The Paradoxes of Intimacy explores the formal and narrative possibilities and limitations of writing about intimate human relationships in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In an age marked by globalization, growing social and environmental insecurities, and intensification of capitalist markets (Jeffrey Nealon), the ways we bond with each other have come under increasing scrutiny in scientific research -not least for its links to problems of alienation, solipsism, and social disintegration. Recent sociological research on intimacy has attested to a crisis in the subject describing contemporary forms of close relationships as dramatically cooling (Eva Illouz), unbinding (Zygmunt Baumann), and even eroding (Byung- Chul Han). Meanwhile, the emergence of new forms of intimate bonding, such as same-sex relationships, the #Metoo social movement’s public exposure of private harm, the rise of emotion-aware technologies, and the sentimentalization of capitalist markets have radically transformed the ways intimacies are created and experienced both in actual life and in artful practices. While the subject has been extensively studied in sociological and philosophical disciplines, it is still underexplored in literary scholarship, where intimacy is often used interchangeably with love to refer to either romantic or erotic relationships. Performing a cross-generic analysis of Rachel Cusk’s The Outline Trilogy, Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, and Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, The Paradoxes of Intimacy argues that contemporary women’s fiction reimagines the aesthetics of intimacy by moving beyond the exhausted structures of romantic and confessional narratives. Investigating the emergent forms of literary intimacies as they are problematized and re-invented in postmillennial women’s fiction, it critically addresses the question of how literature navigates the liminal spaces of (textual and narrative) encounters and temporalities (of imagined futures and old forms) to dismantle the fictional representation of intimacy as a private matter. While literary intimacies are traditionally predicated on an individualized point of view in which the interiority of the narrator or a character is rendered through introspection, contemporary women’s fiction uses interior monologues and indirect style not to deliver psychological depth, but to reveal the sociality, artificiality, and paradoxicality of connection. In tracing these formal and thematic transformations, the dissertation contends that contemporary women’s fiction does not seek to restore intimacy or propose new modes of authentic bonding. Rather, it reflects and aestheticizes the pervasive disconnection that defines the postmillennial world. Cusk’s autofictional narratives turn intimacy into a performative repetition of stories that reveal the emptiness of self-disclosure; Atwood’s dystopian satire renders love as an apparatus of emotional and economic control; and Robinson’s Lila gestures toward a fragile fleeting alternative that neither resolves nor escapes this crisis. In this sense, The Paradoxes of Intimacy argues that intimacy in contemporary fiction becomes not a site of resolution, but a literary form of crisis and paradox -a mode that exposes the limits of relation, the failure of reciprocity, and the persistent yearning for connection in an age increasingly hostile to the intimate.
