Abstract:
copyright: a novel
Phoebe Esther Valor is on the brink of middle age and in the middle of an existential
crisis when she's offered a lifeline: a desperate editor at the Sydney Tribune notices the story
that Phoebe has listed for the following day's paper could make the front page.
There's just one problem: the story he wants doesn’t exist yet-or at least not quite.
And to get it Phoebe will have to convince, cajole or trick her subject, Immigration
Minister Calvin Delahunty, into saying what the editor wants him to. It's not so different
from what reporters do every day. But on this particular day – desperate for a rare Page
One and a final shot at significance – Phoebe goes a little bit further. When she can’t get
Delahunty to say exactly what she wants to hear, she convinces herself it was close
enough and writes the words into his mouth. And when Delahunty goes along with her
fraud, Phoebe realises she could be taking a much more active role in her career- and
Delahunty's. And so, story by story, reporting what he says and does before he says and
does it, Phoebe begins to create a very different Calvin Delahunty from the original. And
a very different Phoebe.
Realisms Traditional, Tragic, Depressive and Moral: The changing fiction
of Jonathan Franzen.
This thesis examines the work of American author Jonathan Franzen and asks whether
the oft-told narrative, that of a young postmodernist writer who abandons artistic
ambition and cultural critique for mainstream success, is sufficient to explain the major
differences between Franzen's early novels and his later work.
I will contend that while Franzen's later work does not offer a postmodern critique
in the same vein as his first two novels, neither is it a retreat into pre-modernist realism.
Indeed, I will argue that Franzen abandoned postmodernism as a literary form partly
because of what he perceives as its role in entrenching the existing capitalist hegemony.
And instead of going back to pre-modernist forms, as though theory and its discoveries
had never occurred, Franzen's later work moves beyond postmodernism in search of a
new literary form that can maintain a critical distance from, and therefore offer an
analysis of, the advanced capitalist society in which we find ourselves. As such, his more
recent writing has much in common with the emerging literary genre that has been called
post-postmodernism. To frame my argument, I will use close textual analysis of the
Christian holidays—that is, Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving—in Franzen’s fiction
due to their ubiquity and thematic importance in his work.
