I am currently working on a PhD proposal with the preliminary title “Visuality and Materiality in the Contemporary North American Novel”. In this project, I want to analyze the state of North American Literature in the aftermaths of postmodernism, particularly Derridian deconstruction. Apart from the border – if there is one at all – between postmodernism and post-postmodernism, my PhD grows on the soil of multiple borders and their instable, fluid nature: word/image, presence/absence and materiality/immateriality are probably the three most important ones.

In 2002 Linda Hutcheon declared postmodernism as being “over” and the chorus of voices in literary and cultural studies demanding a solution-oriented attitude in lieu of ivory tower musings on transcendental signifiers, simulacra and the like, has steadily increased. Many contemporary writers (e.g. Jonathan Franzen) consciously turn their back on the ‘cerebral aesthetics’ and never-ending postmodernist play while displaying a move towards a post-postmodernism, a period in which concepts of the body, the senses and materiality experience a revival. The return to materiality serves a specific purpose in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), a novel which brims over with tangible things in order to answer age-old questions such as ‘Is death truly the end?’ or ‘Why do we need art?’. These two questions alone evoke two more borders: life/death and art/non-art.

The concepts that simultaneously enforce and bridge all these borders are ‘ekphrasis’ and ‘aura’. While the former is defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation (Heffernan in Museum of Words, 1993), the latter denotes a transcendental quality of certain art objects, which is based on the combination of materiality, presence, uniqueness, history, authenticity and authority (Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1935). These two concepts have in common that they are the immaterial products dependent on the material source that they are evoking and transcending, respectively. My preliminary findings suggest that ekphrasis is an aura-enhancing tool, which – given the ‘material turn’ that some critics speak of – explains it ubiquity in today’s western culture. The intermedial phenomenon of ekphrasis is therefore symptomatic for a time in which the material is yet again center-staged.

I intend to broaden the project by also considering theories of monumentalism, memory and identity, and by including other contemporary North American writers who display a shift away from postmodernism, a revival of materiality and a highlighting of visuality. Siri Hustvedt, for example, emphasizes the materiality of the body and the importance of the senses to foreground concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ (e.g. What I Loved, 2003, and The Summer Without Men, 2011); Mark Z. Danielewski expresses his turn to visuality and materiality by playing around with typography, format and style (House of Leaves, 2000, and The Familiar series, 2015-); Anthony Doerr focuses on the metaphor of seeing and illuminates it from multiple angles, e.g. seeing the immaterial or seeing through touching (All The Light We Cannot See, 2014). Needless to say, this list is not exhaustive and it would profit immensely from the input of specialists in the field of border studies.