Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0005-5958-4535
Defense Date
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Jennifer Rhee
Second Advisor
Adin Lears
Third Advisor
Elizabeth Canfield
Abstract
Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary American society in the literature of the 1970s and conclude with an examination of hyper-contemporary fiction, tracing essential threads of postmodernism, transhumanism and posthumanism, nostalgia and—via my coining of a new application of the term—post-nostalgia through the work of writers including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan, and Don DeLillo. Postmodernism has long been accused of creating without feeling or emotion, an accusation that tends to stagnate within specifically aesthetic applications of the term. I, instead, ground my argument in material applications of postmodernism, primarily to resist the common “hierarchy of value,” as Amy Hungerford terms it, created by the traditional valorization of primarily white, male thinkers that occurs in postmodern discourse. My investigation is divided into two parts that straddle the divide between nostalgia and post-nostalgia, which I argue are the two central forces that have impacted the experience of hope in Western society over the past fifty years, and I employ frameworks outlined by Sianne Ngai, Legacy Russell, Christina Sharpe, and O’neil Van Horn, among others, in determining how we can find hope as resistance and, ultimately, as surrender.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-6-2024
Included in
American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons