Fictions, we are so often told, are everywhere in America today.
The extravagant claims of advertising are everywhere, much of the
day's news concerns "pseudo-events" like rallies or ceremonies
...staged so that they can be reported on, and philosophers doubt even
the possibility of any knowledge being objective. Thus we seem less
and less able to distinguish between the real and the invented. In
Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of
Contemporary American Fiction, Daniel Punday examines the
"postmodern" expansion of fictionality-the feeling today that the
line between the real and the invented is harder to draw-and argues
that this feeling reflects a struggle by different cultural groups
to define how we tell and use "literary" stories. He discusses the
literary texts of John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed;
paraliterary forms like science fiction and electronic writing; and
resolutely nonliterary texts, especially role-playing games, in
terms of how each responds to the institution of literature through
its definition of fictionality. For too long, postmodernism has
been described by easy generalizations-relativist, indeterminate,
commercialized-that have rendered the term nearly worthless. Punday
applies a more nuanced understanding of fictionality to a variety
of contemporary narrative forms that occupy different locations
within postmodern literary culture. Approaching postmodernism as a
configuration of institutions that legitimize fictionality, he
illuminates the nature of creative writing and the conflicts
between different literary groups in America today.
What does narrative look like when the possibility of an expansive future has been called into question? This query is the driving force behind Daniel Grausam'sOn Endings,which seeks to show how the ...core texts of American postmodernism are a response to the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and especially to the new potential for total nuclear conflict. Postwar American fiction needs to be rethought, he argues, by highlighting postmodern experimentation as a mode of profound historical consciousness.
In Grausam's view, previous studies of fiction mimetically concerned with nuclear conflict neither engage the problems that total war might pose to narration nor take seriously the paradox of a war that narrative can never actually describe. Those few critical works that do take seriously such problems do not offer a broad account of American postmodernism. And recent work on postmodernism has offered no comprehensive historical account of the part played by nuclear weapons in the emergence of new forms of temporal and historical experience.On Endingssignificantly extends the project of historicizing postmodernism while returning the nuclear to a central place in the study of the Cold War.
Despite having vanished from the epicentre of Beckett Studies, the modern/postmodern debate remains unsettled ground. Drawing from Beckett's historical unwillingness to fall neatly within these ...markers, this article investigates Beckett's legacy over the fiction and essays of John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Privileging Beckett as a generative 'problem', Barthelme's category will be used to illustrate Beckett's legacy as one that is both resisted and accommodated by postmodern authors. In this regard, Barthelme conceives of his works as written 'in opposition' to Beckett, while appropriating his aesthetic commitment to 'not knowing'. This is supplemented by a discussion of Barth, in whose works we find a 'shore' erected against the ruins of Beckettian 'silence'. Underwriting the 'problem' discussed in this article, we will also examine the contradictory models of legacy embodied in Beckett's writing; in particular, the Texts for Nothing, (1955) following the impasse of The Unnamable, (1953) find Beckett forging a nominally post-Beckett voice in the space of his own corpus. Simultaneously engaging with and disavowing Beckett's influence, Barth and Barthelme interrogate the shape of Beckett's postmodern legacy, finding in Beckett's works both the threat of ending and the promise of creative renewal.
CGL LEAVEY, JOHN P.
Mosaic (Winnipeg),
09/2017, Letnik:
50, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The margins of letters as genre, literature, and theory are explored in an intertextual polylogue on John Barth’s LETTERS and Jacques Derrida’s Glas and La carte postale.
This thesis discusses the aesthetics of a mode of survival in light of the postmodern reading in The Wonderland Quartet of Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ). Oates is a prominent American critic and writer ...of fiction, whose texts encompass novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. Her oeuvre has been translated into multiple languages, and she holds an array of literary and other awards. Additionally, Oates has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize five times, and has been the recipient of prestigious Nobel Prize nominations.Her writing takes on abundant influences of literary and philosophical intellectuals, mirrors her life observance and poses altering forms of her artistic imagination. What may be delineated as Oates' original literary scholarship is her ability to reflect on the cultural reception of Walter Arnold Kaufmann's Nietzsche in her fiction, while enabling her characters to decide their purposes. Echoing Nietzsche, her characters are not limited by any normative standards. The author's narrative techniques let the characters' polyphonic voices dominate the fabulation. In the context of societal margins from the 1950s until the early 1970s, the tone of The Wonderland Quartet progresses into a buoyant climax of human pursuit in its last text.Oates aestheticizes cultural experiments after the proclamation about the death of God that mould postmodern social theories of the American culture after 1950. She depicts the philosophical transition of Kaufmann's model of Nietzsche, as a shaping influence on society, into postmodern sentiment. In her fiction, Oates juxtaposes the concept of unity with the postmodern concept of decentralisation that affirms pluralism. Her fictional perspective of blurred lines between fantasy and reality is influenced by Lewis Carroll's texts that are celebrated for the element of absurdity and the images of jumbled nonsense by postmodern critics.In The Wonderland Quartet (A Garden of Earthly Delights(1967),Expensive People (1968), the National Book Award-winning Them (1969), and Wonderland (1971)), Oates' characters epitomise the cultural margins, and push their boundaries, testing their limitations and striving to go beyond them. The author celebrates the aesthetics of playful fictions that corresponds to the postmodern reading. However, her dramatisation of the power games invites an element of terror to depict the tragedy of disordered human domination. While the protagonists from the first three novels of the Quartet correspond to the postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche's ideas, in the last text, the protagonist achieves integrity, and centralises authoritative influences into his internal control, fashioning Kaufmann's model of Nietzsche.
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