DOCSLIB.ORG

The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism 15 POSTMODERNISM AND FICTION BARRY LEWIS From the vantage point of the new millennium, it is clear that the dominant mode of literature in the second half of the twentieth century was postmodernist writing. The fiction later to be classified under this rubric emerged at around the time of the erection of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s. By 1989, with the Wall demolished and the Cold War almost over, postmodernism had established itself as the dominant paradigm for the culture. After this point, the concept saturated the media and academia to such an extent that the term became prob- lematic as an explanatory force due to its all-embracingness. It came to apply to virtually anything that mixed modes in a knowing manner. It would seem, then, that the epistemic break that occurred around 1990 concerns two understandings of the concept of postmodernism in relation to literature. Before that date, it referred to an overlapping set of characteristics that applied to a particular set of novelists, bound together by their simulta- neous acceptance/rejection of earlier traditions of fiction. These writers particu- larly contested the representational claims of realist writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, whose novels were positioned as unproblematic mirrors of society. Also contested were the subjective, totalizing tendencies of the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and the distinctions they made between low and high culture. Inspired by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin – particularly the concepts of dialo- gism, heteroglossia, polyphony, the chronotope and the carnivalesque1 – and later theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, the texts of the postmodernists were self-reflexive, playful and exceedingly aware of the medium of language in an attempt to revivify the novel form. Several commentators intuited that the ‘literature of exhaustion’ (John Barth’s phrase for the last-gasp attempt of the novel to achieve pre-eminence in the electronic global village)2 itself became exhausted around 1990. De Villo Sloan, in his essay ‘The Decline of American Postmodernism’ (1987), wrote: ‘Post modernism as a literary movement … is now in its final phase of deca- dence.’3 Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland, in their sweeping survey From Puritan ism to Postmodernism (1991), asserted: ‘Postmodernism now looks like a stylistic phase that ran from the 1960s to the 1980s.’4 If we take these statements seriously, it follows that the texts published between 1960 and 1990 constitute the ‘first wave’ of postmodernist writing and a large proportion of writing published after 1990 is part of what we might call its ‘second wave’. What 169 BARRY LEWIS distinguishes the two is that postmodernism mushroomed into the widest of catch-all terms in western culture after the global shifts initiated by the collapse of Communism, the exponential spread of the media and the ubiquity of the computer. In literary terms, postmodernist fiction itself became perceptible as a kind of ‘style’ and its characteristic techniques and themes came to be adopted without the same sense of breaking new ground. It is as if the ‘avant-garde’ had become the mainstream. Bradbury did much to chart the territory and promulgate the perception of the writing between 1960 and 1990 as a self-contained period. He admitted that the problems of mapping contemporary literature are considerable, and that its diversity presents problems for the would-be cartographer. Postmodernism was, of course, only part of the total landscape, but like a mountain range it loomed over everything else, and plodding over its peaks and valleys is no easy task. Luckily other intrepid guides have explored its contours and reliefs. The most useful textbooks are Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction, Larry McCaffery’s Post- modern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction, Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory and Brian Nicol’s The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernist Fiction.5 Postmodernist fiction was an international phenomenon, with major repre- sentatives from all over the world: Günter Grass and Peter Handke (Germany); Georges Perec and Monique Wittig (France); Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino (Italy); Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie (Britain); Stanislaw Lem (Poland); Milan Kundera (former Czechoslovakia); Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru); Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia); J. M. Coetzee (South Africa); and Peter Carey (Australia). Yet, despite this cosmopolitanism, Malcolm Bradbury quipped that ‘When something called postmodernism came along everyone thought it was American – even though its writers had names like Borges, Nabokov, Calvino and Eco’.6 This is because the number of Stateside writers who published post- modernist fiction was large. Here are twenty names usually included in such lists: Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Steve Katz, Jerzy Kosinski, Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick, Kurt Vonnegut. A similar list for the post-1990 or ‘second wave’ of American postmodernist writers would probably include: Sherman Alexie, Mark Amerika, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Douglas Coupland, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Mark Z. Danielewski, William Gibson, Lyn Hejinian, Harold Jaffe, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Leyner, Richard Powers, Joanna Russ, Joanna Scott, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lynne Tillman, Gerald Vizenor, William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace. Raymond Federman states in ‘Self-Reflexive Fiction’ that ‘it cannot be said that these [postmod- ernist] writers ... formed a unified movement for which a coherent theory could be formulated’.7 It is difficult to disagree with this, as the novels and short stories of both sets of authors vary a great deal. However, the ‘first wave’ of postmod- ernist writers have more of a common end and means than the ‘second wave’. 