Paul Auster’s Transcendentalism: Shifting Postmodern Sensibility in the New Millennium

Jesús Bolaño Quintero

doi:10.18172/jes.4750

Authors

Jesús Bolaño Quintero Universidad de Cádiz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2635-7812

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.4750

Keywords:

Paul Auster, transcendentalism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, language games, Postmodernism, American fiction

Abstract

This article traces Paul Auster’s shift in sensibility after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. While his earlier novels where paradigmatic of postmodern self-referentiality, several critics have argued that his post-9/11 production turned towards realism. This might be interpreted as subsidiary evidence in favor of the polemic debate around the death of postmodernism. However, the aim of this article is to outline the transformation of the writer and offer explanations as to why that change in sensibility does not respond to a divestiture of postmodernism, but to an intensification of it. I trace Auster’s alternative to postmodern relativism, that is, transcendentalism, to arrive at the conclusion that his stance towards it is the same in his later novels.

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Author Biography

Jesús Bolaño Quintero, Universidad de Cádiz

Jesús Bolaño Quintero is a full-time lecturer at the University of Cadiz, where he read his PhD on Paul Auster and Dave Eggers. His research interests are centred on the role of transcendentalism in post-postmodern American literature and cinema. His latest article, entitled “Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and the Return of the Grand Narratives,” was published in the 2019 edition of the journal Revista Internacional de Culturas y Literaturas.

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