INFORMATION TO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overiaps. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. IHigher quality 6' x 9' black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additkxial charge. Contact UMI directly to order.

PR EV

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by

ProQuest Informatkxi and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600

IE W

PR EV IE W

NOTE TO USERS

This reproduction is the best copy avaiiabie.

PR

EV
IMI'

IE

PR EV IE W

PERSON, THING, PLACE: REALISM AND POSTMODERN REALISM IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

PR
THESIS Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2002 Chicago, Illinois

EV

SUE-IM LEE B.A.. Yonsei University, Seoul South Korea, 1991 M.A., Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1993

IE W
BY

UMI Number; 3047862

PR EV

UMI

UMI Microform 3047862

Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 46106-1346

IE W
(B)

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO Graduate College CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

I hereby recommend that the thesis prepared under my supervision by

SUE-IM LEE PERSON, THING, PLACE: REALISM AND POSTMODERN REALISM IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

entitled.

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

/ concur with this recommendation

PR EV IE
12=

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

CLjc^ K. tf).
Adviser (Chaitpmon of Defense Comminee)

I HeaiVCIiair

Recommendation concurred in:

Members of

^ K

Thesis or Disseiialian Defense Committee

UlC

University of Illinois at Chicago

To My Twenties

PR
iii

EV

IE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I learned to write while writing this dissertation. For this development, I must acknowledge my three core dissertation committee members. Christian Messenger, Judith Gardiner, and Joseph Tabbi. With unfailing prompmess, unity of spirit, and generosity, these advisors fostered this dissertation into growth. They provided the intellectual framework for me to write, rethink, and write some more. In the process, I was learning that writing was my work. In particular, I wish to thank my dissertation advisor, Chris Messenger; I walked into his classroom for my first course at UIC and saw a smiling face. From that moment, he has been my steadiest counselor and cheerleader, and my graduate life could not have taken its smooth trajectory without his sturdy presence. I express a deep gratitude to James Hall and Sharon Holland, my two other readers, whose reading of the near-final version of this dissertation showed immense care and scope; their suggestions will be fundamental in my further development of this project. I also wish to acknowledge my girlfriends, Gwynne Gertz and Eva Bednarowicz, who were there from the beginning. To borrow from Sula. "we were girls together." Finally, I thank my husband. He provides the playground for me to play on.

EV

IE
SL

PR
iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1THE SUCCESSFUL FAILURE OF AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM Between Reflectionist Historicism and Immanent Historicism The Successful Failure of American Literary Realism CHAPTER 2INVISIBILITY, TRANSPARENCY, AND OTHER LIES THAT REALISM TELLS: POSTMODERNISM AS ANTI-REALISM Postmodernism, Anti-Realism, and Anti-Narrativity Postmodern Realism 1

19 23 33

50 54 69

CONCLUSION

PR

CHAPTER 5THE HUMAN MEASURE OF THINGS; RICHARD POWERS'S POSTMODERN REALISM IN GALATEA 2.2 AND PLOWING THE DARK The "Invisible" Locus of the Human in Realist Narrativity Plowing the Dark

EV

IE

CHAPTER 4WOMEN WHO THINK TOO MUCH: THE POSTMODERN REALISM OF LYDIA DAVIS AND LYNNE TILLMAN 125 Lydia Davis and Unobliging Storytelling 132 The Disjointed Aesthetic in Lynne Tillman's Fiction 146

CHAPTERSSUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS: REALISM, POSTMODERN REALISM, AND ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY 78 The Realist Formation of Asian American Identity 82 Doing Without the Comfort of Identity: Postmodern Non-Identity in Dictee 101

166 174 193 208 219 232

WORKS CITED VITA

SUMMARY

This dissertation argues the heuristic usefulness of a "postmodern realism" to describe a realism altered by the postmodern assault on the politics of representation. Juxtaposing the fictional theories and practices of realism to those of postmodernism, I examine the internal tensions within a storytelling environment inhabited by both realist narrative properties and postmodern formal innovations. In particular, I focus on the making of the subject in three areas of contemporary American fiction^the "ethnic" in Asian American fiction, the "woman" in female-centered fiction, and the "machine" in fictions of science and technology. In order to

contemporary constructions of Nineteenth-century American literary realism. The second chapter positions these models against the American literary postmodernism of the nineteensixties and seventies that predicted the "death of realism." In the subsequent three chapters, I use theories of narrative, race, ethnicity, feminism, and technology to read the works of post-1950s writers such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and Richard Powers. In their moments of representational conflict over the subject marked by the "difference" of race, ethnicity, gender, or technology, I argue, their works exemplify a postmodern realism that enacts, in aesthetic terms, the contemporary debates over notions of identity, agency, knowledge, and subjectivity.

