Ebner Collins, paralyzed by a jealous man’s bullet in the middle of the Sinai desert. Hernando Vasquez, cowed into marriage by the longing for his dead wife, Evelyn Cuthbert. Guiermo Fuentes de Solis, cuckolded husband. Jaime Vasquez, who hears voices and lives at the bottom of a bottle, unable to save his cousin Paulina. The Revolution is the beginning of the end for Montelejos, and the miraculous will be its undoing. Analytical Portion abstract (25%): An Outsized Reality: How “Magical Realism” Hijacked Modern Latin American Literature With the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Anos de Soledad in 1967, Latin American writing captured the world’s attention. Critics, readers, and imitators rushed to discuss and emulate this astounding novel. A whole genre of literature, “magical realism”, was popularized, and with it, critical discussion of its influences, history, genre limitations, and the sheer “imagination” it brought to the forefront of literary debate. In this thesis I will discuss the problems associated with “Western” critical analysis of Latin American writing, specifically as it seeks to define, without a proper context, the literature which draws life from the history and culture of Latin America and categorizes its literature without the cultural understanding required.
9
Flavell, Helen. "Writing-between : Australian and Canadian ficto-criticism /". Access via Murdoch University Digital Theses Project, 2005. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20051222.114143.
Texto completo
10
Eckman, John. "Confronting modernity : urbanization and American fiction, 1880-1930 /". Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9402.
Texto completo
11
Dale, Daniel. "Beyond the Textual: Multimodal Print Fiction, Postmodernism, and Digital Literacies". University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1522319323132118.
Texto completo
12
Kocela, Christopher. "Fetishism as historical practice in postmodern American fiction". Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38213.
Texto completoResumen
This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker
13
MILLER, JEFFREY WILLIAM. "NOVEL RESISTANCE: CULTURAL CAPITAL, SOCIAL FICTION, AND AMERICAN REALISM, 1861-1911". University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1023305969.
Texto completo
14
Christianson, Frank Q. "Realism and the cult of altruism : philanthropic fiction in nineteeth-century America and Britain /". View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3174588.
Texto completo
15
Dobozy, Tamas. "Towards a definition of dirty realism". Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ56533.pdf.
Texto completo
16
Mete, Baris. "Reconceptualisation Of Realism In British Postwar Fiction: The Cases Of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark And John Fowles". Phd thesis, METU, 2011. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613417/index.pdf.
Texto completoResumen
This study is about British postwar fiction and its canonical reception according to a special categorisation of the novelists who were publishing in Britain during the two decades after the end of the Second World War. The study emphasises that mainstream literary criticism of 1950s and &rsquo60s Britain tended to catalogue the novelists of this period according to a well-established dichotomy between tradition and innovation in which the traditional realist novels, the neorealist works of C. P. Snow, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis, were privileged over any other fictional work having modernist innovative characteristics. Therefore, the first published novels of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles, novelists belonging to today&rsquo
s postmodern canon, were first critically recognised as social realist works in Britain. One of the objects of this study is to demonstrate the shortcomings of this classification. Moreover, the main argument of the study is that none of these three novelists should have been classified as a traditional realist novelist. All of these three British postwar novelists were reconceptualising traditional realism by self-reflexively including the problem of representation as part of their conventional subject matters in their formal realist novels.
17
Sutton, Malcolm. "Ontologies of Community in Postmodernist American Fiction". Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20695.
Texto completoResumen
Using a number of structurally innovative novels from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as a basis for study, this dissertation examines the representation of communities in postmodernist American fiction. While novels have often been critically studied from the standpoint of the individual and society, here the often neglected category of community is put under scrutiny. Yet rather than considering it from a sociological point of view, which can potentially favour historical, economic or political grounds for community, this study focuses on the ontological binds formed between individual and community. On one level this study connects formal qualities of postmodernist novels to a representation of community – especially literary conventions from the past that are foregrounded in the present texts. On another level it interrogates the limits of the individual in relation to others – how we emerge from others, how we are discrete from others, how much we can actually share with others, at what cost we stay or break with the others who have most influenced us. The primary novels studied here, each of which is deeply invested in the community as a locus for ontological interrogation, are Robert Coover’s "Gerald’s Party" (1985) and "John’s Wife" (1996), Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Crystal Vision" (1981) and "Odd Number" (1985), Harry Mathews’s "Cigarettes" (1987), Joseph McElroy’s "Women and Men" (1987), and Toni Morrison’s "Paradise" (1997). Despite their varied representations of and attitudes toward the individual in community, these texts share a common spectre of American Romanticism that inflects how we read the possibility of community in the postmodernist period.
18
DeBrock, Jacob. "Behind Every Curtain is Another Trick:Narrative, Magic, and Trauma in In the Lake of the Woods". University of Toledo Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1513273387030866.