170 POSTMODERNISM AND FICTION Some of the dominant features of both waves of postmodernist fiction include: temporal disorder; the erosion of the sense of time; a pervasive and pointless use of pastiche; a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs; the loose association of ideas; paranoia; and vicious circles, or a loss of distinction between logically separate levels of discourse. Traits such as these are encountered time and time again in the bare, bewildering landscapes of the orig- inal postmodernists. John W. Aldridge puts it like this: In the fiction of [postmodernist writers] ... virtually everything and everyone exists in such a radical state of distortion and aberration that there is no way of deter- mining from which conditions in the real world they have been derived or from what standard of sanity they may be said to depart. The conventions of verisimili- tude and sanity have been nullified. Characters inhabit a dimension of structure- less being in which their behaviour becomes inexplicably arbitrary and unjudgeable because the fiction itself stands as a metaphor of a derangement that is seemingly without provocation and beyond measurement.8 Although Aldridge’s statement could also be applied to the ‘second wave’ of postmodernist writers who made their impact after 1990, it should be noted that their use of these techniques is more routine than radical, as the experimentation of their predecessors became deeply absorbed into the general culture. The following brief survey will therefore concentrate mainly on the characteristic derangements of the writers who belong to the pre-1990 dispensation. It will also focus primarily on the novel. Postmodernism has, of course, infiltrated all literary forms. The paradoxes and perplexities of John Ashbery and Susan Howe, and the word games of the Language poets such as Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, are well documented. In drama, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepherd and Tony Kushner exhibit a postmodern sensibility. Yet it is within the genre of the novel that postmodernism has had the most impact. For this reason, I will focus on postmodernist fiction, although it is possible to find many of the features it discerns in other types of contemporary writing. TEMPORAL DISORDER Postmodernism, according to Linda Hutcheon is a ‘contradictory enterprise: its art forms ... use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention ... [in] their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past’.9 She argues further that post- modernist writing is best represented by those works of ‘historiographic metafic- tion’ which self -consciously distort history. This can be accomplished by several means, as Brian McHale notes in the study mentioned earlier: apocryphal history, anachronism or the blending of history and fantasy. Apocryphal history involves bogus accounts of famous events. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, for instance, implies that its two eponymous heroes were aware that their famous line, dividing Maryland from Pennsylvania, would 171 BARRY LEWIS eventually lead to civil war.10 Anachronism disrupts temporal order by flaunting glaring inconsistencies of detail or setting. In Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed, Abraham Lincoln uses a telephone, and his assassination is reported on televi- sion.11 Tom Crick, a schoolteacher in Graham Swift’s Waterland, blurs history and fantasy by combining his account of the French Revolution with personal reminiscences and unsubstantiated anecdotes about
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Necessary Fictions”: Authorship and Transethnic Identity in Contemporary American Narratives
    MILNE, LEAH A., PhD. “Necessary Fictions”: Authorship and Transethnic Identity in Contemporary American Narratives. (2015) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 352 pp. As a theory and political movement of the late 20th century, multiculturalism has emphasized recognition, tolerance, and the peaceful coexistence of cultures, while providing the groundwork for social justice and the expansion of the American literary canon. However, its sometimes uncomplicated celebrations of diversity and its focus on static, discrete ethnic identities have been seen by many as restrictive. As my project argues, contemporary ethnic American novelists are pushing against these restrictions by promoting what I call transethnicity, the process by which one formulates a dynamic conception of ethnicity that cuts across different categories of identity. Through the use of self-conscious or metafictional narratives, authors such as Louise Erdrich, Junot Díaz, and Percival Everett mobilize metafiction to expand definitions of ethnicity and to acknowledge those who have been left out of the multicultural picture. I further argue that, while metafiction is often considered the realm of white male novelists, ethnic American authors have galvanized self-conscious fiction—particularly stories depicting characters in the act of writing—to defy multiculturalism’s embrace of coherent, reducible ethnic groups who are best represented by their most exceptional members and by writing that is itself correct and “authentic.” Instead, under the transethnic model, ethnicity is self-conflicted, forged through ongoing revision and contestation and in ever- fluid responses to political, economic, and social changes. “NECESSARY FICTIONS”: AUTHORSHIP AND TRANSETHNIC IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NARRATIVES by Leah A. Milne A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by _____________________ Committee Chair ©2015 Leah A.
