American disillusionment: reading authenticity and artificiality in Michael Chabon’s millennial fiction

Barnes, Westley (2023) American disillusionment: reading authenticity and artificiality in Michael Chabon’s millennial fiction. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis examines how American fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century can be read as holding together the opposing influences of postmodern aesthetics and a resurgent interest in the ethics of realist fiction. By locating a materialist critique of the reification of popular culture in Michael Chabon’s late Twentieth century and early Twenty first century fiction, starting with the writing Chabon begins to produce with the publication of his novel Wonder Boys (1995), my research posits a resurgent interest in reading authenticity. Considering authenticity in Chabon’s writing allows me to explore the stylistic developments in Chabon’s work against a context of broader developments in what I describe as millennial fiction. By detailing, beginning with Chabon, an American literary fiction that embraces hybrid forms of genre writing, this thesis will analyze how authenticity, described by Lionel Trilling as “sincerity’s darker brother”(Trilling, 1973), is articulated through material objects with politically ascribed properties. In Chabon’s millennial fiction popular culture artifacts such as comic books, vinyl records and even genre forms such as the detective novel and Blaxploitation film are given the type of “auratic” qualities which allude to personal and political ambitions. In giving a comparative reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura (Benjamin, 1924) and juxtaposing Fredric Jameson’s conception of the “waning of affect” in postmodern fiction, my methodology will chart the interest in a literary turn towards historicizing affect in Chabon’s fiction, a turn that is nevertheless, to borrow a further phrase from Jameson, “couched in the narrative” of postmodern influences.
I will explore how the darker themes at work in Chabon’s novels from this period offer a commentary on the experience of feeling both inside and distanced from major historical events, and how this acts as a key narrative device in millennial fiction. A reading of Chabon’s recurring narrative of discovering the Holocaust as an affiliative family member of survivors occurs throughout this thesis; it runs through all the texts of Chabon’s I consider. This recurring story of the discovery of the Holocaust disrupts any easy interpretation of Chabon’s fiction as entertainment alone, whilst the Holocaust is an event which in general interrupts much of reductive misinterpretations of postmodern philosophy.
This argument is my departure point for an examination of why authenticity becomes such a significant consideration for writers of Chabon’s generation. The resurgence of a stylistic interest in the authentic allows for a contextualization of what critics have called an “affective turn” (Clough, 2010) in the American humanities. I will look specifically at an affective turn 4 in Chabon’s millennial fiction by considering the importance of, alongside popular culture: the tonal registry of spoken dialogue, outbursts of violence as politicized acts, and the importance of maintaining a space for family unity and the social community in Chabon. These themes often circle back to the significance of beginning and maintaining a collection of objects. In this millennial fiction objects now register feeling, whereas before they had the kind of mere referentiality which at one time frustrated such an astute interpreter of postmodern poetics as Jameson.
In focusing on an analysis of the literary project of Michael Chabon, I will address my constellations of aesthetic and philosophical readings to reflect Chabon’s own dialectic situation of being both “a Jew and a teller of Jewish stories” and a writer who wishes to contribute to literary heritage “as a lover of genre fiction.” (Chabon, 2004) History, community and sincerity – often given to us as romantic surrendering to narrative inclinations -- are features of Chabon’s work I investigate against the backdrop of a developing poetics of materialism and feeling in contemporary American fiction and postmodern theory. In focusing on an analysis of the literary project of Michael Chabon, I will address my constellations of aesthetic and philosophical readings to reflect Chabon’s own dialectic situation of being both “a Jew and a teller of Jewish stories” and a writer who wishes to contribute to literary heritage “as a lover of genre fiction.” (Chabon, 2004) History, community and sincerity – often given to us as romantic surrendering to narrative inclinations -- are features of Chabon’s work I investigate against the backdrop of the developing poetics of materialism and feeling in contemporary American fiction and postmodern theory.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies
Depositing User:	Zoe White
Date Deposited:	15 Mar 2024 17:46
Last Modified:	15 Mar 2024 17:46
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94705
DOI:

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