Texto completo
19
Dargue, Joseph W. "Heuristic Futures: Reading the Digital Humanities through Science Fiction". University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439301885.
Texto completo
20
Traub, Courtney Anne. "Romanticising crisis : digital revolution and ecological risk in late postmodern American fiction". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:adb4eb33-9053-402c-8322-bd55c915077f.
Texto completoResumen
This thesis probes how recent experimental American "crisis fictions" from authors including Mark Z. Danielewski, Kathryn Davis, and Evan Dara reformulate transatlantic Romantic literary debates about technological and environmental change. Arguing that such texts extend previously theorised ties between Romanticism and postmodernism, it identifies enduring ties between late-postmodern accounts of crisis and those of Romantic predecessors. Responding to the upheavals of digital revolution and ecological risks, these texts, published between 1995 and 2012, inventively engage several linchpin constructs in transatlantic Romantic writing: chiefly, the imagined supersession of subjective and temporal boundaries; a sense that the natural and non-human world is of crucial importance; and a reliance on idioms of sublimity to suggest the unrepresentability of the aforementioned crises. Although numerous critics have traced similarities between Romantic and postmodern modes, this thesis considers those resonances as deeper questions of cultural and literary history. It proposes to more carefully historicise the Romantic intellectual heritage in late postmodernism, identifying intermediating moments that inform contemporary accounts of crisis. It unearths how late postmodern technocultural and environmentalist imaginaries were always already Romantic. Deeply informed by countercultural, mid-century American movements and ideas that themselves drew significantly from transatlantic Romanticism, contemporary figurations of upheaval, syncretically figured in mid-century publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog, are indebted to both Romantic and neo-Romantic heritages. This thesis additionally argues that the digital revolution and unprecedented environmental crisis act as pressures on postmodern literary practices from the mid-1990s onward. Digital speeding and a looming sense of ecological risk register as even earlier crises than the terrorist attacks of "9-11", requiring a recalibration of what the postmodern might mean and do. Crucially, in their preoccupation with embodied realities and environments, including natural ones, the contemporary narratives examined here diverge from the assumption that the natural world bears little importance in postmodern fields of representation. Finally, many recent literary experiments figure themselves as materially participating in the technological and medial systems they respond to; formal experimentation is, accordingly, another centre of interest. This research examines how select texts deploy formal strategies to "materially instantiate" Romantic ideas, to borrow Katherine Hayles's term. Although numerous critics have suggested that Romantic discourse permeates digital cultural imaginaries, existing scholarship devotes little attention to how formal experimentation intersects with narrative strategies.
21
Geary, James P. "Social Realism in Central America: the Modern Short Story Translated". Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1215444512.
Texto completo
22
MacLeod, Alexander. "Between a rock and a soft place : postmodern-regionalism in Canadian and American fiction". Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19527.
Texto completoResumen
This study calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary regionalist literary theory. It argues that traditional models of the discourse have been too heavily influenced by nineteenth century realist aesthetics and political ideologies. Because most scholars continue to interpret regionalist texts according to a resolutely empirical reading of geography, literary regionalism has fallen out of touch with the new kinds of "unrealistic," generic landscapes that now dominate North American culture in the postindustrial era. Drawing heavily on recent work by postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michael Dear and Derek Gregory, this project updates regionalist theory by "re-placing" the artificially stabilized reading of geography that dominated the nineteenth century with a more self-consciously spatialized reading of what Soja calls our contemporary "real-and-imagined" places. By grafting together traditional regionalism and postmodern spatial theory we improve on both contributing discourses. In a "postmodern-regionalist" literary criticism, traditional regionalism sheds its reputation for theoretical naivete, while the elusive abstractions of postmodern theory gain a real-world referent, and a specific geographical index. When we "read postmodernism regionally" - - when we aggressively interrogate where this kind of fiction comes from and the places it represents - - we realize that the canons of postmodern fiction in Canada and the United States have been influenced by two very different spatial epistemologies. Rather than being "determined" by their real geographies, Canadian and American postmodernism have been more directly influenced by two different readings of geography. Works by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo demonstrate that American postmodernism often interprets social space according to what Henri Lefebvre calls the idealistic "the illusion of transparency," while texts by Canadian postmodernists such as Robert Kroetsch, Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe tend to fall under Lefebvre's more materialistic "illusion of opacity." The ambiguous figure of Douglas Coupland - - a Canadian writer most critics treat as an American - - puts the spatial conventions of postmodernism in both countries in sharp relief. In an American postmodernism, dominated by generic suburban settings, regions will almost always be seen as imaginary projections, while in a Canadian postmodernism, dominated by the Prairies, regions will almost always retain some sense of their material reality.