PR EV
vi

IE W

conceptualize a historically informed study of a postmodern realism, I begin by examining

INTRODUCTION This study evolved from the question^what's wrong with storytelling? It was a defiant question voiced by a reader who loved stories. Each story was an open invitation to someone else's business, someone else's days and years, someone else's choices and fate. How lovely it was to glide through events, experiences, decisions, dramas not of my making; how much more lovely it was that I could demand to know of this storyworld than I could know of my own life. What happened? And then what happened? How did it happen? Who did whatl Why? How did it end? And what did it mean? What are the compelling forces, desires, and rules that govern the storyworld, and what do they have to do with this world I inhabit? Like those crystal globes of miniaturized worlds that sometimes pass as holiday presents, each story held an entire world, a specificity of "person, thing, and place," and the plentitude of such worlds promised a well that never runs dry in the land of storytelling.

The above vision of storytelling and reading is underwritten by a host of interrelated theoretical assumptions, and one of the most exciting aspects of this project has been in learning to name and to situate that system of thought within the larger critical discourse. First, in taking "fiction" to be a representation of a miniature world formally constituted through the literary conventions of plot, character, setting, description, dialogue, I was claiming the entire domain of "fiction" as the territory of "story." In a related maimer, my definition of the linguistic and literary organism called "story" relied on the notion of "narrativity," a presence of properties that enact a sense of a temporal wholeness fi-om the beginning, middle, and the end. In my defiant questionwhat's wrong with storytelling?I was calling up some of the most urgent and hotly disputed topics in the late-twentieth-century literary and critical discoursethe topics of fiction, narrative, and storytelling. Furthermore, in my synonymous usage of "fiction" with "story," and

PR EV
1

IE W

2 "story" with the miniature globe of other people's affairs, I had staked some underlying assumptions regarding issues of representation, mimesis, the aesthetic, especially of the imitative aesthetic, that stood in strong contrast to the postmodern spirit of anti-narrativism and antirepresentation in late-twentieth-century literature and criticism.' The most synecdochical expression of postmodemism-Lyotard's declaration, in The Postmodern Condition, of the demise of metanarrativeswasn't a pronouncement limited to "big" narratives, like Enlightenment, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism, systems of thought whose teleology functioned as foundational concepts in explaining the workings of "reality." Postmodern suspicion of "narrative" extended to the very convention of narrative representation itselfto the politics of its internal consistency, its coherency as a temporal whole, its developmental logic, and ultimately, its ability to impose a single order, a single causality, a single story, to what was hitherto a formless phenomena. The logic of emplotment, hence, receives scrutiny as an organizational system of control, as an epistemological exercise grounded within the dominant political, cultural, historical worldview. As Derrida puts it: "The narratorial voice is the voice of a subject recounting ... knowing who he is, where he is, what he is and what he is talking about... In this sense, all organized narration is a 'matter for the police'" (102). For Barthes, the law of narrative is inseparable from the "the law of the Father" (The Pleasure of the Text 20). As an organizing system that finds coherence in formlessness, finds wholeness in multiplicity, and unity in disparateness, narrative is equated with a totalizing mode of representation. Hence the mark of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson writes, may be "a repudiation of representation, a 'revolutionary' break with the (repressive) ideology of storytelling generally" (54).

PR EV

IE W

3 However, the postmodern suspicion of narrative representation comes against a staunch critical defense of the heuristic utility of emplotment and the cognitive necessity of storytelling in human lives. As Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, the organizing logic of narration is an inescapable part of human consciousness: ''We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed" (3). Similarly, for Paul Rocoeur, "emplotment" is fundamental to the business of living: "the plots we invent help us to shape our confused, formless and, in the last resort, mute, temporal existence" ("On Interpretation" 180). As Hayden White argues with his tellingly entitled essay, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," the

"informed by a programmatic, if ironic, commitment to the return to narrative as one of its enabling presuppositions" (xi).