    [Show full text]
  • T.111%. Iltdrulli 11C,UIVIC
    DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE OE FORM 6000,2/69 OFFICE OF EDUCATION , t.111%. IltdrUllI 11C,UIVIC. ERIC ACC. NO. ED 041 181 I S DOCUMENTCOPYRIGHTED? YES ta NO II CH ACC. NO. P.A.PUBL. DATE ISSUE ERICREPRODUCTION RELEASE? YES 0 NO AA 000 589 70 RIEDEC70 LEVELOF AVAILABI I-ITY I II HI AUTHOR Rothenberg, Albert TITLE Comprehensive Guide to Creative Writing Programs in American Colleges and Universities. SOURCE CODEINSTITUTION(SOURCE) ECC99225 SP. AG. CODESPONSORING AGENCY LYR56987 EDR S PRICE CONTRACT NO, GRANT NO. 0.75;8.45 REPORT NO. BUR EAU NO. AVAI LABI LI TY JOURNAL CITATION DESCRIPTIVE NOTE 167p. DESCRIPTORS *Creative Writing; *English Programs; *Higher Education; UndergraduateStudy; Graduate Study; Short Stories; Playwriting; Poetry; Scripts; Independent Study; Experimental Programs; Instructional Staff; Recognition; Student Teacher Relationship; Cocurricular Activities; School Surveys I DENT1 Fl ER S ABSTRACT Information on creative writing programs was collected from 1042 out of 1200 American colleges and universities contacted. The following data is presented in tabular form: (1) undergraduate academic status of creative writing; (2) graduate status; (3) offering of a course or courses covering the"core" or basic literary genres of short story, verse, and playwriting;(4) additional or unique course offerings in creative writing, such as TV, radio, film writing; (5) opportunities for independent study and work/study or experimental programs related to creative writing; (6) professional writers on the faculty; (7) opportunities for contact with professional writers through visits, lecture series or a"Writer in Residence" program; (8) prizes and awards in creative writing;(9) opportunities for individual contact with creative writing faculty iv seminars or individual conferences; (10) extra-curricular outlets for practicing and appreciating creative writing.
    [Show full text]
  • Master in Advanced English Studies: Languages and Cultures in Contact
    MASTER IN ADVANCED ENGLISH STUDIES: LANGUAGES AND CULTURES IN CONTACT Departamento de Filología Inglesa 2015-2016 Final Master Thesis And the Virus Spread: Infection as a Bond Between William Burroughs’s and David Cronenberg’s Dystopian Works Pedro Alberto Martinez Martínez VALLADOLID 2016 The work presented in this MA thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original and my own work, except as acknowledged in the text. The work in this thesis has not been submitted, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this or any other university. This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Advanced English Studies: Languages and Cultures in Contact to Universidad de Valladolid by Pedro Alberto Martínez Martínez July 2016 Student’s signature__________________________________________ Approved Dr. Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Stracham Supervisor’s signature______________________________________ ABSTRACT This dissertation deals with infection in the American Beat Generation author William S. Burroughsand the Canadian film-maker David Cronenberg. I have chosen Burroughs’s Cut- Up trilogy (formed by The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express) and Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Shivers and Rabid as my main frames of reference to carry out this study. The main purpose of this comparative analysis (which is not exempt of similarities and differences in the way these two authors tackle the same subject matter) is to explore a research gap in order to shed some light to the means by which the two authors perceive infection and parasitism as ever-present elements in theirworks that provides them with philosophical ideas that go well beyond the genres which they seem to be ascribed to on the surface.