23
Doyle, Darrin Michael. "The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions". University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1155575561.
Texto completo
24
Pettersson, Bo. "The world according to Kurt Vonnegut moral paradox and narrative form /". Åbo [Finland] : Åbo Akademi University Press, 1994. http://books.google.com/books?id=lXlbAAAAMAAJ.
Texto completo
25
Moses, Geoffrey. "THE LACK OF A FUTURE:UTOPIAN ABSENCE AND LONGING IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST- CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION". Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1365784335.
Texto completo
26
Crotty, Tammy J. "Left of mainstream : genre fiction and its ability to transcend formula". Virtual Press, 2005. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1313073.
Texto completoResumen
This collection of short stories studies the elements of genre fiction and applies them to literary fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror have specific manners in which they speak to an audience. By using these elements, for example the desensitization of the current generation of readers to most horrors, an author can demonstrate the core of the human relationship to pain, faith, or hope. Though some genre fiction seems to fit certain formulas, there are also horror or science fiction stories which do not fit a conventional mold. This collection sets forth to break away from genre fiction conventions. Also, this project utilizes the genre of magical realism, which is the medium between genre fiction and literary fiction, by using fantastic events within a mundane setting to emphasize the author's ideas. By bridging the gap between genres, magical realism reveals how interrelated the elements of all genres are. In this study stories use magical and horrifying events while maintaining an intention beyond the formulaic thrill. Therefore, genre fiction can have a place amongst literature.Department of English
27
Meals, Nathaniel Jeffrey. "Among the Lost: Fictions". Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1522933463551811.
Texto completo
28
Myrick, Emily. ""Perhaps the Bear Heard Fleur Calling, and Answered": The Significance of Magical Realism in Louise Erdrich's Tracks as a Postcolonial Novel". Digital Archive @ GSU, 2010. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/76.
Texto completoResumen
In her novel Tracks, Louise Erdrich tells the story of a band of Anishinaabe early in the twentieth century. Through the two narrators, one a tribal elder and the other a mixedblood who eventually abandons the traditions of the tribe, the novel offers two divergent perspectives of the events that take place as the government divests the tribe of its land. The conflicting perceptions of these occurrences, which are magical realist in nature, underscore the conflict within the tribe to maintain tradition in the face of the ever-increasing influence of European settlers. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the perceptions at odds with one another in order to shed new light on the significance of Erdrich’s use of magical realism in the text. Highlighting Erdrich’s engagement with magical realism, a largely postcolonial literary device, will hopefully expand notions of identity and authenticity within the Native American literary tradition.
29
Guzman-Medrano, Gael. "Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction by the Turn of the 21st Century". FIU Digital Commons, 2013. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/917.
Texto completoResumen
Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts the persistent war against social injustice, violence, criminal activities, as well as the new technological advances and economic challenges of the post-war neo-liberal order that still prevails throughout the region.
Drawing on postmodernism theory proposed by Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon and Brian MacHale, I argued that the new Central American literary paradigm exemplified by Sergio Ramirez’s El cielo llora por mí, Dante Liano’s El hombre de Montserrat, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and La diabla en el espejo, and Ramon Fonseca Mora’s El desenterrador, are highly structured novels that display the characteristic marks of postmodern cultural expression through their ambivalence, which results from the coexistence of multiple styles and conflicting ideologies and narrative trends. The novels analyzed in this dissertation make use of a noir sensitivity in which corruption, decay and disillusionment are at their core to portray the events that shaped the modern history of the countries from which they emerge. The revolutionary armed struggle, the state of terror imposed by military regimes and the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, are among the major themes of these contemporary works of fiction, which I have categorized as perfect examples of the post-revolutionary post-modernism Central American detective fiction at the turn of the 21st century.
30
Delfino, Andrew Steven. "Becoming the new man in post-postmodernist fiction : portrayals of masculinities in David Foster Wallace's Infinite jest and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight club /". unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04202007-113340/.
Texto completoResumen
Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Christopher Kocela, committee chair; Paul J. Voss, Calvin Thomas, committee members. Electronic text (96 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 16, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-96).
31
Plicka, Joseph B. "Stories for the Mongrel Heart". Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1304542382.
Texto completo
32
Hemm, Ashley N. "“In my fiction I never say anything which is not absolutely true”: Reassessing Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Literary Realism". ScholarWorks@UNO, 2015. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2083.
