Abstract
This dissertation interrogates the affective emphasis in three post-postmodern texts and how they respond to what Fredric Jameson (1991:9) has identified as the postmodern “waning of affect”. Scholars have more recently identified a turn to affect in various academic fields, however, and some have correlated this with the waning of the postmodern (Gibbons, 2017:161). The affective focus in this study is on how the chosen post-postmodern texts find new ways to affectively connect to the reader, through moving beyond their own postmodern forms. The affective emphasis is expressed through the narrative focus on sincerity (as a “congruence of avowal and actual feeling” (Trilling cited in Kelly, 2010: 135)) and empathy (as the “sharing of feelings” (Keen, 2007:21)). This study centres on three texts: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1989), a short story by David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders. Although the texts range over a relatively extended period, this dissertation will unite them under the umbrella term “post-postmodern” for the unique ways in which they utilise, or comment upon, postmodern forms and conventions while simultaneously attempting to move beyond the affective detachment characteristic of the postmodern. Post-postmodernism encompasses new, wide-ranging theories in literature (and beyond) that emerge out of, or react to, the waning of postmodernism. Other related terms intersecting with the idea of the post-postmodern are metamodernism, post-irony, and the New Sincerity. This dissertation argues that the affective emphasis in the texts under study is a feature of post-postmodern literature: it shows how Wallace, Smith and Saunders’ texts utilise postmodern conventions in new and unique ways relating to a broader cultural turn to affect.
M.A. (English)