Metafiction and Postmodernism

Question 1

Metafiction and postmodernism
1960s American Postmodern Literature
- Roots
- Influences
- Influence on US fiction

Answer 1

Roots

• Experimental modernism
• Popular culture
• Mediascape

Influences : “Late moderns”

• Samuel Beckett
  
  • Absurdity
  • Pessimism (failure, death)
  • Schematism of life
• Vladimir Nabokov
  
  • Synesthesia
  • “Lolita”
  • “Pale Fire”
• Jorge Luis Borges
  
  • Fantasy worls subject to an alternative logic.
  • Magical realism
    “Ficciones”
    “ El Aleph”

Influence ON US fiction

• Interest in enigmatic worlds (fantasized or “real”).
• Taste for alternative realities + parallel, coexisting universes.
• Language mediates the perception of reality.
• “Reality” is the stories we tell ourselves about it.
  
  • “read and narrated”
• From attempts to understand the world to inhabiting it.
• Post-cognitive universe.
• Cognitive –> Post-cognitive
• Epistemology –> Ontology

Question 2

Metafiction and postmodernism
1960s American Postmodern Literature
- Characteristics (8)

Answer 2

• Literature = window to textuality, literature and its mechanisms.
• Literature comments on literature.
• Narratives : nonlinear, nonrational, indeterminate,fragmentary,open -ended
  
  • At times, arises from the commentary itself.
• Themes : writing, composing texts, finding texts one must interpret.
• Text in double columns, odd spacings, “caligrams”, “concrete” prose, diagrams.
• Splits the reading into:
  - meaning / graphic form or a semantics of language.
  - semiotics of visual form.
• Comments on / criticises the absurdity and cruelty of contemporary American culture.
• Characters:
  
  • Cannot claim a unified and coherent subjectivity.
  • Question their function in the world of the text and position in world at large .
  • Author often a character who critiques the narrative.
  • Narrative as construction.

Question 3

Metafiction and postmodernism
After 1960s literature
Don DeLillo

Answer 3

• Evokes 20th century and 21st century American culture and global history
• Often critical but through loving eye.
• Humor to see cultural absurdities in new light.

“White Noise”
- Postmodern life = heap of fragments, babble of incessant voices from modern media to penetrate our perceptions and thoughts.
- Material consumption and entertainment = goals of domestic, professional life.
- Ambiguity
- Uncertainty.
- Shift between satire and sincerity.
- Openness to interpretation.

Question 4

Metafiction and postmodernism
After 1960s literature
Kathy Acker
- Influences
- Characteristics
- Works

Answer 4

Influences : Charles Olson, William Burroughs.

• Link to the New Narrative movement.
  
  • Portray personal experience
  • Embraced a nuanced, authnetic story telling.

Characteristics

• Genre-crossing work.
• Punk writer.
• “Pirate” as a verb.

“Don Quixote”
- About love and violence + power of a city over a woman.
- Quest for love = relations of power and language.

“Great Expectations”
- Gender shifting narrator.
- Paternal h/role filled with father substitutions.
- Abrupt changes in place, character and tone.
- Highlights domination and subjugation as universal and continuous.