Texto completoResumen
Despite her immense popularity in the nineteenth century, Constance Fenimore Woolson's reputation dwindled substantially in the decades which followed. While her works have been rediscovered over the past thirty years, they are often categorized as regionalist writing or, in the case of her penultimate novel, Jupiter Lights, melodrama. What many fail to consider, however, is that Woolson very much considered herself a realist author, and may have been remembered as such were it not for the influence of William Dean Howells and his peers, whose very narrow parameters for literary realism excluded Woolson, among others. Unfortunately, those parameters are still with us today, and exclude many authors whose realities do not conform to Howells’s original scope. In this thesis, I examine the biographical and historical context for Woolson’s lesser-known works, arguing that they demonstrate a type of empathetic realism which must not be ignored by current scholars of American literature.
33
King, John Paul. "The Sad Kitchen and Song of Neon: Two Novellas". TopSCHOLAR®, 2019. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/3149.
Texto completoResumen
The Sad Kitchen, a work of magical realism, tells the story of a saintly woman named Helen. She opens an underground kitchen where people who feel guilty can come to be comforted and nurtured in the middle of the night. The story is, at its heart, a reflection on forgiveness. Song of Neon, also of the magical realist genre, is an existential work about a nurse named Avery and her husband, an owl house maker, named Saul. Their town, Milliard, is under a trance. Avery and Saul struggle with their respective identities in the quiet, vacuum the town has become.
34
Squance, Joe P. "The Hole: Stories". Miami University / OhioLINK, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1154536794.
Texto completo
35
Langendorfer, Anne Therese. "Feeling Real: Emotion in the Novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James". The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1499858033212105.
Texto completo
36
Figueroa, José Antonio. "Realismo mágico, vallenato y vIolencia politica en el Caribe Colombiano". Connect to Electronic Thesis (ProQuest) Connect to Electronic Thesis (CONTENTdm), 2007. http://worldcat.org/oclc/453505700/viewonline.
Texto completo
37
He, Wei. "The First Party". Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1376047028.
Texto completo
38
Williams, Eleanor. "The Divine and Miss Johanna". Ohio : Ohio University, 2006. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1145555978.
Texto completo
39
Vogtman, Jacqueline. "The Preservation of Objects Lost at Sea". Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1268930284.
Texto completo
40
Richards, James. "Sugar Skulls". Digital Archive @ GSU, 2006. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/8.
Texto completoResumen
This dissertation is a collection of four long short stories about contemporary Americans written in the mode of psychological realism. “Bare Knuckles” depicts the struggles of a young man trying to “make it” in the world of illegal boxing. “ZOSO” focuses on the breakdown of an upper-middleclass family forced to move from the rustbelt to the “New South.” In “Dusted,” a man ill-equipped to navigate through the adult world turns to substance abuse and violence as a “way out.” “Sugar Skulls” explores the fascination with death in the punk rock world.
41
Northcraft, Teresa Ann. "E Unibus Omnem: New Sincerity and Transcendence in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest". University of Toledo Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1544614667543305.
Texto completo
42
Abramowitz, Rachel I. "Donald Barthelme and 'Not-Knowing', 1964-1987". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c183d6a9-86f9-4337-b6c5-4efdc6dc0731.
Texto completoResumen
This thesis argues that Barthelme's major 1985 essay "Not-Knowing" contains within its title Barthelme's central artistic idea, and that not-knowing informs both the subject of his fiction and his philosophy of art. This study will be the first critical treatment of Barthelme that positions his work from beginning to end in terms of the dimensions of not-knowing that came out of his own reading in psychology, art theory, philosophy, religion, and education, offering coherent readings of content and suggesting the ways in which content relates to form. The Introduction explores the origins of Barthelme's ideas of not-knowing, paying special attention to the influence of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett on Barthelme's first characterisations of not-knowing, creativity, and reception. The first chapter gives an in-depth reading of Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme's first collection of stories. Though Barthelme had not yet begun to formally theorise his ideas of not-knowing, they were already latent in Come Back, Dr. Caligari's characterisation of psychological experience, specifically in relation to anxiety, boredom, and interpretation. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Harold Rosenbergâs theories of the visual arts, and especially collage, which Barthelme encountered while co-editing Location magazine with Rosenberg in the early 1960s, address form and not-knowing, and how Barthelme treats these issues in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Amateurs (1976). The third chapter shows how Barthelme's university studies in 19th century philosophy, especially Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony (1841) and Kierkegaard's treatment of Schlegel in that treatise, inform his concern with irony, both in theory and practice, in City Life (1970), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Chapter Four argues that Kierkegaard's theories of education and religion in Either/Or (1843) and The Present Age (1846), as well as the contemporary incarnation of Dewey's ideas of progressive education, both had a profound influence on Barthelme's ideas about the way a society is educated into knowingness, the artist's aspiration toward not-knowing, and the validity of religion in the postmodern world. The conclusion to the thesis reexamines the Introduction's argument about literary influence through a brief reading of The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme is recognised as one of the most important American postmodernist writers, and yet there has been relatively little critical treatment of his oeuvre. The major books that address Barthelme's work, which include Jerome Klinkowitz's Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (1975) and Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition (1991), as well as Alan Wilde's Horizons of Assent (1981) and Stanley Trachtenberg's Understanding Donald Barthelme (1990), belong to a two-decade span of classifying writers such as Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth using a limited set of ideas about postmodernism that were interesting as theory at the time, but did little to explore the actual literary, philosophical, and aesthetic content and contexts of these writers' works (with the possible exception of Pynchon). This thesis aims to rescue Barthelme from now-hackneyed ways of talking about postmodernism, which include lumping various aesthetic techniques under the rubric of "metafiction," claiming that the era's sole interest is in surface at the expense of depth, and that the dependence upon clichés is a deliberate expression of artistic exhaustion.
