WORLD LITERATURE

HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF
HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF LITERATURE AND THE ARTS, NO. 16

Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, MASON

postmodernist
including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, bur-
lesque, parody, intertextuality, and hybrid forms to create textual realities that literature and theater
run either in opposition to or parallel with an external reality; fabulations that
develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to real-
HISTORICAL KATHY ACKER | PETER ACKROYD | MARTIN AMIS | DAVID ANTIN
ity; works that more fully engage with political or cultural realities; and texts DICTIONARY MAX APPLE | JOHN ASHBERRY | MARGARET ATWOOD | PAUL AUSTER
OF
that deal with history as fiction. For example, a postmodernist novel or play J.G. BALLARD | JOHN BANVILLE | JULIAN BARNES | JOHN BARTH

postmodernist
DONALD BARTHELME | JOHN CALVIN BATCHELOR | SAMUEL BECKETT

literature and theater

might feature a writer struggling with writing, only to later discover that he is
a character in a book by another writer struggling to write. THOMAS BERNHARD | JORGE LOUIS BORGES | T.C. BOYLE
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN | WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS | A.S. BYATT
ITALO CALVINO | PETER CAREY | ANGELA CARTER
This Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater examines
JONATHAN COE | J.M. COETZEE | ROBERT COOVER
the different areas of postmodernist literature and theater and the variety of DOUGLAS COUPLAND | ROBERT CREELEY | LYDIA DAVIS
forms that have been produced. It contains a list of acronyms, a chronology, SAMUEL R. DELANY | DON DELILLO | PHILIP K. DICK | E.L. DOCTOROW
an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced MARGUERITE DURAS | STANLEY ELKIN | JAMES ELLROY
dictionary entries on individual writers, important aesthetic practices, signifi- STEVE ERICKSON | JOHN FOWLES | CARLOS FUENTES
WILLIAM GADDIS | WILLIAM H. GASS | WILLIAM GIBSON
cant texts, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety
GÜNTER GRASS | ALASDAIR GRAY | PETER HANDKE | JOHN HAWKES
of literary approaches within the form. By placing these concerns within the
RUSSELL HOBAN | SUSAN HOWE | EUGÈNE IONESCO
historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts of postmodernism, this refer- ELFRIEDE JELINEK | JAMES JOYCE | DORIS LESSING | DEBORAH LEVY
ence explores the frameworks within which postmodernist literature of the MARK LEYNER | JOSEPH MCELROY | THOMAS MCGUANE
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries operates. TONI MORRISON | WALTER MOSLEY | HARUKI MURAKAMI
VLADIMIR NABOKOV | CEES NOOTEBOOM | FRANK O’HARA
BEN OKRI | CHUCK PALAHNIUK | OCTAVIO PAZ | GEORGES PEREC
FRAN MASON is a British scholar who lectures at the University of
HAROLD PINTER | TIM POWERS | MANUEL PUIG | THOMAS PYNCHON
Winchester.
ISHMAEL REED | ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET | SALMAN RUSHDIE
JOSE SARAMAGO | CLAUDE SIMON | NEAL STEPHENSON
BRUCE STERLING | TOM STOPPARD | MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN | KURT VONNEGUT JR.
For orders and information please contact the publisher
SCARECROW PRESS, INC. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE | STEPHEN WRIGHT
A wholly owned subsidiary of
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4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5598-4
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Cover design by Allison Nealon
FRAN MASON

HD Postmodernist Theater_LITHO.i1 1 2/6/07 11:17:08 AM

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HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES
OF LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
Jon Woronoff, Series Editor

1. Science Fiction Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2004.

2. Hong Kong Cinema, by Lisa Odham Stokes, 2007.
3. American Radio Soap Operas, by Jim Cox, 2005.
4. Japanese Traditional Theatre, by Samuel L. Leiter, 2006.
5. Fantasy Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2005.
6. Australian and New Zealand Cinema, by Albert Moran and
Errol Vieth, 2006.
7. African-American Television, by Kathleen Fearn-Banks, 2006.
8. Lesbian Literature, by Meredith Miller, 2006.
9. Scandinavian Literature and Theater, by Jan Sjåvik, 2006.
10. British Radio, by Seán Street, 2006.
11. German Theater, by William Grange, 2006.
12. African American Cinema, by S. Torriano Berry and Venise Berry,
2006.
13. Sacred Music, by Joseph P. Swain, 2006.
14. Russian Theater, by Laurence Senelick, 2007.
15. French Cinema, by Dayna Oscherwitz and MaryEllen Higgins,
2007.
16. Postmodernist Literature and Theater, by Fran Mason, 2007.
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Historical Dictionary
of Postmodernist
Literature and Theater

Fran Mason

Historical Dictionaries of
Literature and the Arts, No. 16

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2007
06-641_00_FM.qxd 1/19/07 9:34 AM Page iv

SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Published in the United States of America
by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of
The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.scarecrowpress.com

Estover Road
Plymouth PL6 7PY
United Kingdom

Copyright © 2007 by Fran Mason

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mason, Fran, 1962–
Historical dictionary of postmodernist literature and theater / Fran Mason.
p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of literature and the arts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5598-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8108-5598-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Literature, Modern—20th century—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries.
2. Literature, Modern—20th century—Dictionaries. 3. Theater—History—
20th century—Dictionaries. 4. Postmodernism—Dictionaries. I. Title.
PN771.M36 2007
809’.9113—dc22 2006101383

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
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Contents

Editor’s Foreword Jon Woronoff vii

Preface ix
Reader’s Notes xi
Acronyms, Abbreviations, and Non-English Usage xiii
Chronology xv
Introduction xxix
THE DICTIONARY 1
Bibliography 347
About the Author 405

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Editor’s Foreword

Postmodernist literature emerged after World War II, like other post-
modern phenomena largely in the west. It does not, however, include
much of the literature produced since then, most of which is a continu-
ation of earlier trends. Rather, it is practiced by a considerably smaller
circle of writers who have reacted against and rejected earlier forms and
genres. Much of their work has been experimental, but gradually their
writings have been accepted by the broader public. Many, in fact, have
won the Nobel Prize for literature, such as Samuel Beckett, Gabriel
García Márquez, Claude Simon, Günter Grass, and Harold Pinter.
Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater begins
with a chronology, which charts the milestones of the movement. The
introduction defines the movement and also highlights major features
and contributors. The bulk of the information, however, appears in the
dictionary, which includes several hundred entries on authors and no-
table books, theoreticians, literary journals and groups, techniques, gen-
res, and concepts such as the literature of exhaustion and the death of
originality. The bibliography provides useful theoretical literatures and
the literary output of the period.
This volume was written by Fran Mason, lecturer, program director
of film studies, and member of the American Studies program at the
University of Winchester, Hampshire, UK, where he teaches courses re-
lating to postmodernism and contemporary writing. His doctoral thesis
was on American postmodernist fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, but Dr.
Mason has drawn on his knowledge of contemporary French literature
to expand this book’s geographical coverage to include Europe and
Latin America.

