Simone Sannio is a PhD Candidate in American Literature at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He was a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at Princeton University in the Academic Year 2022/23 and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in the Spring 2022. His dissertation is about unfinishedness and self-reflexivity in the American novel of the 1990s.

An End in Itself? Unfinishedness and Self-Reflexivity in the American Novel of the 1990s (Dissertation Project)

Dissertation in Literature

Mentoring team:

First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein

Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Martin Klepper

Third supervisor: Prof. Dr. Frank Kelleter

“Unfinishedness” is not a new issue in literature and art, nor something specific to the United States. Quite the contrary, unfinished creative works of all sorts have surfaced throughout the ages, in every artistic field, and all over the world—from Michelangelo’s non finito sculptures to the Romantic fragment poem. Yet the development of the US novel in recent decades provides a particularly fertile and relatively unexplored setting for the study of the “Literary Unfinished.” My argument is that the unfinished novel has not disappeared in contemporary America: it has survived by changing its nature and scope, after other transformations in US literature, culture, and society. Following the lessons of modernism and postmodernism, a growing number of American writers have dealt with incompleteness in art and literature as part of their fiction, that is, self-reflexively—by the 1990s, however, unfinishedness is no longer just “an end in itself.”

This dissertation focuses on four US novels from the 1990s that include within their plots fictitious unfinished texts, or other unfinished creative works, as media of textual self-reflection: Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. These works are representatives of the same literary form that I propose to call, for short, “unfinished metafiction,” or more precisely “fiction about unfinishedness.” My book intends to trace the perceived shift between traditionally unfinished novels and this peculiar type of finished novel in which unfinishedness, fragmentariness, and the lack of closure have been internalized, thus progressively moving from form to content.

Even though the unfinished has continued to underlie much of American culture, the recurrence of this trend over the past few decades has not been given the critical scrutiny it deserves. “Unfinished metafiction” has not been thoroughly investigated as a literary form of its own, just as the potentialities of a comparison with actual archive material or with similar forms in other arts and media have not been fully explored. Moreover, it has not been spelled out enough that literary works—just like in music, films, and the fine arts—can be potentially “complete” and “perfect” in their “unfinished” and “imperfect” appearance. My dissertation intends to stress all this based on a close reading of unfinishedness and self-reflexivity in the American novel of the 1990s, thus also aiming at the revaluation of an apparently flawed artistic form about which there is still much left unsaid.