Postmodern Fragmented Self: Schizophrenia and Masculinity Crisis in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

نوع المستند : أبحاث علمیة

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أستاذ مشارك في الأدب الإنجليزي قسم اللغات الأجنبية كلية التربية - جامعة طنطا

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This paper deals with the relationship between the death of the subject and postmodern schizophrenia in late capitalist society from Fredric Jameson's point of view. Also, it explains how this relationship between the death of the subject and schizophrenia leads to the crisis of masculinity in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. In the postmodern era, late capitalism leads to the death of the individual subject, which leads to depthlessness and fragmentation. Jameson asserts that the idea of postmodern depthlessness appears in two phenomena: schizophrenia and pastiche. For Jameson, postmodern schizophrenia has nothing to do with the clinical meaning. It is a social and cultural process rather than a state of mind. He defines it as the breakdown of signifying chain and temporal unification. In Fight Club, Palahniuk introduces an example of postmodern schizophrenia and the masculinity crisis generated by capitalism. The protagonist has schizophrenia because of capitalist society. His schizophrenic state of mind resembles the postmodern crisis of temporality in which he lives in a perpetual present, so he cannot formulate a unified sense of identity. He creates an altered personality to help him resist his chaotic state of mind that extends to his society. Consequently, he engages in self-destruction and invents an anarchist group to destroy capitalism. At the end of the novel, the protagonist cannot escape the schizophrenic state of mind since schizophrenia is a psychological response to the condition of postmodernism.

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