Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987)
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from: Brian McHale. Posmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Preface
- Brian McHale, Tel Aviv, July 1985 and Pittsburgh, May 1986
- xi: states that his book "falls under the category of descriptive poetics [...], it does aspire to contribute to literary theory"
Contents
- 1 Excerpt
- 1.1 1: From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant
- 1.2 2: Some ontologies of fiction
- 1.3 3: In the zone
- 1.4 4: Worlds in collision
- 1.5 5: A world next door
- 1.6 6: Real, compared to what?
- 1.7 7: Worlds under erasure
- 1.8 8: Chinese-box worlds
- 1.9 9: Tropological worlds
- 1.10 10: Styled worlds
- 1.11 11: Worlds of discourse
- 1.12 12: Worlds on paper
- 1.13 13: Authors: dead and posthumous
- 1.14 14: Love and death in the post-modernist novel
- 2 Comment
Excerpt
Part One: Preliminaries
1: From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant
The dominant
Beckett
Robbe-Grillet
Fuentes
Nabokov
Coover
Pynchon
2: Some ontologies of fiction
Heterocosm
"The old analogy between Author and God"
Ingarden
Possible worlds
The social construction of (un)reality
Part Two: Worlds
3: In the zone
How to build a zone
Ohio, Oz, and other zones
Intertextual zones
4: Worlds in collision
Parallel lines
The science-fictionalization of postmodernism
The postmodernization of science fiction
5: A world next door
Hesitation
Banality
Resistance
From "worlds" to worlds
Displaced fantastic
6: Real, compared to what?
Constrained realemes
Apocryphal history
Creative anachronism
Historical fantasy
Part Three: Construction
7: Worlds under erasure
Something happend
Something exists
Excluded middles, forking paths
The sense of a (non-)ending
8: Chinese-box worlds
Toward infinite regress
Trompe-l'oeil
Strange loops, or metalepsis
Characters in search of an author
Abysmal fictions
Which is reel?
Part Four: Words
9: Tropological worlds
Hesitation revisited
Hypertropy
Postmodernist allegory
Allegory against itself
10: Styled worlds
Kitter-litter, litanies, back-broke sentences
Letters
Machines
11: Worlds of discourse
Discourse in the novel
Heteroglossia
Carnival
Part Five: Groundings
12: Worlds on paper
"A spatial displacement of words"
Concrete prose
Illustration and anti-illustration
The schizoid text
Model kits
13: Authors: dead and posthumous
The dead author
Auto-bio-graphy
Roman-à-clef
Authority
Short-circuit
Part Six: How I learned to stop worrying and love postmodernism