—Jon Woronoff
Series Editor

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Preface

The main aim of this dictionary is to include writers, movements, forms

of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are signif-
icant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important
scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where
these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writ-
ing. The choice of entries has been based on their perceived importance
to postmodernism so that, for example, in the case of individual texts
that have a separate entry their selection has been based either on their
importance historically with regard to the development of postmod-
ernist literature or on their significance as an expression of a particular
form of postmodernist writing. There is often no particular judgment
being made on the literary merits of these selections nor on their com-
parable achievements with other texts that also have individual entries.
A similar principle informs the choice of writers, albeit with the in-
tention of including more recent authors in order to give a sense of the
persistence of postmodernist forms of writing even if their achievement
may not yet be considered to be comparable to that of more established
authors. The selection of authors as a whole has been based on a con-
sideration of their use of postmodernist aesthetic or textual strategies.
However, it should also be noted that writers have been included here
who do not overtly use such forms. In these cases, the criteria for in-
clusion have been to consider authors who use experimental forms that
are important in relation to the development of postmodernist styles,
those who use experimental forms in dealing with postmodern ideas or
cultural processes, and even writers who use forms of realism (perhaps
with some fracturing of this style of writing), but who again deal with
postmodern culture or philosophy. In some cases, these writers have
been included because a consensus of critical opinion considers them to
be postmodern or postmodernist, even if the author of this work is less

ix
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x • PREFACE

certain in this regard. Because this dictionary deals primarily with writ-
ten texts, the rationale for including entries relating to postmodern the-
ater has been to emphasize the written contributions of drama. This
means that important movements and writers have been included, but
areas relating to postmodern performance have not.
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Reader’s Notes

The format for referencing non-English texts within the dictionary sec-
tion of this book is to cite the title of the text in its original language,
followed in parentheses by the title in English and the date of the first
edition or performance in the country of origin. The title in English is
represented in italics where a published English translation exists, but
without italics where there is no English-language version, in order to
indicate that the translation of the title is my own. In some cases, where
the title of the published English translation differs in meaning from the
original title I have also provided my own translation. Short stories
originally written in a language other than English are usually referred
to by their English title for ease of reference. Titles of series of works
(such as trilogies) are italicized when works within the series have been
published either collectively or individually under that title and in quo-
tation marks where the title of the series has developed as a result of au-
thorial or critical usage.
In some places words are enclosed in quotation marks, and in other
places they are not. The words “reality” and “truth” (or variations, such
as “real” or “true”), for example, are treated in this way. The reason for
the variation is that in postmodern theory and postmodernist writing,
these terms are often regarded as fictional constructions of language,
narrative or sign systems that have no objective existence outside the
discourses that represent them. Thus, where the discussion within the
dictionary analyzes such a view, these words appear in quotation marks.
At other times, when the term is used in less problematic forms (as
when referring to the “fictional reality” that a text creates), quotation
marks are not used.

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Acronyms, Abbreviations,
and Non-English Usage

AI artificial intelligence
Aka also known as
FC2 Fiction Collective Two
ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts
N⫹7 Noun ⫹ 7
OuLiPo Ouvroir de littérature potentielle
PALF Production Automatique de Littérature Française
S⫹7 Substantif ⫹ 7
SF science fiction
UK United Kingdom
U.S. United States

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Chronology

1939 Arnold Toynbee uses the phrase “the Post-Modern Age” to refer
to the period after 1914. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake confounds tra-
ditional notions of the novel with its radical experimentation and lan-
guage games and later becomes a significant influence on self-reflexive
versions of postmodernist literature. Publication of Nathalie Sarraute’s
Tropismes, a collection of fragments that becomes the basis for her later
novels. Publication of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel that
configures many of the metafictional aesthetic strategies later devel-
oped in self-reflexive versions of postmodernist literature.
1945 First use of “post-modern” to refer to contemporary culture
when Joseph Hudnut uses the term to describe new developments in
modern architecture.
1947 Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style offers an early example
of the permutational forms of writing that were to be developed more
systematically by OuLiPo writers.
1949 Alejo Carpentier uses the term “lo real maravilloso” in the in-
troduction to his novel De reino de este mundo to describe a new way
of thinking about Latin America.
1950 Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” sets out the “open
field” poetics that was to be adopted by the Black Mountain Poets. First
production of Eugène Ionesco’s La Chantratrice Chauve contributes to
the creation of what is later to be called “The Theater of the Absurd.”
1951 Publication of the first of Italo Calvino’s historical fabulations, Il
Visconte Dimezzato, which signals a shift in the aesthetic focus of his
writing from neorealist to nonmimetic forms. Publication in France of
Molloy and Malone Meurt, by Samuel Beckett, the first two volumes of a
trilogy that he completed in 1953 with the publication of L’Innommable.

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xvi • CHRONOLOGY

1953 First performance of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot at

the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris.
1955 Publication of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions whose medi-
tation on artistic counterfeits and facsimiles deals with aesthetic issues
that became important in the theorization of postmodernist literature in
the 1970s and 1980s.
1956 Publication of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones, a collection of his
fabulations that were mainly written in the 1930s and 1940s. Its trans-
lation from Spanish into other languages in subsequent years establishes
Borges’ international reputation and has a significant impact on the de-
velopment of postmodernist fiction. Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry col-
lection Laborintus develops avant-garde anti-mimetic poetic strategies
typical of the Italian neoavanguardia.
1957 Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie establishes many of the fea-
tures that come to be associated with the French nouveau roman, in-
cluding radical objectivity, an unstable position of narration, and a frac-
tured narrative structure. First performance of The Birthday Party, one
of Harold Pinter’s best-known plays. Barney Rosset of Grove Press
founds Evergreen Review, a journal that fosters new writing from Eu-
rope and the United States. Its initial focus is on Beat and Absurdist
writing, but in the 1960s it incorporates more experimental and post-
modernist writing before it suspends publication in 1973.
1959 William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch published by Olympia
Press in Paris. Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel, the first volume of his
Danzig Trilogy, investigates the rise of Nazism through the eyes of Os-
kar, a child who refuses to grow up. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s The Sirens of Ti-
tan uses the form of science fiction to present a postmodern critique of
the fictions of ideological grand narratives. Publication of Raymond Que-
neau’s best-known novel, Zazie dans le métro. In The Sociological Imag-
ination C. Wright Mills refers to the development of a “post-modern pe-
riod” as a successor to modernity in which he sees the collapse of
Enlightenment principles. Irving Howe argues in “Mass Society and
Postmodern Fiction” that the structures of mass society have made the
ideas and aesthetic principles of modernism redundant.
1960 Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier found Tel Quel, which
fosters literature that questions conventional literary forms and produces
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CHRONOLOGY • xvii

