Date of Graduation

5-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

Advisor/Mentor

M. Keith Booker

Committee Member

Adnan Haydar

Second Committee Member

Susan Marren

Keywords

culture, fiction, postmodernism, global culture, local culture, capitalism, Arab

Abstract

As the Jordanian culture is gradually impacted by the globalization process of late capitalism, this study argues that many Jordanian novels exhibit a number of postmodern characteristics, such as blurring boundaries and disrupting hierarchies, the use of pastiche as a compositional technique, formal fragmentation, and the weakness of utopian imagination. Adopting Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as a framework, the study explores ten Jordanian novels written between 1986 and 2016 to demonstrate that the modernization process and the cultural changes in the Arab world, in general, and in the Jordanian society, in particular, have increased the density of postmodern features in the Jordanian novels. Therefore, the conventional categorization of Jordanian novels as postcolonial works is challenged by the proliferation of postmodern features in such works. The study also attempts to illustrate that the novels that are written toward the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century display more postmodern characteristics. For comparison purposes, Arab and non-Arab postmodern novels are engaged in this discussion.

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