    [Show full text]
  • Artists' Books
    ARTISTS' BOOKS REFERENCE REVIEWS Multiples, et cetera by Harry Ruh6 (Amsterdam, Tuja Evewhing You Always Wanted, Anywhere But Mere by Books, 1991) is the story of how Rube became involved in Joey Morgan includes a CD as well as a full-blown book, in creating an environment for exhibiting and collecting artists' keeping with the rnultitalents of this artist-filrmnaker. The books from the outset of the movement, discussing Fluxus. bookwork accompanies an exhibition at the Power Plant in Mundertmark in Berh and then in Cologne, Francesco Toronto. The bookwork includes photographs of Abel Cou in Verona, a discussion of artists' books, object books Gance and his crew, as well as film st& of men and women, and book objects, Ulises Carrion in Amsterdam. He then interspersed with text. By using vellum pages, the artist- &cusses the booklet production of Icelandic artists, who filmmaker's pages have overlays at all times, allowing one to eventually came to Amsterdam and other places in Holland peer through texts with no punctuation except for bold and and continued their publishing. italic differentations for illustrations, so that there is a filmic Archives are also discussed with the Archiv Sohcer- quality to the time-space continuum of this bookwork. In- tainly in focus, as well as The Archive created by Peter van terspersed is a color transparency (full-size) of butterflies Beveren first in Middelberg and now in Rotterdam, whose and an aurobiographical description of summering on Nan- artwork is his archive, as well as the Silverman Collection, tucker. At the end of the complex and convoluted fhtext Namucci, Guy Schraenen, etc.
    [Show full text]
  • Raymond Federman
    INTRODUCTION OTHER VOICES The Fiction of Raymond Federman Jeffrey R. Di Leo BEFORE—AND AFTER—THEORY Over the past thirty or so years, the fi ction of Raymond Federman has been the subject of a good deal of scholarship in multiple languages. Numerous critical studies of his work have been published.1 Also, doctoral dissertations2 have been written about him, and several volumes celebrating his achieve- ments3 have come out. This is in addition to the many articles and book chapters devoted his work. However, in spite of this wealth of attention, the full range of Federman’s achievements have yet to be fully recognized by the academic community. One of the reasons for this lack of recognition stems from the ways in which Federman’s novels have been categorized. In the United States, Federman’s work has most commonly been connected with a group of writers that brought new “life” to American fi ction in the wake of pro- nouncements of the death of the novel in the late 1960s.4 As such, his revitalizing, innovative peers include Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick. While the identifi cation of Federman with this group of writers is accurate, important, and not without its merits, in the long run, it has served to exclude or marginalize his work from other—and arguably even more signifi cant—contexts. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers that created through narrative experimentation a pioneering 1 © 2011 State University of New York Press, Albany SP_DiL_INT_001-026.indd 1 10/26/10 12:29:34 PM 2 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS body of “metafi ction” or “postmodern” American literature.
    [Show full text]
  • The Post-Postmodern Aesthetics of John Fowles Claiborne Johnson Cordle
    University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Master's Theses Student Research 5-1981 The post-postmodern aesthetics of John Fowles Claiborne Johnson Cordle Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/masters-theses Recommended Citation Cordle, Claiborne Johnson, "The post-postmodern aesthetics of John Fowles" (1981). Master's Theses. Paper 444. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE POST-POSTMODERN AESTHETICS OF JOHN FOWLES BY CLAIBORNE JOHNSON CORDLE A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF ~.ASTER OF ARTS ,'·i IN ENGLISH MAY 1981 LTBRARY UNIVERSITY OF RICHMONl:» VIRGINIA 23173 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . p . 1 CHAPTER 1 MODERNISM RECONSIDERED . p • 6 CHAPTER 2 THE BREAKDOWN OF OBJECTIVITY . p • 52 CHAPTER 3 APOLLO AND DIONYSUS. p • 94 CHAPTER 4 SYNTHESIS . p . 102 CHAPTER 5 POST-POSTMODERN HUMANISM . p . 139 ENDNOTES • . p. 151 BIBLIOGRAPHY . • p. 162 INTRODUCTION To consider the relationship between post­ modernism and John Fowles is a task unfortunately complicated by an inadequately defined central term. Charles Russell states that ... postmodernism is not tied solely to a single artist or movement, but de­ fines a broad cultural phenomenon evi­ dent in the visual arts, literature; music and dance of Europe and the United States, as well as in their philosophy, criticism, linguistics, communications theory, anthropology, and the social sciences--these all generally under thp particular influence of structuralism.
