On the Distinctness of the Postmodernist Epiphany

This paper aims at assessing developments in the use of the epiphany in literary postmodernism. To achieve this, it draws on existing accounts of the epiphany in postmodern and contemporary literature, contending that the distinctness of postmodernism’s use of the epiphany is indissociable from its preoccupation with the articulation of subjectivity in narrative. Taking a selection of short stories (by Coover, Saunders, and Wallace) as examples, this paper illustrates how the moments of illumination in some contemporary fiction disrupt the established imaginary of the Joycean epiphany. As this article asserts, this results from the inability to fully embrace the relational quality of the revelation, thereby failing to “subject” the postmodernist literary character to the structure of power that endowed its high modernist counterpart with transcendental knowledge and therefore articulated it qua subject.