But for the first generation of American literary postmodemists in the nineteen-sixties

stronghold of narrativity, from storytelling (see Chapter Two). For too long, they argue, the demands of storytelling have immobilized the possibility that the artistic, linguistic, and technological structure called "fiction" may develop into something other than~and more thannarrative representations of miniature worlds contained within temporal wholes. This domination encourages an artistic activity of more-of-the-same, the generation of stories built around the conventions of "person, thing, place," as well as fostering a reading activity revolving around illusionismthe belief that the characters, actions, and the conflicts in the story stood for people, experiences, and material forces in the reader's lived world. Hence the postmodern

PR

and seventies, the work of a truly innovative writer is precisely to liberate "fiction" from the

EV IE

compelling pull of narrativity is difficult to escape, and even the postmodern project is

literary-critical challenge to contemporary American fiction is; why this fixation on storytelling? Why are stories constituted the way they are, and how do the well-known conventions constrain the aesthetic possibilities of fiction? Fundamental to the postmodern suspicion of storytelling is the assertion that every representation is simultaneously an argument about 'Hhe way things are," and that illusionist storytelling hides the fact that the rhetorical act of persuasion is taking place. The duplicitous element of illusionist storytelling furthermore rests upon an aesthetic and linguistic naiveteas if the linguistic act and the literary conventions of representation enact an unmediated transmission of reality. In contemporary discussions of storytelling, then, notions of mimesis, representation, and imitative aesthetic are reworked under postmodern anti-narrativism and anti-representation.

It is against this wider background that I discuss the state of realism in contemporary American fiction. In using such a staple of critical vocabulary to ground my study of storytelling in contemporary American fiction, I have often thought that "realism" is like a house with too many past owners, bearing too many histories and struggles to be used neatly or even concisely. "Realism" bears a different discursive lineage and meaning according to intellectual disciplines, like art, architecture, literature, historiography, sciences, philosophy; there are furthermore numerous understandings of "modified" realisms, such as "commonsense realism," "naive realism," "pragmatic realism," "scientific realism," "contextual realism," and more.^ Within the literary historiography of the term, "realism" may designate a specific literary periodthe latter half of the nineteenth-centuryand revolve around a different set of exemplar realists according to national literary contextssuch as Eliot and Dickens in English literary history, Balzac and Flaubert in the French, and Howells, Twain, and James in the American. "Realism" may also designate a particular mode of literary activity, as in Rene Wellek's 1963 definition of realism as

PR EV

IE W

5 "the objective representation of contemporary social reality" (240). As Christopher Prendergast points out, if the literary production of realism took place in the nineteenth-century, the theorization of realism took place in the twentieth-century, and the highly contested philosophical, political, ideological, and artistic evaluations of realism have been fundamental to the major theoretical approaches of the twentieth century, such as Marxism, structuralism and poststructuraiism, feminism inspired by poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and as I will discuss in Chapter Two, literary postmodemism (The Triangle of Representation 121). In light of the term's diffused and multiple significance, it may be more judicious to

twentieth-century American fiction. On the other hand, the specter of realism casts a shadow on

construction that comes under postmodern scrutiny. For instance, realism is the term used most interchangeably with the "novel." For instance, Ian Watt's influential 1957 work. The Rise of the Novel (which primarily focuses on such eighteenth-century novel as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Richardson's Pamela. Fielding's Tom Jones), begins with a chapter entitled, "Realism and the Novel Form." As realism "is a central moment in the novel's history, and defines essential aspects of the novel's potential" (Bradbury 191), the term "realism" most readily invokes the storytelling conventions of "person, thing, place" at work in the literary activity of constructing the illusion of a miniature world.^ For many postmodern critics, also, the novel's structurethe organization of temporality into a beginning, a middle, and an endingis the ultimate exercise of a "totalizing" discipline at work. Furthermore, "realism" is the term most conflated with those of "mimesis" and "representation." The fluid use of "realism," "mimesis," and "representation" takes place in Erich Auerbach's monumental work. Mimesis:

PR EV

IE

any discussion of storytelling, especially the kind of illusionist, miniature-globe storyworld

employ the term "narrative" in my discussion of the contested nature of storytelling in late-