    [Show full text]
  • Listening As Agon in the Society of Control You Can Find out More About the Nervous 1
    But why return to Nietzsche for an analysis Listening as Agon in of listening-especially listening today in the age of big data and surveillance capitalism? the Society of Control I do so for two reasons: first, to remind us that our current situation is not as novel as we sometimes take it to be; and, second, to make a broader point about what listening is and what a politics of listening might be. Let me take up the second of these points. Nietzsche's polemically broad conception of Christoph Cox interpretation contests the special status of human beings and of human interpretation, Before we move too quickly to discuss asserting that all entities (human, animal, "the politics of listening", I would like to vegetable, mineral, mechanical, etc) are offer some philosophical caveats aimed at engaged in this battle of interpretations. reconfiguring the ontological field in which This is relevant to our consideration of both we understand "listening" and "the political". listening and politics. In the announcement The question of listening seems to me to be for this symposium, the organisers quote fundamentally a question of interpretation, a passage by sound artist Lawrence Abu in the expanded sense in which Nietzsche Hamdan, who writes: "Listening is not a uses the term. For Nietzsche, "to interpret" natural process inherent to our perception is to be confronted with a flow (of words, of the world but rather [is] constructed by sounds, images, information, whatever) and the conditions of the spaces and times to filter it in some way according to some set that engulf us."3 Now, I am very fond of Abu of interests or constraints.
    [Show full text]
  • American Book Awards 2004
    BEFORE COLUMBUS FOUNDATION PRESENTS THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS 2004 America was intended to be a place where freedom from discrimination was the means by which equality was achieved. Today, American culture THE is the most diverse ever on the face of this earth. Recognizing literary excel- lence demands a panoramic perspective. A narrow view strictly to the mainstream ignores all the tributaries that feed it. American literature is AMERICAN not one tradition but all traditions. From those who have been here for thousands of years to the most recent immigrants, we are all contributing to American culture. We are all being translated into a new language. BOOK Everyone should know by now that Columbus did not “discover” America. Rather, we are all still discovering America—and we must continue to do AWARDS so. The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The goals of BCF are to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. BCF has always employed the term “multicultural” not as a description of an aspect of American literature, but as a definition of all American litera- ture. BCF believes that the ingredients of America’s so-called “melting pot” are not only distinct, but integral to the unique constitution of American Culture—the whole comprises the parts. In 1978, the Board of Directors of BCF (authors, editors, and publishers representing the multicultural diversity of American Literature) decided that one of its programs should be a book award that would, for the first time, respect and honor excellence in American literature without restric- tion or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre.
    [Show full text]
  • Nancy Huston in Self-Translation an Aesthetics of Redoublement
    Corso di Dottorato in Studi Umanistici Curriculum: Studi Linguistici e Letterari XXIX ciclo Nancy Huston in Self-translation An Aesthetics of Redoublement Relatore Dottoranda Prof. Andrea Binelli Dott.ssa Giorgia Falceri A.A. 2015-2016 1 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I ............................................................................................... 7 I. AN INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY SELF-TRANSLATION .............. 7 1.1 FRAMING SELF-TRANSLATION STUDIES ................................................... 7 1.2 SELF-TRANSLATION IN THEORY ............................................................. 15 1.2.1 AUTHOR, TRANSLATOR AND TEXT .....................................................................18 1.2.2 RECONSIDERING TRADITIONAL CATEGORIES AND BINARY OPPOSITIONS .......... 23 1.3 SELF-TRANSLATION IN PRACTICE ........................................................... 26 1.3.1 SELF-TRANSLATORS, THESE STRANGERS. .......................................................... 26 1.3.2 TYPOLOGIES OF SELF-TRANSLATED TEXTS ........................................................ 31 1.3.3 TOWARDS A HISTORY OF SELF-TRANSLATION? ................................................. 35 1.3.4 SELF-TRANSLATION IN A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE ................................. 40 1.4 AGAINST SELF-TRANSLATION ................................................................ 46 1.5 INNOVATIVE THEORETICAL MODELS TO APPROACH THE SELF-TRANSLATED TEXT ............................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Post-Holocaust Interactions : Means of Defamiliarising Reality in Raymond Federman's 'The Voice in the Closet'