écriture, a form of nonreferential writing. As well as attracting to it writ-

ers who become known as the Tel Quel group (including Jean Ricardou,
Jean-Louis Baudry and Severo Sarduy), the journal also becomes a fo-
cus for poststructuralist theorists. Foundation of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de lit-
térature potentielle) by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in
November, following on from a colloquium on Queneau’s work that had
been held at Cerisy-la-Salle in September. Important writers who join
OuLiPo in the 1960s and 1970s include Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews,
Georges Perec, and Jacques Roubaud. Publication of the first volume of
Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems.
1961 Publication of I novissimi edited by Alfredo Giuliani introduces
theoretical and literary writings by proponents of the Italian neoavan-
guardia. Publication of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de
poèmes which becomes a paradigm for Oulipian combinatory literature.
Philippe Sollers’ Le Parc suggests that reality is a fiction-making
process. Publication of John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig.
1962 John Ashbery publishes the avant-garde collection of poems The
Tennis Court Oath. Publication of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Note-
book, a novel about a breakdown that is enacted through the use of dis-
connected narratives. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire presents a fictional
reality that is radically uncertain by virtue of the layering of fictions one
upon another.
1963 Foundation of the Italian neoavanguardia movement Gruppo 63
in Palermo. Many of the members of the group, including Edoardo San-
guineti and Nanni Balestrini had been published in Alfredo Giuliani’s
1961 collection, I novissimi. Publication of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Pour
un nouveau roman, a collection of essays about the new narrative and
textual forms that he had been publishing since 1954. Publication of
Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, a novel that has often been seen as the
founding text of the “Latin American Boom” of the 1960s and 1970s.
First performance of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, a play that uses Brecht-
ian alienation techniques and metadramatic forms to explore the nature
of power.
1964 Foundation in Paris of Locus Solus, a short-lived avant-garde
magazine, by Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James
Schuyler, that takes its name from a novel by Raymond Roussel and
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xviii • CHRONOLOGY

which uses approaches similar to those adopted by the OuLiPo group.

Michael Moorcock assumes the editorship of New Worlds magazine and
helps to foster the development of the British “New Wave” science fic-
tion movement. William Burroughs’ Nova Express completes the
“Nova” trilogy, a series of novels that uses experimental textual forms
and fantasy settings to demythologize power relations in culture and
language.
1965 Publication of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres Tristes Tigres, a
novel that mixes literary and vernacular forms and which seeks to chart
the colloquial languages of Cuba in the encyclopedic style of James
Joyce’s Ulysses. Jean Ricardou’s La Prise de Constantinople develops
anti-mimetic strategies that extend the practices of the nouveau roman.
Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch brings a post-
modern perspective to contemporary science fiction in its concerns with
the indeterminacy of reality.
1966 Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 utilizes a range of post-
modernist textual devices, including fabulation, pastiche, metafiction,
and the mixing of genre codes, while also paying attention to the cul-
tural processes of a nascent postmodernity. Ann Quin’s Three develops
the aesthetic practices of the nouveau roman within an English literary
setting. Compact by Maurice Roche, a novel written in the 1950s, pro-
vides a focus point for the experimental aesthetics associated with the
Tel Quel group. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead is performed at the Edinburgh Festival, before a revised version
is staged in London in 1967, and presents an involuted metatextual
drama that incorporates scenes from Hamlet as a play-within-a-play. La
casa verde, Mario Vargas Llosa’s most innovative novel, uses different
narrative modes to explore Peruvian culture and society.
1967 Publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad,
one of the most important texts of the “Latin American Boom” and the
novel that helped to bring international recognition to postwar Latin
American writing. Severo Sarduy’s De donde son los cantantes develops
textual artifice in the “Baroque” style that Sarduy brought to the prac-
tices of the Tel Quel group. Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in Amer-
ica combines a countercultural sensibility with metafictional aesthetics
and soon gains a cult status in the United States. Publication of Angela
Carter’s The Magic Toyshop which, according to Jeanette Winterson,
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CHRONOLOGY • xix

was the first interesting book to have been published in the United King-
dom since T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets in 1944. Robert Scholes’ The
Fabulators identifies fabulation as an important contemporary fiction-
making process. John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” ar-
gues that old forms of writing have become stale and require renewal
through the adoption of self-consciously metafictional techniques.
1968 Barth’s short story collection Lost in the Funhouse puts into
practice the self-conscious strategies he argued for in “The Literature of
Exhaustion.” Manuel Puig’s La traicíon de Rita Hayworth presents a
polyphonic text that develops new strategies in Latin American litera-
ture by using popular cultural discourses drawn from film and televi-
sion. Philippe Sollers’ collection of essays, Logiques, theorizes anti-
mimetic fiction. Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince
establishes many of the textual forms that become associated with sur-
fiction. Publication of the second volume of Charles Olson’s The Max-
imus Poems. Publication of William H. Gass’ short story collection, In
the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and the novel, Willie Masters’
Lonesome Wife.
1969 Publication of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, a novel in a
box whose narrative is created by the way in which the reader arranges
the separately bound sections contained within it. John Fowles’ The
French Lieutenant’s Woman parodies realist modes of writing by in-
cluding an intrusive author figure and by providing two endings. In The
Death of the Novel and Other Stories Ronald Sukenick questions the
ability of realist forms of writing to represent contemporary society.
Robert Coover’s short story collection, Pricksongs and Descants, de-
velops a range of experimental forms, including metafiction, political
fabulation, pastiche, and “cubist” styles. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughter-
house-Five, about the Dresden Firestorm, presents a metafictional med-
itation on history, fiction, and reality. Gruppo 63 disbands.
1970 Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Project pour une révolution à New York
develops a more self-reflexive approach for the nouveau roman by
foregrounding the way in which narrative configurations generate an
unstable fictional reality. Publication of José Donoso’s best-known
novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche. J.G. Ballard develops a more ex-
perimental approach to writing in The Atrocity Exhibition. Publication
of Donald Barthelme’s collection, City Life, which includes some of
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xx • CHRONOLOGY