43
Sipley, Tristan Hardy 1980. "Second nature: Literature, capital and the built environment, 1848--1938". Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10911.
Texto completoResumen
x, 255 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation examines transatlantic, and especially American, literary responses to urban and industrial change from the 1840s through the 1930s. It combines cultural materialist theory with environmental history in order to investigate the interrelationship of literature, economy, and biophysical systems. In lieu of a traditional ecocritical focus on wilderness preservation and the accompanying literary mode of nature writing, I bring attention to reforms of the "built environment" and to the related category of social problem fiction, including narratives of documentary realism, urban naturalism, and politically-oriented utopianism. The novels and short stories of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and Mike Gold offer an alternative history of environmental writing, one that foregrounds the interaction between nature and labor. Through a strategy of "literal reading" I connect the representation of particular environments in the work of these authors to the historical situation of actual spaces, including the western Massachusetts forest of Melville's "Tartarus of Maids," the Virginia factory town of Davis's Iron Mills, the Midwestern hinterland of Sinclair's The Jungle, and the New York City ghetto of Gold's Jews without Money. Even as these texts foreground the class basis of environmental hazard, they simultaneously display an ambivalence toward the physical world, wavering between pastoral celebrations and gothic vilifications of nature, and condemning ecological destruction even as they naturalize the very socio-economic forces responsible for such calamity. Following Raymond Williams, I argue that these contradictory treatments of nature have a basis in the historical relationship between capitalist society and the material world. Fiction struggles to contain or resolve its implication in the very culture that destroys the land base it celebrates. Thus, the formal fissures and the anxious eruptions of nature in fiction relate dialectically to the contradictory position of the ecosystem itself within the regime of industrial capital. However, for all of this ambivalence, transatlantic social reform fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century provides a model for an environmentally-oriented critical realist aesthetic, an aesthetic that retains suspicion toward representational transparency, and yet simultaneously asserts the didactic, ethical, and political functions of literature.
Committee in charge: William Rossi, Chairperson, English; Henry Wonham, Member, English; Enrique Lima, Member, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; John Foster, Outside Member, Sociology
44
Prelorentzou, Renato Brighenti. "À sombra de um livro: história e ficção na leitura de \'Amphitryon\', de Ignacio Padilla". Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-30072008-112522/.
Texto completoResumen
Este trabalho explora três possíveis significados para o \"romance histórico\" Amphitryon, de Ignacio Padilla, e, a partir disso, estuda modos de interação entre história e ficção. O primeiro sentido analisa-o como um livro na história, uma obra marcante que se escreveu sob o contexto de um manifesto célebre por tentar reorganizar a tradição literária latinoamericana. O segundo sentido toma-o como um livro de história, um romance que não só se aproxima de um gênero literário afeito aos fatos historiográficos, mas que, sobretudo, articula conteúdos históricos, literários e culturais sob formas narrativas que também derivam do século passado. O terceiro sentido, finalmente, o lê como um livro da história, uma narrativa que, pela disposição de relatos e narradores, simula o próprio mecanismo do fazer histórico. Conduzindo essas argumentações estão os princípios da dialética formaabertura e da interação autor-obra-leitor, derivados de Umberto Eco, a noção de leitura e escritura como forma de conhecer, cara a Jorge Luis Borges, e o paradigma indiciário, de Carlo Ginzburg. A tentativa final é fazer de um exercício de crítica literária uma reflexão sobre a história. Para tanto, insiste-se na analogia entre verificação e interpretação de dados e as mediações livro-leitor-leituras, e adota-se a \"espiral de leituras\" historicizadas como modo operativo que aproxima discursos ficcionais e discursos históricos, esboçando-se, então, paralelos e limites nos percursos da produção historiográfica e da produção ficcional ao longo do século XX.This work explores three possible meanings for the \"historical novel\" Amphitryon, of Ignacio Padilla, and, from this, it studies ways of interaction between history and fiction. The first meaning analyzes it as a book in history, a remarkable work that was written under the context of a manifest notable for trying to reorganize the Latin American literary tradition. The second meaning takes it as a history book, a novel that not only comes close to the historiographies facts, but, above all, it articulates historical, literary and cultural contents under narrative forms that are also drawn from the last century. The third meaning, finally, reads it as a book of history, a narrative that, for the disposal of stories and narrators, simulates the mechanism of history. As a guide line for these arguments, there are the principles of the dialectic form-opening and the interaction author-work-reader, derived from Umberto Eco, the notion of reading and writing as forms of knowledge, from Jorge Luis Borges, and the evidential paradigm, of Carlo Ginzburg. The final attempt is to make a reflection on history from a literary critical exercise. In such way, one must insist on the analogy between verification and interpretation of data and the relations bookreader- readings, and adopts the historic \"spiral of readings\" as an operative way that approaches fiction and historical speeches, and so, outlining parallels and limits in the course of the historiography and fictional production throughout the 20th century.