    :. ~· j;,f' • . ·. :' ,. · Post-Holocaust InteractiQns: Means of Defamiliarising Reality · in Raymond Federman's The Voice in the C/tiset · Catalina Botez Ab~tract: In this article l explore Raymond Federm~ni's Post-Holocaust narrative The ·voice in the Gloset froirt the perspective of Viktor Shkovsky's fönnaHst theory of "defaniiliarization Of reality". ·I argue · that the dissolution of latiguage and syntax~ along with . StrUCtutal disorder ·and iSgUeg ·· ·Of perspecfive, stich aS blended, · alnlost undistinguishable narrative vöices, contribute to deconstruct the trauma of'survivotship ahd work towards comprehension and healing. These• extreme formal strategies · challenge · the reader to actively participate in an innovative, albeit controversial type of litetariness, . which uses paradox; absurdity, repetitioti and specific. symbolism as further nieans to defainiliarise and re-order events. Additionally; I contend that the metatextual approach involved in the process of fictionalising lived experience, fuels the debate related to the abstractisatimi ofmemory and to the legitimacyof rewriting niemocy into imtobiographic fiction. I also maintain that the intetactioi'i of the child survivor's narrative voice with that ofthe adult narrator's autobiographic ruminations speaks for the pöst-trauniatic splitting of the self, which also functions as a de-habituation ofthe reader from mainstream perceptions of survivorship~ . ' . .. Keywords: defam1liarisation ·of niality; H~locaust ~auina, child-survivor, deconstruction and nietatextuality,
    [Show full text]
  • William S. Burroughs Reading Wilhelm Reich
    humanities Article Genius and Genitality: William S. Burroughs Reading Wilhelm Reich Thomas Antonic Department of German Studies (Institut für Germanistik), University of Vienna, A1010 Vienna, Austria; [email protected] Received: 15 January 2019; Accepted: 16 May 2019; Published: 21 May 2019 Abstract: This article explores the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s theories and writings on the works and thinking of William S. Burroughs. Reich’s significance for Burroughs’ fiction is beyond doubt, as the appearance of Reich’s discoveries and inventions, such as orgones and orgone accumulators, in Burroughs’ major works demonstrates. Yet to date, no attempt has been made in academia to make all those references to Reich in Burroughs’ complete œuvre visible. In order to make the thinking of the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and scientist comprehensible for readers not familiar with Reich, the first section will provide a brief biographical outline. In the subsequent sections, the article will describe how Burroughs and other Beat writers discovered Reich, how and to what extent Burroughs incorporated Reich in his texts throughout his career and what opinions Burroughs expressed about Reich in interviews and letters. For the first time, with a summary as undertaken in this article and by documenting most of the references to Reich in Burroughs’ work, the importance of the former to the latter is revealed in a compact form. Keywords: William S. Burroughs; Wilhelm Reich; beat generation; orgone 1. Introduction At some point, readers familiar with Beat literature have certainly come across the name of Wilhelm Reich or references to one of his discoveries and inventions in books by or about the Beat Generation.
    [Show full text]
  • Daniel Green
    DANIEL GREEN TABLE OF CONTENTS POSTMODERN FICTION IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 4 POSTMODERNISTS 1.0 14 Twice-Told Tales: 14 John Barth 14 William Gass 23 Robert Coover 28 Raymond Federman 33 Gilbert Sorrentino 39 Calibrated Iconoclasms: 48 Donald Barthelme 48 John Hawkes 55 Ishmael Reed 68 Thomas Pynchon 74 Don DeLillo 85 Joseph McElroy 93 Harry Mathews 97 1 INTRODUCTION Although these are essays that have appeared variously over the past decade or so, usually on the publication of a new work by the writer at hand (obviously the Hawkes essay is an exception, as is the omnibus review that begins the collection), they were almost all written as part of an effort on my part to “cover” as many classic postmodern writers as I could while also in individual reviews and essays examining the formal features and stylistic tendencies, as well as discernible commonalities of insight and perspective, associated with American postmodern fiction in general. Ideally, then the reader would find in the following selections both close readings of an individual author’s work and accumulating commentary on the nature, assumptions, and identifiable practices of postmodern fiction. The earliest of the essays is the first, which was published in 2003. Even though it discusses books published in the earliest years of the “new millennium,” and postmodernism is now a phenomenon rooted even more firmly in the past, I have chosen it as a keynote essay of a sort because it announces some of the themes pursued further in the subsequent essays and identifies important postmodern writers, some of whom are discussed at greater length in the essays, while those who are not at least receive some attention in this omnibus survey.
    [Show full text]