his best-known stories. Publication of Juan Goytisolo’s Reinvindi-

cación del conde don Julián.
1971 Jean Ricardou’s Pour une théorie du nouveau roman theorizes
new forms of fiction and contributes to ideas on “the death of the novel”
that had begun to develop at the end of the 1960s. Robert Grenier and
Barrett Watten cofound This, a journal of poetics that becomes influen-
tial in the development of Language Poetry. Tony Tanner’s City of
Words analyzes the fiction-making tendencies of postwar American
writing. In The Dismemberment of Orpheus Ihab Hassan develops the-
ories of postmodernism and literary history that have an important in-
fluence on criticism of postmodernist literature in the United States.
1972 Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili combines postmodernist aes-
thetic strategies with poststructuralist theories of textuality to produce a
self-conscious meditation on the role that texts play in constructing re-
ality. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo presents the fullest fictional artic-
ulation of Reed’s theory of “Neo-Hoodooism,” a politicized form of
aesthetic practice that uses pastiche and textual fragmentation to de-
mythologize accepted social ideologies. Angela Carter’s The Infernal
Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman explores the relationship between
discourses associated with modernity and postmodernity by creating
and then problematizing an opposition between rationality and fantasy.
Publication of John Ashbery’s collection of prose poems, Three Poems,
which develops postmodernist poetics in its mixing of codes, self-
reflexivity, and blurring of textual and cultural boundaries. David An-
tin’s first “talk-poems” are published in his collection Talking. Publica-
tion of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the first part
of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which is completed by the publication
of Milles Plateaux in 1980.
1973 Foundation of the Fiction Collective in the United States by a
group of writers (including Ronald Sukenick, Steve Katz, and Raymond
Federman) who wish to foster the development of the kinds of experi-
mental writing that mainstream publishers are usually reluctant to put
into print. Claude Simon’s Triptyque creates an internalized narrative in
which stories run across one another and into and out of embedded fic-
tions to radically problematize textual ontology. Ronald Sukenick’s Out
offers a politicized form of postmodernist experimentation within a
countercultural perspective. Publication of Thomas Pynchon’s Grav-
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CHRONOLOGY • xxi

ity’s Rainbow, a novel that divides critical opinion, with some critics re-
garding it as a high point in postwar American fiction while others are
shocked by its excess, slapstick humor, and inclusion of pornographic
elements. J.G. Ballard’s Crash offers a perverse vision of the technolo-
gized desires of postmodern culture.
1974 Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge maps the relationship be-
tween knowledge and power in information society.
1975 Publication of Carlos Fuentes’ Epic novel Terra Nostra, which
uses an encyclopedic range of experimental devices to explore Latin
American culture and history. William Gaddis’ JR maps the cultural,
economic, and social dislocations created by the forces of postmodern
capitalism, albeit without overtly designating it as such. Publication of
John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, whose title poem be-
comes a postmodern “classic.” Octavio Paz’s Pasado en claro considers
the relationships between language, reality, perception, and identity.
Posthumous publication of the final volume of Charles Olson’s The
Maximus Poems. Surfiction: Fiction Now And Tomorrow, edited by
Raymond Federman, brings together essays by American and European
writers arguing for the death of the traditional novel and for the creation
of new forms of fiction. Publication of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat, an ex-
perimental poetic exploration of London that is continued in his 1979
collection, Suicide Bridge.
1976 Nathalie Sarraute’s “Disent les imbéciles” presents a radically
experimental novel of voices that challenges traditional notions of plot
and character. Don DeLillo’s encyclopedic novel, Ratner’s Star, ex-
plores the “fictions” of truth and science by using mathematical princi-
ples to structure its narrative before deconstructing their ability to cre-
ate meaning.
1977 Publication of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning by Viking
after many years of publishers’ refusals because the novel presented
Richard Nixon in a negative light. Angela Carter’s The Passion of New
Eve uses a range of styles to create a fabulated world in order to explore
myths of gender in contemporary culture. Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon presents a literary archaeology of African-American culture
that focuses on folktale and storytelling as a response to the erasure of
history and traditions.
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xxii • CHRONOLOGY

1978 Publication of Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, an en-

cyclopedic novel that is one of the most important achievements in
postwar French fiction. Foundation of L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E
magazine, edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, which de-
velops theories of postmodern poetry by focusing on the materiality of
language and the use of internal textual mechanisms in the creation of
poetic meaning. Debate between William H. Gass and John Gardner
over the form and function of the novel at a conference at the Univer-
sity of Cincinnati in October following arguments in print including,
in the same year, Gass’ The World within the Word and Gardner’s On
Moral Fiction.
1979 Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore consciously
uses semiotic and poststructuralist theories of textuality and language to
produce a radically experimental postmodernist novel. John Barth’s
“The Literature of Replenishment” revises the ideas on the exhaustion
of literature that he proposed in 1967 and his maximalist novel, LET-
TERS, offers a conscious attempt to overcome the idea of exhaustion
even while it exhaustively reuses and reworks old forms of writing.
Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition develops a theoret-
ical hostility to totality by announcing the death of the grand narratives.
Its focus on plurality becomes highly influential in later theorizations of
both postmodern culture and postmodernist literature. Publication of
Jean Echenoz’s first novel, Le méridien de Greenwich, which can be
considered to be the founding moment of the “nouvelle génération de
Minuit,” a post-nouveau roman group of writers (also including Éric
Chevillard and Jean-Philipe Toussaint), whose works shift French ex-
perimental literature from the linguistic minimalism of the nouveau ro-
man to more narrative-based experiments with form. Publication of
Gilbert Sorrentino’s radically self-reflexive anti-novel Mulligan Stew.
Raymond Federman’s The Voice in the Closet experiments with form
and typography in a novel dealing with the death of his family in the
Holocaust. Publication of Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, the first volume in
the postmodernist science fiction series, Canopus in Argos.
1980 Publication of Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa, a postmod-
ernist detective novel set in the Medieval Age, which becomes a liter-
ary best-seller when it is translated into other languages. Russell
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CHRONOLOGY • xxiii

Hoban’s experimental postapocalyptic novel Riddley Walker helps to in-

troduce postmodernist forms of experimentation to a more general read-
ership in the UK when it becomes a cult classic.
1981 In what can be regarded as the year of the postmodernist break-
through in the United Kingdom, 1981 sees the publication of Alasdair
Gray’s Lanark, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and D.M.
Thomas’ The White Hotel. In Simulacra and Simulation Jean Bau-
drillard presents his fullest theorization of postmodern processes by an-
alyzing the triumph of image and simulation over reality. Foundation of
the Review of Contemporary Fiction, an important focus for the study
of experimental postwar writing. Foundation of Conjunctions, a journal
of contemporary writing, by Bradford Morrow.
1982 Publication of the first volume of Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria
del fuego trilogy which presents an experimental hybrid text with a left-
wing political perspective that traces in its totality the history of the
Americas from precolonial times to the present. Raymond Federman
continues his project of using experimental forms to represent the Holo-
caust in The Twofold Vibration, a novel dealing with the ways fiction
and history have obscured its reality. Tel Quel suspends publication.
1983 Publication of Julián Ríos’ Epic tale of language and literature,
Larva: Babel de una noche de San Juan, a novel much admired by Car-
los Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy because of its reimagi-
nation and reinvention of the Spanish language.
1984 Publication of Fredric Jameson’s seminal article “Postmod-
ernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in the New Left Re-
view in which Jameson argues that postmodernism is a new cultural
dominant. The Dalkey Archive Press founded in Chicago by John
O’Brien. Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot helps to develop a more
mainstream profile for postmodernist writing in the United Kingdom.
Publication of The L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E Book, a collection of
Language Poetry’s important writings. Publication of William Gib-
son’s Neuromancer gives the new movement of “cyberpunk” an aes-
thetic and cultural focus and helps lead to the mainstreaming of the cy-
berpunk vision of contemporary culture as a technologized,
postmodern, and global space. Publication of Milorad Pavić’s Haz-
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xxiv • CHRONOLOGY

arski recnik (Dictionary of the Khazars), which becomes an interna-

tional bestseller when it is translated into other languages. O ana da
morte de Ricardo Reis by José Saramago uses one of Fernando Pes-
soa’s heteronyms to investigate the relationship between fiction and re-
ality.

