Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
English
Advisor
Marc Dolan
Committee Members
Gerhard Joseph
Eric Lott
Subject Categories
American Literature | Cultural History | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Keywords
postmodernism, post-1945, Heller, DeLillo, Vonnegut, Pynchon
Abstract
In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of the emerging corporatized masculinity and its cultural conditions of production (Hutcheon 2). In contrast, as I will iterate in my conclusion, contemporaneous American postmodernists outside of the typical demographic, such as Ishmael Reed and Kathy Acker, express different concerns in their own contributions to the genre.
Recommended Citation
Chancellor, Jennifer, "Mad Men of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, and the American Postmodern Novel" (2016). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1505
Included in
American Literature Commons, Cultural History Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons