Film in post-World War II American fiction

Abstract

This dissertation is an exercise in intertextual analysis and an effort toward historicizing film referentiality in American fiction. It focuses on four novels, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, and Han Ong's Fixer Chao, and includes an epilogue on Don DeLillo's Underworld. As a means of offering an alternative to exhausted and limiting categories such as Modernist and postmodernism, I map these novels onto a cinematic, rather than literary, timeline. My argument is that close-reading the film references and filmic form of these novels informs not only our understanding of them as individual texts, but offers an alternative means by which to situate them historically.