“A Museum of Fifteen Years Ago”: Nostalgia in Three Novels by Douglas Coupland

TLDR: Coupland's characters must negotiate between progressive new forms, expressions, anxieties and styles and an older-fashioned, nostalgic attachment to the past and a search for essential meaning, truth and order as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: Summary In several of his earlier books, notably Generation X, Douglas Coupland presents his recent past as a lost moral condition and the mid-1970s as the moment of the fall into the confusions of a post-industrial age. His protagonists repeatedly commemorate and mourn the last days of this putative golden age. While it can be argued that there is nothing essentially unique about his X-generation characters’ nostalgia, it is clear that Coupland believes that his characters inhabit a special socio-economic period with unique challenges and losses. Focusing on Generation X (1991), Life After God (1994) and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), the article examines how Coupland's characters must negotiate between progressive new forms, expressions, anxieties and styles and an older-fashioned, nostalgic attachment to the past and a search for essential meaning, truth and order. Julia Kristeva's concept of the chora and certain ideas of Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard are used to counterpoint and illuminate the d...