1985 Jean-Philippe Toussaint, one of the “nouvelle génération de Mi-

nuit” writers, publishes his first novel, La Salle de bain. Patrick Süskind’s
Das Parfüm becomes an international bestseller. Publication of Peter
Ackroyd’s first important historiographic metafiction, Hawksmoor,
which is followed by several others in later years, including Chatterton
in 1987. Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix develops post-humanist ideas that
are to become important elements in postmodern cybercultural thinking
in the 1990s.

1986 Auslöschung continues Thomas Bernhard’s concerns with the

perceived corruptions and vulgarity of Austria and modifies the form of
his novels slightly by presenting the narrative in two separate paragraphs
(because it has two sections) instead of the usual one. Ron Silliman de-
velops a Language poetics in The Age of Huts and edits a collection of
Language Poetry in In the American Tree. J.M. Coetzee’s Foe rewrites
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to focus on colonial politics. Antonio
Tabucchi’s Filo dell’orizzonte presents a postmodern meditation on the
“language” of objective reality. Publication of the short story collection
Mirrorshades with an influential “Preface” by Bruce Sterling that or-
ganizes and theorizes cyberpunk as both a cultural and literary move-
ment. Marcel Bénabou’s Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres pres-
ents a self-reflexive meditation on writing using Oulipian techniques.

1987 Publication of Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men, a complex

encyclopedic novel that experiments with both narrative structure and
point of view. Carlos Fuentes’ Cristóbal nonato explores Mexican cul-
ture and politics as well as considering Mexico’s relationship with the
United States. James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, the first volume of the
“L.A. Quartet,” presents a postmodernized version of the crime novel
and helps to develop postnoir writing. Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion
blurs history with fiction, as expressed in the recurring refrain: “I’m
telling you stories. Trust me.” Éric Chevillard, one of the “nouvelle
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CHRONOLOGY • xxv

génération de Minuit” writers, publishes his first novel, Mourir m’en-

rhume. Ron Silliman presents a theorization of syntax and language in
poetry in The New Sentence. In The Language of Post-Modern Archi-
tecture, Charles Jencks announces that postmodernism began on “July
15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts),” at the moment when the Pruitt-
Igoe building in Philadelphia was demolished.

1988 Publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a novel

that questions religious ideologies and explores cultural forms of hy-
bridity. The novel is condemned by Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini of
Iran who issues a fatwa against Rushdie which ignites a debate over the
forms and function of literature. Publication of Bernardo Atxaga’s Ob-
abakoak, a postmodernist novel about Basque culture that brings
Basque literature to wider awareness. Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Letzte
Welt uses Ovid’s Metamorphoses to imagine a fictionalized version of
the Roman Empire in which it becomes a 20th-century dictatorship. Pe-
ter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda presents a postcolonial and postmod-
ernist Victorian novel. In Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker extends
her deconstruction of gender relations to social and economic structures.

1989 David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity supplies eco-

nomic and social contexts for the development of postmodern culture,
primarily by reference to the decentralization of industrial organization
that Harvey sees coming into existence in the 1970s. The reorganization
of Fiction Collective as Fiction Collective Two helps lead to the devel-
opment of the “post-postmodernist” literary movement of “avant-pop.”
Foundation of Gruppo 93 in Italy, a “post-avant-garde” group that
draws inspiration from Gruppo 63 and whose name announces the year
in which it will disband. Jacques Roubaud’s Le grand incendie de Lon-
dres, the first volume in a cycle of the same name, presents a radically
experimental “novel” about the process of writing that develops the
type of bifurcating “tree fiction” used by hyperfictional texts.

1990 Publication of Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, his first novel for

17 years. A.S. Byatt’s poststructuralist literary detective novel, Posses-
sion, wins the Booker Prize. Publication of J.G. Ballard’s War Fever,
a collection of short stories using a variety of postmodernist techniques
that focuses on aspects of postmodern culture more explicitly than
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xxvi • CHRONOLOGY

Ballard’s previous work. Publication of William T. Vollmann’s The Ice

Shirt, the first volume of his Seven Dreams cycle. Nicholas Mosley’s
Hopeful Monsters concludes the “Catastrophe Practice” series he be-
gan in 1979.
1991 Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi’s dream-novel, Requiem,
about a meeting between the author and the ghost of Fernando Pessoa,
is published in Portuguese before Tabucchi translates it into Italian. Ben
Okri’s The Famished Road innovatively uses magic realism and mythic
fantasy within a referential framework to explore the cultures of post-
colonial Nigeria. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X establishes the cul-
tural vision and stylistic forms of Generation X writing. Bret Easton El-
lis’ metafictional novel American Psycho presents a satirical account of
postmodern commodity culture and masculine desire. It is condemned
by feminist critics who read it as a realist account of male violence that
does not unambiguously condemn the violence against women that it
presents. Iain Sinclair’s novel, Downriver, uses experimental tech-
niques to map a culture of disconnection in a fantasy version of Great
Britain ruled by “The Widow” (aka Margaret Thatcher). Publication of
Jameson’s book-length study, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism.
1992 Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body offers a modernist re-
vision of her previous fabulational style by developing a writing that is
resonant of écriture. Toni Morrison’s Jazz innovatively reconfigures the
forms of jazz in a literary context.
1993 Mark Amerika’s The Kafka Chronicles puts the principles of
avant-pop into operation, while the collection of stories edited by Larry
McCaffery, Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, provides a
showcase for the movement. Foundation of the internet journal CThe-
ory arising out of an interest in the conjunctions of culture, technology,
and philosophy created by cybercultural and cyberpunk ideas.
1994 Publication of Jacques Jouet’s Le directeur du Musée des
cadeaux des chefs d’Etat de l’étranger, the first volume in his La
République roman cycle. Haruki Murakami’s Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru
(The Wind-up Bird Chronicle) offers a meandering narrative that is inter-
cut with historical episodes and which also uses pastiches of popular fic-
tion to map a postmodern culture of simulations cut adrift from history.
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CHRONOLOGY • xxvii