45
Embry, Jason Michael. ""Nam-Shub versus the Big Other: Revising the Language that Binds Us in Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, and Chuck Palahniuk"". Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/46.
Texto completoResumen
Within the science fiction genre, utopian as well as dystopian experiments have found equal representation. This balanced treatment of two diametrically opposed social constructs results from a focus on the future for which this particular genre is well known. Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, more aptly characterized as speculative fiction because of its use of magic against scientific social subjugation, each tackle dystopian qualities of contemporary society by analyzing the power that language possesses in the formation of the self and propagation of ideology. The utopian goals of these texts advocate for a return to the modernist metanarrative and a revision of postmodern cynicism because the authors look to the future for hopeful solutions to the social and ideological problems of today. Using Slavoj Žižek’s readings of Jacques Lacan and Theodor Adorno’s readings of Karl Marx for critical insight, I argue these four novels imagine language as the key to personal empowerment and social change. While not all of the novels achieve their utopian goals, they each evince a belief that the attempt belies a return to the modernist metanarrative and a rejection of postmodern helplessness. Thus, each novel imagines the revision of Žižek’s big Other through the remainders of Adorno’s inevitably failed revolutions, injecting hope in a literary period that had long since lost it.
46
Labourey, Marion. "Les écritures de l’histoire dans le récit magico-réaliste des Amériques". Thesis, Sorbonne université, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018SORUL138.
Texto completoResumen
Le récit magico-réaliste entretient avec l’écriture de l’histoire un rapport très étroit. Entre les années 1940 et les années 1980, dans toute l’aire géographique américaine, s’est développé et a évolué une fiction magico-réaliste qui se donne comme objectif la transcription de données anthropologiques, concernant les populations dominées américaines, qu’elles soient composées d’autochtones, d’esclaves ou de descendants d’esclaves, dans un univers romanesque où réalisme et magie se côtoient sans tensions. Ainsi, en abordant les périodes passées du continent américain, les auteurs de récits magico-réalistes ont construit un type de fiction qu’ils ont façonné dans le but de permettre une expression littéraire de l’opération historiographique, qui ne peut pas se substituer à la science historique, mais qui peut donner, d’une façon qui tire parti des potentialités de la fiction, une voix à ceux qu’un discours dominant et des structures de pouvoir ont longtemps laissés dans l’ombre. Nous étudierons donc comment les récits magico-réalistes écrivent l’histoire, et notamment restituent des visions du monde longtemps ignorées, dans une perspective proche de l’histoire des représentations. Une telle entreprise littéraire et historique constitue par-là même un phénomène structurant pour le champ littéraire américain, mais aussi caribéen. Notre corpus d’étude trilingue réunit des auteurs de tout le continent américain : Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Toni Morrison, Wilson Harris, Toni Cade Bambara, Jean-Louis Baghio’o, Jacques Stephen Alexis et Maryse CondéThe magical realistic narrative is deeply linked with the writing of history. Between the 1940’s and the 1980’s, throughout the entire America, has been developed and has evolved the magic realism which let the authors of such narratives to transcribe anthropological datas, coming from dominated populations of America (Natives, slaves or former slaves) in novels in which realism and magic can mix without tension. Then, by describing the past periods of the American continent, the authors of magic realism narratives have built a kind of fiction able to imitate, but not replace, the historical investigation : they can, with the help of the specific resources of fiction, give a voice to those who where kept in the dark for so long. We will study how the authors of magic realism narratives write history, et transcribe the representations of people who were not considered before. Such a literary phenomenon is fundamental in the building of an American literary filed. Our trilingual corpus gathers these nine authors : Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Toni Morrison, Wilson Harris, Toni Cade Bambara, Jean-Louis Baghio’o, Jacques Stephen Alexis et Maryse Condé
47
Regoczy, Lucia Graciela y n/a. "Espiritu de subversion : la construccion del discurso de la mujer en la narrativa posmoderna hispanoamericana". University of Otago. Department of Languages and Cultures, 2007. http://adt.otago.ac.nz./public/adt-NZDU20070927.141659.
