Class #14.ppt

Class #14 Literary Criticism Postmodern Fiction Postmodernist representation Re-presenting the past Postmodernist Representation Anti-realism “ . . . Many postmodern strategies are openly premised on a challenge to the realist notion of representation that presumes the transparency of the medium and thus the direct and natural link between sign and referent or between words and world” (Hutcheon, Politics, 34). Postmodernist Representation Exhaustion and replenishment “Literature itself had been ‘exhausted,’ as Barth argued . . . . The great plots has been used again and again; centuries of stylistic innovation and formal experimentation had left contemporary writers with nothing new to say or do. That ‘nothing’ . . . Was the starting point for the postmoderns, itself the key to the treasure of a new literature, what Barth would subsequently call ‘the literature of replenishment’” (Rowe 181). Postmodernist Representation Laying bare the device Postmodern de-naturalizing: “the simultaneous inscribing and subverting of the conventions of narrative” (Hutcheon, Politics, 49). Postmodernist Representation Metafiction Fiction about fiction; Narcissistic narrative “Fiction that includes within itself a commentary a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 1) Postmodernist Representation Metafiction “The novelist’s business is no longer to render the world, but to make one from language: fiction is no longer mimetic, but constructive” (Woods 56). metafiction Authors of metafiction often violate narrative levels by * intruding to comment on writing * involving his or herself with fictional characters * directly addressing the reader * openly questioning how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter reality, trying to ultimately prove that no singular truths or meanings exist /~moconner/e360/postmodern.html Metafiction unconvention