title: The quest in postmodern literature
Creators: name: Carda, Eva
Publisher: name: :none
Year: 2013

description: Der Begriff “Quest” wird in der Literatur gewöhnlicherweise mit der “Quest” nach dem heiligen Gral in Verbindung gebracht. „Quest“-Erzählungen sind jedoch während der gesamten Literaturgeschichte weit verbreitet, wobei diese Erzählungen durch eine gemeinsame Basisstruktur charakterisiert sind, auch wenn sie sich oberflächlich stark voneinander differenzieren. Diese Popularität hielt auch in der amerikanischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts an und auch in der Periode des in diesem Jahrhunderts entstehen Postmodernismus. Diese Periode ist gekennzeichnet, durch eine Abkehr von traditionellen literarischen Konventionen und durch ein Experimentieren mit literarischen Formen. Dementsprechend wurde auch die traditionelle Strukturform der „Quest“ in dieser literarischen Periode in einer Form verwendet, die stark von der traditionellen Verwendung dieses Strukturelements abweicht. In dieser Diplomarbeit, soll untersucht werden, in welchen veränderten Formen die „Quest“ in postmodernen Texten auftritt. Darüber hinaus, soll festgestellt werden, wie die „Quest“ in diesen Texten verwendet wird, um postmoderne Fragestellungen in den Text einzuführen. Hierfür werden zwei für die Postmoderne repräsentative Texte analysiert und zwar Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 und Paul Austers City of Glass.
description: The term “quest” in literature is commonly associated with the early legends of the quest for the Holy Grail. Literary history, however, provides a wide range of quest narratives, each of which seems to share an essential structure, even when they assume so many different outward forms. The quest can be found throughout the history of literature, ranging from the earliest myths to the most contemporary writing; it can thus be considered one of the most consistent structural patterns of the human storytelling tradition. The quest narrative remained important for American literature throughout the 20th century, and its turn to so-called postmodern literature. One of the ways in which postmodern literature can be distinguished from earlier literature is by its rejection of traditional literary conventions and its development of new forms of creating literature. As a result, the quest’s appearance in postmodern literature comes to deviate from its more traditional form and is often either a parody or a subversion of that form. In this thesis, it will be argued that the quest pattern is of major importance to postmodern writers, whose use of that pattern significantly deviates from its traditional form in order to account for the complexities of the postmodern world. Postmodern writers use the pattern of the quest in a deconstructive way, thus recreating the quest’s form and allowing for the incorporation of postmodern concerns. It is, therefore, one of the primary aims of this paper to investigate the various forms taken by the pattern of the quest in postmodern literature. It will then be shown how the quest was used to incorporate their concerns within these texts, thereby introducing postmodern theories within them and thematizing the surrounding postmodern world. The two postmodern texts which are analyzed according to these criteria are Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Paul Auster’s City of Glass.