A comparative study of the death of authority and the loss of self in postmodern literature.

摘要

The themes of the death of authority and the loss of self are portrayed in postmodern world literature. Through five culturally specific novels, both the theme of the death of authority and the resulting idea of the loss of self are explored. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jerzy Kosinski, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee, and Haruki Murakami provide the novels, each of which presents the postmodern individual living in the world with no sense of authority and no sense of self. These individuals abandon their cultural and social roles in the attempt to find themselves. The individual's situation is understood through the radical theology of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Altizer and it's relationship to the deconstruction of Derrida and Barthes.