6 The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. In the epilogue that concludes the twenty chapters of close analysis, extending from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach uses the term "realism" interchangeably with mimesis as the "the interpretation of reality through literary representation or 'imitation'" (554). In poststructuralist and postmodern criticism "realism" stands for the manipulative semiotic practices and disingenuous epistemological and political claims of an imitative aesthetic. As Barthes describes it: "The writing of Realism is far from being neutral[;] it is on the contrary loaded with the most spectacular signs of fabrication" (Writing Degree Zero 67-8).

due to the fact realism trails behind it a host of related ideals that are frmdamental to the business

William Dean Howells, in his influential "Editor's Study" columns of Harper's Monthly, argues the democratic ideals of realism, his mantra is that realism is an "aesthetic of the common." When Georg Lukacs defends the ideals of realism against the anti-representational modernist practices of the nineteen-thirties and forties, his argument rests upon the revelatory power of the "type" or the "typical" (character, plot, setting, etc.) to stand as a synecdoche of the historical forces of the times. For Auerbach, realism is the literary emancipation of the subject matter from the classical rules of style, wherein "individuals from daily life" can be treated with literary styles ("serious, problematic, and even tragic representation") that had hitherto been reserved for those subjects with appropriate social and class privilege (489). For J. P. Stem, realism is the form which "gives us all of our conmion reality" (152). The politics of the common that underwrites the ideal of realism, hence, privileges notions like the communal, the ordinary, the recognizable, and the familiar. Implicit in the

PR EV

IE

of storytelling. Realism is a literary notion built upon the significance of the "common." When

Finally, my rationale for speaking of "realism" rather than of "narrative" in this project is

7 privileging of the common is the idealization of intersubjective communication, particularly the notion of consensus. As I will discuss in the first chapter, this interrelated system of thought surrounding the notion of the common is fundamental to the defense that realist storytelling serves a social good. Postmodernism targets precisely those pulsepoints of the communal and consensus that inform the realist politics of the common, and posits, in contrast, a politics of difference. As the intellectual and political movements of marginalized subjects have shown, the close interplay between power and representation means that the rallying cry of the common and consensus are too often used in the service of enforcing oppressive homogeneity and coercive

multiplicity, it effectively challenges the realist celebratory view of the common and critiques

As my discussion of the embattled state of storytelling takes place between the aesthetic and political impulses of realism and of postmodernism, I am as much influenced by the Howellsian idealism of the "ordinary" as I am by the Barthesian suspicion of the "stereotypical." I am as much enamored by storytelling activities that insert me into someone-else's-life-inprogress as I am conscious of the narrative conventions that enable my ensnarement. I am as much swayed by the politics of the common as I am shaped by the postmodern suspicion of consensus as an ideal. It is perhaps to be expected, then, that the contemporary American writers that I discuss in this dissertation are writers who seem as ambivalent about storytelling as I am. I am interested in those writers who evince an epistemological, literary, and linguistic selfconsciousness too great to tell a story comfortably, even competently. I propose the term "postmodern realists" to describe these incompetent storytellers for the ways they take, as their thematic concern, the tensions between the established conventions of "person, thing, place" and

PR EV

IE

realism's inability to address radical difference.

standardization. As postmodernism privileges notions like fi^gmentation, heterogeneity, and

8 anti-narrativism, between formal accessibility and formal innovations, and between realist politics of the common and the postmodern politics of difference. As I describe a theme of ambivalence as the central characteristic of "postmodem realists," I need to stress that this project does not armounce the discovery of a new formal practice or a literary device. It will become evident throughout my discussion that my references to anti-narrativist and antirepresentational gestures recall many of the well-known high modernist and postmodernist formal innovations and disruptions of storytelling. My rationale for naming the late-twentiethcentury spirit of anti-narrativism and anti-representation as "postmodern" is in observation of the fact that literary vanguardism is always a relative descriptor, one that takes place within specific historical and literary contexts.

