Divine Intervention and Performative Experience: Postmodernist Reexamination of Subjectivity in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Abstract

This research examines the portrayal of human subjectivity in postmodernist writings through a reading of Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye. It incorporates close reading of the novel alongside philosophical criticism of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, and works of literary critics such as Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon. These criticisms provide the basis for exploring how subjectivity is regarded through the modernist realm of thought and how it has been debated and altered in the platform of postmodernist thinking. The study aims to locate what contributes to the lack of subjectivity in The Ballad of Peckham Rye and identify the techniques which Spark uses to produce the discussion based on this idea. It argues that the concept of subjectivity is being reassessed in postmodernist writings to identify the role of external authority which has become an increasingly powerful figure that determines human subjectivity, identity, and existence.