1995 Publication of William H. Gass’ The Tunnel, a meditation on the

relationship between fiction and history focused on the Nazi persecu-
tion of the Jews, which Gass had begun writing 30 years before.
1996 Publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, an encyclo-
pedic fabulation about tennis, filmmaking, and terrorism set in a world
where years are named after their corporate sponsor.
1997 Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon presents a postmodernist in-
vestigation into the creation of Enlightenment principles, while Don
DeLillo’s Underworld adopts a similar panoramic perspective in its ac-
count of the history of postwar America. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
presents a critique of consumerism and corporate capitalism that cap-
tures the imagination of a primarily masculine youth cultural audience.
1998 Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires combines
concerns with scientific and cultural discourses within a frame-structure
in order to investigate the relationship between modernity and post-
modernity. Sarah Kane’s Crave plays with theatrical structures in using
strategies similar to those of the “Theatre of the Absurd.”
1999 Jacques Jouet’s collection, Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux, collects
together 1,000 pages of “daily poems.” Peter Ackroyd’s The Plato Pa-
pers uses a science-fictional format to reflect on issues of historical
representation.
2000 Umberto Eco’s Baudolino returns his work to the Medieval pe-
riod in a novel that considers the fictions of history. Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House of Leaves uses cinematic techniques to develop
experimental textual forms. Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of the
Boar combines postmodernist aesthetics with modernist mythification
in its updating of the legend of the Kalydonian Boar.
2001 Jacques Jouet’s La République de Mek-Ouyes develops the La
République roman cycle with a long novel about the creation of a mini-
state within the Republic.
2002 Publication of La bibliothèque de Warburg, the fifth and most re-
cent volume of Jacques Roubaud’s Le grand incendie de Londres cycle.
2003 In Pattern Recognition William Gibson shifts his speculative cy-
berpunk fictions from the near-future to the present in order to consider
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xxviii • CHRONOLOGY

the reality of a postmodern information society. Neal Stephenson opens

The Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of postmodernist historical novels, with
Quicksilver. The trilogy is completed with the publication of The Con-
fusion and The System of the World in 2004.
2004 Publication of Umberto Eco’s La misteriosa fiamma della
regina Loana which Eco has claimed will be his last novel. David
Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas uses an intricate involuted structure to
map a fictional history of power that moves from the 19th century into
an imagined postapocalyptic future.
2005 Publication of Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, his most overtly
postmodernist work, which includes Ellis and fellow writer Jay McIn-
erney as characters. Publication of William T. Vollmann’s Europe Cen-
tral, a fabulation that mixes history and myth written in the form of a
nonlinear narrative. Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown presents a
global perspective on contemporary culture.
2006 Publication of Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon and Only
Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski.
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Introduction

Producing a work called the Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist

Literature and Theater might be considered a postmodernist project
that the Argentine master of fabulations Jorge Luis Borges could have
imagined. It is a written world whose reality needs to be consistent
within its own internal structures and cross-referenced so the reader
can use it without having to venture outside to refer to any other
works. Similarly, such a work might be considered a “fabulation” of
postmodernist literature because the space available does not allow
coverage of every writer who has articulated postmodernist strategies
or ideas, because the compiler’s choice of entries may differ from
those that someone else might choose, and because the attempt to syn-
thesize an understanding of “postmodernism” out of the many differ-
ent definitions and theories available might be considered to be the
creation of a “fiction” of postmodernism itself.
This latter element leads to one of the difficulties with postmodernist
literature that will be dealt with shortly, the problem of definition, but
also assumes that there is a fixed set of features that can be used to de-
scribe a postmodernist novel, poem, or play. The caricature of post-
modernist literature is that it creates texts that either self-reflexively in-
vestigate their own processes of writing or self-consciously ironize their
ability to represent reality by admitting that they are texts. In poetry, for
example, such a text would write about language and its own produc-
tion rather than express an experience, personal sentiment, or philoso-
phy of the world. In fiction, a postmodernist novel might tell a story
about a writer struggling with writing (only, perhaps, to find that he is
a character in a book by another writer struggling to write a book) or
deal with dissociated characters who cannot connect real-world phe-
nomena with the language that they use to represent it.

xxix
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xxx • INTRODUCTION

Certainly, there are contemporary experimental texts such as these

but they do not describe the entirety of postmodernist literature, not
least because such involuted works can be considered to be more late-
modernist in form, while their “postmodernist” features are often dis-
played more in their “postmodern” ideas about language and the inde-
terminacy of reality than in their textual strategies. Nevertheless, such a
view of postmodernist literature has become “canonical,” primarily as a
result of criticism in the 1980s and early 1990s creating a taxonomy of
postmodernism that sought to define its aesthetics as either a break with
or a continuation of modernist styles. This led to totalizing critical proj-
ects that narrowed postmodernist literature to a limited set of textual
functions based on narcissism, self-reflexivity, and language games.
Postmodernist literature, however, cannot be reduced to such a limiting
form for the simple reason that there are nearly as many varieties of
postmodernism as there are of modernism.
Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and per-
spectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive such as
Language Poetry or the works of American surfiction and the French
Tel Quel group; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextu-
ality, and hybrid forms to create textual realities that either run in op-
position to or in parallel with an external reality (such as Italo
Calvino’s works in the 1970s, those of Angela Carter in the same pe-
riod, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest); fabulations that develop
both of these strategies (such as the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges or
Michel Tournier); texts that ironize their relationship to reality (such
as the “midfictions” of Stanley Elkin or Donald Barthelme); works
that use the aspects already noted to more fully engage with political
or cultural realities (such as the Latin American magic realists, Amer-
ican writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael
Reed, or European writers such as J.G. Ballard, Günter Grass, and El-
friede Jelinek); texts that deal with history as a fiction (including
more radical texts by Christoph Ransmayr as well as more conven-
tional works by Peter Ackroyd or Graham Swift); the combinatory lit-
erature of the OuLiPo group; as well as texts that elude categorization
even within the variety already explored (such as the novels of
Thomas Bernhard, Julio Cortázar, Osman Lins, and Juan Goytisolo,
or plays by absurdist writers).
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INTRODUCTION • xxxi

