Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom in the Post-postmodern Era

Abstract

In the contemporary American literary scene, authors distinguish themselves for their different approaches towards the form and content of their works, together with their idea of literature. Jonathan Franzen started his career in 1988 and was dubbed Great American Novelist on Time magazine’s cover in 2010, right after the debut of his fourth novel, Freedom. This work aims at considering Franzen’s contribution to what has been called post-postmodernism by analyzing Freedom and highlighting the specific and unique combination of features that can be linked with this literary (but mostly cultural) trend. The novel presents some innovative elements related to the author’s stylistic and ideological development, but it also brings forward a psychological characterization and, thus, the possibility of identifying the construction of the self in the narrative and what this process entails. Drawing on Timmer’s analysis of the “symptoms” of post-postmodernism, the “structural need for a we” can be detected in Franzen’s novel, together with the interrelation between the socio-cultural context and the self as autonomous and free entity. The issues of competitiveness, depression and anxiety, freedom, rage, political activism and that feeling of not knowing how to live emerge in the novel and help position the author among his contemporaries, highlighting at the same time his personal take on literature and the direction in which it is going.