DECONSTRUCTING TEXT AND SELF: BOUNDARY VIOLATIONS IN THE POSTMODERN NOVEL

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to show a very particular type of intertextuality (defined in three ways) at play within three postmodern texts, to chart the ways in which it is deployed, and to examine the ways in which its influence is manifested. First, each novel contains an intertextual reference that is concealed, marginalized or elided to a degree that misrepresents the intertext’s relevance to the text’s project(s). Secondly, each submerged referent is the subject of a rigorous and sustained deconstructivist critique by the text that contains it. And finally, the intertextual reference in each work is involved in deconstructing the narrator’s self, often displacing or replacing a seemingly unified and autonomous speaker with one that is fragmented and constituted by discourse. Chapter One sets the perameters of my thesis and articulates the manner in which I will be using Intertextuality as a means of “probing, fissuring, disorienting, and dangerously supplementing the text at hand so as to exhibit its implications and implicatedness.”(Clayton 18) In Chapter Two, I offer an analysis of the role of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature as an overlooked intertext in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, a ‘trans-generic prose text’ dealing with the relationship between the fictive and the real. Chapter Three traces Paul Gauguin’s strange intertextual presence in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and Chapter Four is an examination of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which I defend as an apocalyptic deconstruction of ‘the GQ man’.