DEFINING POSTMODERNISM

It should be noted that the title of this book refers to “postmodernist lit-
erature and theater,” a description that, while problematic, nevertheless
suggests that there are particular cultural and aesthetic features that can
be associated with such a type of writing. The title does not refer to
“postmodern literature,” an important distinction because the latter term
might refer either to a type of writing that embodied postmodern ideas,
without it needing to display any textual strategies associated with a
postmodernist aesthetic (and which could therefore be realist in form),
or to literature of the postmodern world as a periodizing concept, irre-
spective of whether that writing engaged with postmodernist aesthetics,
postmodern ideas, or even postmodernity itself.
This raises two key issues that recur in the study of postmodernism:
the slipperiness of the term and the concomitant difficulty of defining
it. It is not only casual readers who are faced by this problem, but also
academics and students in the areas of literature, culture, and social
sciences. Across different disciplines “postmodernism” means differ-
ent things to different people; within these disciplines, the term can be
used in specific, and often undefined, ways that cannot be understood
unless the “code” being used has been cracked. In the study of litera-
ture and related modes of textual and cultural production, for example,
“postmodernism” is used to refer to: (1) a poststructuralist critical ap-
proach that involves belief in certain “postmodern” theories; (2) a
more general “postmodern” outlook with regard to truth, knowledge,
and reality; (3) a description of a cultural condition, zeitgeist or “epis-
teme”; (4) a set of aesthetic and textual devices; (5) any text that adopts
“postmodern” ideas irrespective of whether it uses the postmodernist
textual strategies associated with (4); and (6) the cultural products
(such as literature, film, or architecture) that can be found in contem-
porary culture.
Critics such as Terry Eagleton (2003) and Christopher Norris
(1993), for example, primarily use the term “postmodernism” by ref-
erence to the first definition, where it refers to critics and theorists
who have a “postmodern” or poststructuralist philosophy that focuses
on the privileging of deconstruction, fragmentation, and decentraliza-
tion. This view takes as its premise the belief that “truth” and “reality”
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xxxii • INTRODUCTION

do not exist as objective forms, but are called into existence in the act
of representation through which they are created as discursive systems
of meaning by language, narrative, or any other structure that gener-
ates signifying forms, whether this is a system of logic or a set of
mathematical symbols. Thus, for Eagleton and Norris, figures such as
Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard are not postmodern be-
cause they analyze issues relating to postmodernity (which as an “ob-
ject” of study does not presuppose a particular critical approach), but
because they have a postmodern perspective that embraces principles
of fragmentation and anti-rationalism at the expense of Enlightenment
or rationalist ideas.
In the context of such differing usages and critical viewpoints, it is
usual therefore to apply the term “postmodern” either to a theoretical or
philosophical position that advocates postmodern ideas or to some kind
of social structure (or cultural condition) that operates according to
postmodern principles. The term “postmodernist,” on the other hand,
tends to be used to refer to aesthetic practices, both as a term that de-
lineates the stylistic features and tropes used within texts (pastiche,
metafictional strategies, narcissism, fractured or disconnected narra-
tives, and the retro-mode, for example) and as a way of describing a text
using such aesthetic devices (for example, a “postmodernist” novel,
film, or building) or, collectively, a group of texts (“postmodernist fic-
tion,” “postmodernist cinema,” or “postmodernist architecture”).
This does not, however, fully clarify the terminology utilized in the
study of postmodernism because of the tendency for critics to use the
terms “postmodern” and “postmodernist” in an undifferentiated and
generalized way. Very often, particularly among critics adopting a post-
structuralist position, the two terms are used interchangeably, a situation
that can cause confusion in relation to textual production (such as in
film, literature, music, or television) because of the conflation of “post-
modern” thinking with “postmodernist” textual practices. The main
problem here stems from the addition of “-ist” or “-ism” to “postmod-
ern” as a generalized descriptor, where “postmodernist” comes to refer
to something (a literary text, for example) that expresses some kind of
“postmodern” sensibility (when the critic actually means it has a post-
modernistic approach) and “postmodernism” comes to refer to an un-
differentiated collectivity of everything (texts, objects, ideas, “states of
mind,” forms of behavior, or attitudes) that can be called “postmodern”
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INTRODUCTION • xxxiii

as an expression of some undefined but universal and all-pervasive

“postmodern condition.”
In both cases, the terms are only meaningful in their lack of specifics
and rely on an essentialized view of human behavior, subjectivity, and
cultural and social practice that presumes that because “we” live in a
“postmodern age” then things must necessarily be “postmodern.” How-
ever, although it is possible in the area of philosophy or literary and cul-
tural theory to presume that the two are identical—simply because a
theorist or critic who propounds a “postmodern” philosophy must there-
fore be “postmodernist” in the application of ideas in practice through
his or her interpretation of phenomena—to make such a presumption in
other areas is deeply problematic. The conflation of “postmodern” with
“postmodernist” leads to a position with regard to literature, for exam-
ple, in which a contemporary novel or poem that adopts ideas consonant
with poststructuralist theories of deconstruction or postmodern ideas
about the indeterminacy of truth and reality must necessarily be “post-
modernist” even if it uses traditional modes of expression such as the
realist linear narrative or the personalized form of the elegy without ex-
perimenting or playing with literary form. Such a view, however, pro-
duces a version of postmodernist literature and cultural expression that
is so generalized and extensive in its operation that it becomes mean-
ingless. If such a position is adopted, all forms of contemporary litera-
ture or cultural production become “postmodernist” simply because
they engage with some aspect of “our” contemporary “postmodern con-
dition,” whether this is a concern with a commodified culture of brands
and franchises, an interest in how “reality” can be perceived or under-
stood, or a subject matter that deals with identity and subjectivity in
contemporary society.
There are a number of difficulties in adopting this position, the two
most significant of which focus on textual aesthetics and cultural def-
inition. With regard to textual aesthetics, it cannot be assumed that
reference to postmodern ideas or postmodernist culture means that a
text is itself “postmodern” in outlook or “postmodernist” in form.
Many canonical modernist writers, such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
Marcel Proust, and Ezra Pound, for example, used modernist textual
strategies while holding views that were anti-modern. Similarly, a
novelist such as John Steinbeck engaged with the new social and cul-
tural processes developing in modernity without adopting either
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xxxiv • INTRODUCTION

modernist forms or philosophies. He cannot therefore be considered to

be a modernist writer, in the same way that the writers of dirty real-
ism (Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie for example), who articulate
similar traditional forms in their representation of contemporary cul-
tural processes, cannot be called postmodernist, even though a book
such as Larry McCaffery’s Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographi-
cal Guide designates them as such.
From another perspective, postmodernist textual devices are often
articulated within a cultural, rather than a philosophical, framework
and are not, therefore, expressing an author’s viewpoint. Instead, they
are being self-consciously used as a means to refract or configure
postmodern cultural processes. In such circumstances, writers are at-
tempting to offer a political or cultural perspective whereby they dis-
tance themselves from both postmodern culture and theory. This is the
case, for example, in many magic realist texts, such as Carlos Fuentes’
Terra Nostra or Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del fuego (Memory of
Fire), or in American postmodernist novels of the 1970s, such as Ish-
mael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,
or William Gaddis’ JR, all of which are demonstrating the reality of
power and economic exploitation even if they are a product of ideo-
logical sign systems.
Such considerations also bear on the question of cultural definition.
One of the major problems, as a number of feminist critics and theorists
of postcolonialism have pointed out, is that postmodernism as a zeit-
geist is not the universal, all-pervasive condition that many critics have
presumed it to be. “Our” postmodern condition, under which “we” are
created as postmodern subjects who consume postmodern cultural and
literary products, is a configuration of contemporary culture that is ac-
tually very particular in its field of operation. For many feminists, the
“we” that is referred to in such accounts does not designate women be-
cause it is a product of a male perception in western cultures that their
traditional position as the dominant power is being challenged by com-
peting groups, the result of which is a sense that the “grand narratives”
that have historically justified masculine domination of society are be-
ing deconstructed. The postmodern philosophy that develops from this
view can be seen as a response by male theorists and writers who either
perceive themselves to be fragmented products of a fragmented society
where historical hierarchies have been eroded or who exaggerate the ef-
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INTRODUCTION • xxxv

fects of the challenge to grand narratives of power in order to create a

position of victimhood for themselves, even if the reality is actually
somewhat different. Even where male critics and writers have embraced
postmodern deconstruction and fragmentation, it has often been seen as
a male attempt to appropriate feminine positions for themselves.

