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In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking.
Brian McHale provides a series of readings of a wide range of postmodernist fiction, from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum to the works of cyberpunk science-fiction, relating the works to aspects of postmodern popular culture.
What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fictio...
Offers a striking new interpretation of Beckett's major fiction, demonstrating how his development as a writer was shaped by shifting twentieth-century ideas about the social function of literature.
This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master.
This Introduction surveys the full spectrum of postmodern culture, from architecture and visual art to fiction, poetry, and drama.
A smart, eclectic analysis of nine long poems written by postmodernist poets Addressing subjects as wide-ranging as angelology, the court masque, pop art, caricature, the cult of the ruin, hip-hop, Spense''s Irish policy, and the aesthetics of silence, Brian McHale pulls varied threads together to identify a repertoire of postmodernist elements characteristic of the long poems he examines. As critic Jed Rasula explains, "McHale is wonderfully resourceful in changing the subject from chapter to chapter to fit the poems discussed, and while his approach adheres to the conventions of textual exegesis, the chapters really shine as orchestrations of issues. For instance, James Merrill's The Chang...
The 'narrative turn' in the humanities, which expanded the study of narrative to various disciplines, has found a correlate in the 'medial turn' in narratology. Long restricted to language-based literary fiction, narratology has found new life in the recognition that storytelling can take place in a variety of media, and often combines signs belonging to different semiotic categories: visual, auditory, linguistic and perhaps even tactile. The essays gathered in this volume apply the newly gained awareness of the expressive power of media to particular texts, demonstrating the productivity of a medium-aware analysis. Through the examination of a wide variety of different media, ranging from w...
The last two decades have seen a burst of renewed interest in narrative theory across many academic disciplines as scholars analyze the power of storytelling in print and other media. Teaching Narrative Theory provides a comprehensive resource for instructors who aim to help students identify and understand the distinctive features of narrativity in a text or discourse and make use of the terms and concepts of the field. This volume in the Options for Teaching series is organized to assist teachers at different levels of instruction and in different disciplinary settings. In twenty-one essays, the contributors discuss narrative theory's various teaching contexts (e.g., classes on literature, creative writing, and folklore and ethnography); key concepts and terms (e.g., story and plot, time and space, voice, perspective); applications beyond printed texts (e.g., film and digital media); and impact on other areas of theory (e.g., gender and ethnic studies). A glossary provides a guide to the challenging technical terminology characteristic of the field, and the volume as a whole emphasizes the importance of understanding and implementing technical terms in learning narrative theory.
The Fiction of Postmodernity is a significant and accessible study of the relation of postmodern fiction to theories of the postmodern. Contemporary works of fiction by novelists such as Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and Martin Amis are viewed in relation to critiques of the "culture industry," analyses of the "postmodern condition," and theories of simulacra. The work of influential theorists of the postmodern--such as Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard--is explained and compared. The book offers descriptions of the postmodern from both the Marxist critical tradition and from the perspective of postmarxism. Key features in both these definitions are explained in relation to modernist and postmodern works of fiction. Issues relating to the postmodern representation of history and the development of a postmodern politics are also addressed in relation to works of contemporary fiction.