"The Successful Failure of American Literary Realism," I survey scholarship concerning post1950 American literary realism in order to identify the discursive values and strategies that come into play when realism, storytelling, and the politics of the common are assessed. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, I argue, a reflectionist view of realism assessed the form inadequate to the task of aesthetically "mastering" reality, while in the nineteen-eighties, an immanentist approach indicted the form as a hegemonic tool of ideological duplication. Realism is doomed to failure when cast in critical scenarios of passive reflection or unidirectional inscription, I argue, and point to a dialectic historicism as practiced in the critical works of Amy Kaplan, Kenneth Warren, and Brook Thomas. In addressing realism's conflicted participation with the historical real, these critics demonstrate a livelier model of realism; they resuscitate the "failure of realism" thesis, well established in postwar American literary criticism, discursively to transform the "failure" into the confirmatory site of realism's engagement with material

PR EV IE

I begin by laying out what we talk about when we talk about realism. In Chapter One,

9 reality. In the subsequent chapters, I rely on this dynamic model of realism to discuss the form as an aesthetic whose epistemological focus leaves it vulnerable to ideologically dominant versions of the "common." As the leading French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet once described, "Realism is the ideology which each [writer] brandishes against his neighbor" (157). In Chapter Two, "Invisibility, Transparency, and Other Lies that Realism Tells: Postmodemism as Anti-Realism," I characterize the American literary postmodemism of the late-nineteen-sixties and seventies as a movement of anti-realism. Relying heavily on apocalyptic and revolutionary terms, the first generation of American literary postmodemists like John Barth, William Gass, and Ronald Sukenick, to name a few, targeted realism as a convention that had forgotten itself as a

self-reflexive fiction, and post-contemporary fiction. What the postmodemists targeted was the seeming invisibility of the realist storytelling conventions of "person, thing, place," and as they analyzed realism as the "mode of representation that has 'made it' socially" (Brown 141), they

chapter review of realism's defenses, this chapter characterizes the literary-critical terrain of contemporary American fiction as an ongoing conflict between the aesthetic ideals and literary practices of realism and those of postmodemism. In the following three chapters, I use the term "postmodern realism" to describe a new grouping of contemporary American writers, writers that I believe write through the diminished aura of storytelling in late-twentieth-century. I borrow the notion of aura from Walter Benjamin, of course. In the same year (1936) that he wrote his best known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which he argued the unique singularity of art that is lost in

PR

simultaneously critiqued the politics of formal invisibility. Forming a counterpart to my first

EV

IE

convention, and raised the flag of new technologies in fiction, such as metafiction, surfiction,

10 the face of mechanical reproduction, he wrote "The Storyteller," in which he mourned the "incomparable aura about the storyteller" (109) that had been lost in the years following World War One. Although Benjamin meant "storyteller" more specifically within the tradition of oral delivery, he was also describing a period that was "poorer in communicable experience," where the use-value of "information" competed against the "counsel" that storytelling could carry. Hence, in the years following World War One, "the art of storytelling [was] coming to an end" (84): "More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences" (83). Now, when I use the term "postmodern realism" to describe the diminished aura of

representation and anti-narrativism in late-twentieth-century literary and critical climate. In particular, I discuss the making of the subject in the diminished aura of storytelling in contemporary American fictionthe "ethnic" in Asian American fiction, the "woman" in

representational conflict over the subject marked by the "difference" of ethnicity, gender, or nonhuman, postmodern realism aesthetically enacts the contemporary contestations over notions of identity, agency, knowledge, and subjectivity. Using theories of narratology, feminism, ethnicity, and technology, 1 argue that the contradictory operations of postmodern realism are ultimately revelatory of the normative "real" that dictates the representation of "difference" in contemporary American fiction. Chapter Three, "Suspicious Characters: Realism, Postmodern Realism and Asian American Identity," argues realism's unparalleled utility in performing Asian American cultural work~of

PR

fictions of female experience, and the "machine" in fictions of technology. In moments of

EV

IE

storytelling contemporary American fiction, my usage refers to the strong spirit of anti-

II rendering Asian American visibility, identity, and agency through the narrative properties of locatable setting, detailed description, dialogue, character, and plot development. 1 then situate realism's "success" in the altered critical terrain of contemporary Asian American discourse, in which formal clarity is suspect as the one-sided performance of a minority discourse, and formal opacity is valorized as envisioning a more progressive form of Asian American subjectivity. In order to resist the simplistic equation between the realist form and assimilative politics, I read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. a Korean-American text that is frequently cited as an exemplar of postmodern subjectivity. But in contrast to its highly anti-representational surface of postmodern opacity, 1 argue, the text's narrating consciousness expresses a longing for precisely the community of communication and discursive belonging that accompany the realist

conflicting articulation of identity as both a yoke and a need.

