by Brooke K. Horvath?
Purdue University
The 1960s was a decade of spiritual as well as political restlessness. The counterculture embodied one highly visible manifestation of this spiritual discontent and of the problems attending its resolution in contemporary America. The period's fiction constitutes a second manifestation of these concerns. As a social phenomenon, the counterculture also forms a significant part of the social context within which the fiction was written, a context affecting the attitudes and beliefs of many authors, including the four under consideration here: Walker Percy, John Updike?, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas Pynchon. Chapter One sketches two relevant aspects of the theological context shaping both the period and its fiction: the breakdown of traditional theism and of social community. Chapter Two "reads" the counterculture as an instance of spiritual dissatisfaction, pointing to historical precedents and suggesting in what ways this discontent was unlike earlier examples of unease in America. Against this social-theological background Chapter Three-Six explore how particular spiritual problems were wrestled with in selected fictional works. Chapter Three discusses Percy's The Moviegoer and the loss of wonder, a loss diminishing the scope and depth of emotional and spiritual life. Chapter Four looks at Updike's Rabbit novels to consider love's misconception and failure as vehicle to transcendence. Chapter Five discusses several works by Brautigan and the various ploys they forward to gain imaginative control over death. Chapter Six treats the reader of Gravity's Rainbow, the culmination of Pynchon's work throughout the Sixties, as protagonist to explore how the book's style translates reading into the means of escaping the horrific, apocalyptic world this novel presents. The larger theme uniting these readings is the quest fir a salvific vision in the secular world, a quest prompted by disaffiliation from the social mainstream as a prerequisite to spiritual search.
Dissertation Abstracts International? 47/06A
December 1986: 2157A-58A
Order Number: DA8620569
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI8622158/
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