Postmodern feeling: affective frame-breaking in the metafictional novel

Since Fredric Jameson’s claim that postmodernism is characterised by a ‘waning of affect’, critical approaches to literary postmodernism have allowed for little consideration of embodied experience. By placing contemporary affect theorists, such as Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai, in dialogue with canonical readings of postmodernism, such as Linda Hutcheon’s and Patricia Waugh’s, this thesis not only challenges the claim that postmodernism is neither affective nor affecting, but proposes a new model for postmodern critique. This thesis aims to establish such a model by employing Waugh’s vocabulary of ‘framing’ and ‘frame-breaking’ in order to illuminate how metafictional forms map structures of feeling in early postmodernist fiction. Each chapter of this project provides a close reading of the works of seminal postmodernists William Gaddis, William H. Gass, and Thomas Pynchon, identifying the primary metaphors each writer employs in order to generate the impression of textual self-consciousness. These chapters emphasise how the self-referential qualities so often associated with the metaphors and structures of literary postmodernism impact upon readerly self-consciousness. This project contends that the selfreferentiality associated with metafiction does not inhibit affective response, but re-orients readercharacter identification, introducing an unprecedented affective range into the relationship between reader and text. This research is timely because it seeks to reclaim postmodernism’s origins, and might, therefore, reroute our critical understanding of the elusive period of ‘post-postmodernism’. This thesis not only proves that the structures of metafiction and the affective dimensions of reader-response illu- minate textual self-reflexivity, but self-consciously demonstrate how feeling can be elicited and appropriated for political purposes through the narratives that are used to evoke them. It therefore seeks to establish a continuity that both connects postmodernism to its literary antecedents and foregrounds the concerns of our own political moment.