In Chapter Four, "Women Who Think Too Much: The Postmodern Realism of Lydia Davis and Lynne Tillman," I address the importance of an absolute narrative authority in the

Lydia Davis (Break It Down. Almost No Memory. The End of the Story) and Lynne Tillman (Haunted Houses. Motion Sickness. No Lease on Life). The consciousness-raising fiction that accompanied the Women's Liberation Movement fundamentally relied on the coherence of the female character as a knower of her reality. As the experiencing subject whose knowledge of the world underwrote her feminist agency, the female character's epistemological facility was fundamental to the political transaction of feminist critique and political agenda. In contrast, Davis and Tillman employ the trope of reading to counter the realist ideal of an absolute narrative authority. They create female characters who are obsessive readersof books, of

PR

feminist realism of the nineteen-seventies and highlight its absence in the postmodern realism of

EV IE

formation of identity and subjectivity. I locate Dictee's postmodern realism within this

12 themselves, of the world^and yet whose readings are always impaired by a postmodern doubt of ever "accessing" the "truth." And as their desire to "know" escalates, they suffer the paralysis of self-doubt in a parallel development. Consequently, in eschewing the fictional conventions of a "knowing" character, the postmodern realism of Davis and Tillman illustrates the incompatibility of feminist storytelling and the postmodern incredulity towards truth-claims. In Chapter Five, "The Human Measure of Things: Richard Powers's Postmodern Realism in Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark." 1 analyze competing approaches to representing the machine's "difference" in contemporary American fictions of science and technology.

represent the machine in "recognizable" terms; furthermore, the realist representation of the

Presence, as the ontological measure of all things. 1 argue that the realist epistemological process is in direct contrast to the postmodern one-of using the constructed-ness of the machine to unsettle the primacy of "human" identity from the discourse of the "natural," the "original," the "real." In this last chapter, I place a different emphasis on my descriptive usage of postmodern realism. While 1 emphasized the postmodern disruption of realist narrative operations in the works of Cha, Davis, and Tillman, here, 1 describe a realist resistance to the threat of postmodern disruptions. Hence I read Powers's postmodern realism as a self-conscious and sometimes even a desperate enactment of shoring up realist ideals in the face of postmodern skepticism. Even as he thematizes the epistemological impossibility of apprehending the machine except through human equivalents and defmitions ("mind," "memory," "agency," "subjectivity"), Powers's intense awareness of the limits of representation reveals the ontological fixity of the "human" in a Baudrillardian setting of "simulacrums."

PR EV

IE

machine has taken place within the humanist discourse of holding the "human" as the Originary

Traditionally, the genre of extrapolative science fiction has relied on realist narrative devices to

Hence, each chapter discusses contemporary American fiction writers who are keenly aware of the diminished aura of storytelling. These are writers who are too uncomfortable to assume the storyteller stance of "let me tell you a story," and whose discomfort translates, into a late-twentieth-century version, the post-World War One condition that Walter Benjamin described; "More and more often, there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed," (83). In the postmodern climate of anti-narrativism and anti-representation, a certain amount of embarrassment seems requisite in the production of stories, and the writers that 1 identify as postmodern realists illustrate this embarrassment by disrupting the storytelling form. But what distinguishes them from the first generation of American postmodernists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies is that as they are writing in the late-twentieth-century, they cannot express an euphoria in exposing the fictionality of meaning; nor can they sustain the belief, as espoused by John Barth, that an artist may "transcend artifice by insisting upon it" (qtd. in Hite 46). So in the fictions of postmodem realists, I believe, an attitude of apology, or defiance, in the act of storytelling becomes part of the story itself.

descriptor of postmodem realists are writers such as Carol Maso and David Markson. For instance. Carol Maso's novel Defiance (1998) is a story about a professor who is defiant that she killed two of her graduate students; at the same time, it is a novel defiant in the act of telling the story. So, in addition to reminding us that professors ought not to kill their graduate students, the story of Defiance as told with defiance is an illustration of writing through the diminished aura of storytelling. David Markson's Reader's Block (1996) is a novel constituted by literary trivia (such as the fact that Althusser spent time in a psychiatric ward, or that A.E. Houseman never lived in Shropshire, or that John Donne posed for his death shroud, which he then kept by

PR

Other contemporary American writers that I could have discussed under the critical

EV

IE W