Texto completoResumen
This thesis offers a typology of Postmodern women�s discourse from a sociological perspective. By focusing on the reading of Gioconda Belli�s Sofia de los presagios, Isabel Allende�s Paula, and Anacristina Rossi�s La loca de Gandoca, it examines how each writer achieves, thanks to the process of dialogism and the carnivalesque, a critique of social and aesthetic values, associated with Eurocentric discourse.
Thanks to these two processes, the values associated with the marginalized position of women in Latin America, are brought to the surface, offering a better understanding of the relation that exists between women�s literary production and the cultural environment.
Chapter one offers an overview of the concepts associated with Posmodernism, and its relevance in the Latin American context. This chapter also outlines the key concepts associated with dialogism and the carnivalesque.
Chapter two examines the use of the carnivalesque in two plays by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Los empenos de una casa and Amor es mas laberinto as antecedents of subversive writing in Spanish American women�s writing. It discusses how Sor Juana through appropriation and inversion, transforms her texts into a critique of marginalized social groups. This chapter proposes that Sor Juana sets the model for the subversive nature of Spanish American women�s writing.
Chapter three offers a reading of Cristina Peri Rossi�s El libro de mis primos as an example of radical feminist discourse produced in the 60�s, focusing on the use of parody and irony as means of transgressing patriarchal discourse.
Chapter four examines Gioconda Belli�s Sofia de los presagios, and the incorporation of ancestral and modern myths, to accentuate women�s marginality and the conflicting and contradictory nature of Nicaraguan society.
Chapter five focuses on a reading of Isabel Allende�s Paula in which the techniques of magical realism and the carnivalesque are brought together to criticize social and cultural practices that marginalize women.
Chapter six examines Anacristina Rossi�s La loca de Gandoca. It focuses on the way Rossi makes use of popular music, romantic literature, poetry, and bureaucratic discourse, to denounce the exploitation and destruction of Costa Rica�s natural resources through ecotourism.
48
Paquereau, Marine. "Le réalisme social américain à l'ère postmoderne : (Russell Banks, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford)". Thesis, Dijon, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015DIJOL017/document.
Texto completoResumen
Cette étude se penche sur les œuvres de Russell Banks, Raymond Carver et Richard Ford, qui ont débuté leur carrière dans les années 1960-1970. À une époque où les milieux académiques s’intéressent davantage à l’autoréflexivité et aux jeux métafictionnels des écrivains postmodernes, les trois auteurs revendiquent, quant à eux, leur appartenance à la tradition réaliste. Dans « Quelques mots sur le minimalisme », John Barth suggère que le retour du réalisme social à partir des années 1970 peut être vu à la fois comme une réaction à la fiction dite « postmoderne » et comme un symptôme du malaise social et économique de l’époque. En effet, Cathedral, Continental Drift et The Sportswriter décrivent, dans un souci de vraisemblance et d’exactitude, la vie quotidienne d’Américains ordinaires malmenés par la politique de Reagan. Cette étude montre que les trois auteurs s’inscrivent dans la tradition du réalisme social, mais qu’ils sont influencés par le contexte postmoderne dans lequel ils écrivent et tiennent compte des problèmes de représentation typiques de cette période. Leurs œuvres sont donc marquées par une tension entre le respect des conventions littéraires propres à la tradition réaliste et la mise en évidence de l’artificialité de l’illusion mimétique, à une époque où la réalité elle-même est vue comme une construction linguistiqueHis study focuses on the works of Russell Banks, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. They started writing during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the self-reflexivity and metafictional play of postmodernist writers were drawing a lot of critical attention in academic circles. However, they consider themselves to be realist writers. In “A Few Words about Minimalism,” John Barth suggested that the return to realist fiction in the mid-1970s could be both a reaction against so-called “postmodernist” fiction and a symptom of the social and economic unease of the period. Indeed, Cathedral, Continental Drift and The Sportswriter describe in accurate detail the everyday lives of ordinary American men and women during Reagan’s presidency. This study demonstrates that these authors are part of the American realist tradition, but that their strand of social realism also takes into account the postmodern context in which they write, by dealing with problems of representation that are typical of the period. Their works both use and challenge the literary conventions associated with the realist tradition, by underlining the artificiality of mimetic illusion at a time when reality itself is seen as a linguistic construct
49
Pillainayagam, Priyanthan A. "The After Effects of Colonialism in the Postmodern Era: Competing Narratives and Celebrating the Local in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost". Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1337874544.
Texto completo
50
D'Abramo, Kevin. "Recollecting Work : Labour and Class in Contemporary North American Historical Fiction". Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11093.
Texto completoResumen
Ma thèse examine quatre romans de l`époque post-1960 qui s’appuient sur le genre de la littérature prolétarienne du début du vingtième siècle. Se basant sur les recherches récentes sur la littérature de la classe ouvrière, je propose que Pynchon, Doctorow, Ondaatje et Sweatman mettent en lumière les thèmes souvent négligés de cette classe tout en restant esthétiquement progressiste et pertinents. Afin d’explorer les aspects politiques et formels de ces romans, j’utilise la « midfiction », le concept d’Allen Wilde. Ce concept vise les textes qui utilisent les techniques postmodernes et qui acceptent la primauté de la surface, mais qui néanmoins essaient d’être référentiels et d’établir des vérités. Le premier chapitre de ma thèse propose que les romans prolétariens contemporains que j’ai choisis utilisent des stratégies narratives généralement associées avec le postmodernisme, telles que la métafiction, l’ironie et une voix narrative « incohérente », afin de contester l’autorité des discours dominants, notamment les histoires officielles qui ont tendance à minimiser l’importance des mouvements ouvriers. Le deuxième chapitre examine comment les romanciers utilisent des stratégies mimétiques afin de réaliser un facteur de crédibilité qui permet de lier les récits aux des réalités historiques concrètes. Me référant à mon argument du premier chapitre, j’explique que ces romanciers utilisent la référentialité et les voix narratives « peu fiables » et « incohérentes », afin de politiser à nouveau la lutte des classes de la fin du dix-neuvième et des premières décennies du vingtième siècles et de remettre en cause un sens strict de l’histoire empirique. Se basant sur les théories évolutionnistes de la sympathie, le troisième chapitre propose que les représentations des personnages de la classe dirigeante riche illustrent que les structures sociales de l’époque suscitent un sentiment de droit et un manque de sympathie chez les élites qui les font adopter une attitude quasi-coloniale vis-à-vis de la classe ouvrière. Le quatrième chapitre aborde la façon dont les romans en considération négocient les relations entre les classes sociales, la subjectivité et l’espace. Cette section analyse comment, d’un côté, la représentation de l’espace montre que le pouvoir se manifeste au bénéfice de la classe dirigeante, et de l’autre, comment cet espace est récupéré par les ouvriers radicaux et militants afin d’avancer leurs intérêts. Le cinquième chapitre explore comment les romans néo-prolétariens subvertissent ironiquement les tropes du genre prolétarien précédent, ce qui exprimerait l’ambivalence politique et le cynisme généralisé de la fin du vingtième siècle.My dissertation project examines post-1960s novels that draw on the genre of proletarian fiction of the early twentieth century. Building upon current research focused on working-class literature, as well as pertinent literary theory, I argue that Pynchon, Doctorow, Ondaatje, and Sweatman bring to light often neglected working-class themes while remaining aesthetically progressive and relevant. In order to explore these novels in their political and formal aspects I employ Allen Wilde’s concept midfiction. This concept refers to texts that use postmodern techniques and accept the primacy of surface, but nonetheless try to be referential and establish truths. The first chapter of my dissertation argues that the contemporary proletarian novels that I have selected employ narrative strategies commonly associated with postmodernism, such as metafiction, irony, and an “incoherent” narrative voice, to challenge the authority of dominant discourses, including the official histories that tend to downplay labour movements. The second chapter examines how the novelists employ mimetic strategies in tandem with more experimental techniques in order to achieve a believability factor that helps to connect the narratives to concrete historical realities. Referring to my argument in chapter one, I explain that the novelists ultimately use these two modes, referentiality and “unreliable”, “incoherent” narrative voices, in order to both re-politicize the class struggle of the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century as well as to undermine a strict sense of empirical history. The third chapter draws on evolutionist theories of sympathy to argue that the depictions of wealthy ruling class characters illustrate that social structures at the time fostered a sense of entitlement and lack of sympathy in the elites that caused them to adopt a colonial-like attitude towards the working class. The fourth chapter addresses how the novels under consideration mediate the relationships between social classes, subjectivity and space. This section analyses how, on the one hand, representations of space show how power is manifested to benefit the ruling class, and on the other hand, how space was co-opted by radicals and militant workers in order to further their interests. The fifth chapter explores how the neo-proletarian novels ironically subvert tropes from the earlier proletarian genre which, I argue, expresses the political ambivalence and cynicism of the late twentieth century.