POSTMODERN CULTURE AND POSTMODERNITY

A further element to assumptions that the concept of a “postmodern

condition” refers to a universal experience relates to accounts of post-
modern culture and postmodernity as totalizing concepts. Postcolonial
and Marxist accounts have noted that the concerns of postmodernism
(either as a textual form or as a philosophy) are based on an American
and European conception of contemporary culture that does not de-
scribe the condition of African, Asian, or Latin American nations (even
though the latter area has been one of the major producers of postmod-
ernist literature). The culture of commodification, pervasive mass-
media images, pastiche, and irony that is seen within such versions of
postmodernity is premised on a view that everyone, globally, partakes
of such a culture, even though it can be argued that such a culture is pri-
marily experienced in advanced societies that have developed beyond
subsistence economies of need into economies of plenty where there is
time and money to indulge in cultures based on information and enter-
tainment because the need to survive is no longer a key issue. This po-
sition is contested by Marxist critics who note that access to con-
sumerism is still only partial in advanced economies. However, a
prevailing view of postmodernity in the United States, Japan, Australia,
and western European nations is that it is a culture of consumption
based on a fantasy world created by the simulacra in which people can
endlessly consume brands, themes, nostalgia, and self-conscious texts
that announce their own fictionality.
Perhaps a better way of considering contemporary postmodern global
culture is to see it as a stratified arrangement split between a sphere of
consumption (advanced economies and enclaves of wealth in develop-
ing nations), where such cultural processes are available and where the
major products are information and images, and a sphere of production
(developing nations) which provides the labor and resources for the
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xxxvi • INTRODUCTION

manufacture of the material products (commodities) that are consumed

in the former areas, but without having anywhere near the same access
to postmodern forms of consumption. In such an analysis, postmoder-
nity exists primarily in the former area, where a culture of consumption
and “reproduction” (based on the recirculation of images and informa-
tion) has replaced a culture of production. With the reservations that not
everyone in advanced economies experiences a condition of economic
privilege that allows such patterns of consumption nor that everyone in
developing nations is similarly lacking, it can be further argued that in
contemporary global culture the class structures identified within Marx-
ist analyses have become geographical and that the American or Euro-
pean working class now arguably lives in countries such as Mexico,
China, India, Indonesia, or Brazil where products including clothing,
footwear, computers, mobile phones, and other electronic goods are
manufactured to be consumed inside advanced economies.
Although focused on a particular area within contemporary global or-
ganizations, what such accounts suggest is that postmodernity is a re-
cent development that builds on modern colonial forms of economic or-
ganization while also developing the sense that, at least for advanced
economies, contemporary society has moved into a new phase of cul-
tural practices and social structuring. Theorists of postmodernity, such
as Jameson (1984 and 1991), Harvey (1989), Jencks (1989), Anderson
(1998), and Crook, Pakulski, and Waters (1992) argue that this involves
a shift from modern forms of social and economic organization, such as
mass production, rationalization, and grand narratives of knowledge, to
postmodern forms, such as consumption, decentralization, and frag-
mentation. The period when postmodern forms of social, cultural, and
economic organization (and the phenomena that characterize it) became
dominant varies depending on the critic, but there is a general agree-
ment that postmodernity began to manifest itself in advanced
economies at some time in the 1960s and 1970s and became a dominant
cultural condition in the United States and Europe in the neoconserva-
tive years of the 1980s as a result of the shift to decentralized market
economies and the rise of a media or information society.
The dominant features of postmodernity are most often taken to be
“commodification” and “simulation,” with the former referring to the
ways in which social and cultural life are increasingly governed by con-
sumerism (in terms of the creation of identity or social relationships)
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INTRODUCTION • xxxvii

and the latter describing the dominance of the image and the related
idea of “the death of reality.” Commodification is particularly associ-
ated with Marxist critics, such as Fredric Jameson, who argue that there
has been a qualitative change in capitalist processes in contemporary
society that shifts attention to consumption and reproduction at the ex-
pense of production. For example, as noted, most advanced economies
are premised on the consumption of products and services with the ac-
tual manufacture of commodities occurring in developing or ex-Soviet
nations. Accompanying this shift in production has been a transforma-
tion in the role of commodities in postmodern culture, so that they are
not purchased for their function or utility but for their image and for
their ability to fulfill a desire rather than a need. The result of this is that
products are less important as objects and more important either as a
way for people to project their identity or as a form of advertising
hoarding upon which companies such as Nike can advertise themselves
and their corporate ethos.
This latter aspect relates to the primacy of the simulation or image
in postmodernity, with the theorist Jean Baudrillard (1983) arguing
that image has become everything in contemporary society with the
result that the simulacrum displaces reality. By this he means that
there are so many images in circulation in society nowadays that it is
not only difficult (if not impossible) to tell the difference between im-
age and reality, but also that people’s access to reality is determined
by the images of it that they have already consumed. In the case of the
attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, for example,
many westerners either commented that it looked like a disaster film,
implying that they could only judge reality in terms of already exist-
ing images, or only believed that it had happened when they turned on
the television set and saw the images of the destruction of the “Twin
Towers,” suggesting that reality meant nothing to them except in the
form of a mediated image. For Baudrillard this produces a culture of
copies without reference to reality and without any depth. Surface and
spectacle determine cultural production with the effect that experience
and consciousness are determined by access to images and informa-
tion rather than through, for example, personal relationships or self-
reflection. The individual becomes a part of the flows of image, in-
formation, and commodities and is, in the process, turned into a
spectacle of the self, a commodity, or a piece of information.
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xxxviii • INTRODUCTION

Although these are dominant forms of postmodernity for many theo-

rists, there are also further aspects that are influential. Jean-François Ly-
otard (1984), for example, defines the postmodern condition as one that
is characterized by the “death of grand narratives,” by which he means
that contemporary culture is increasingly skeptical of the ideologies of
the Enlightenment, such as beliefs in technological or social progress
and the liberation and enfranchisement of the individual, which he sug-
gests have been proved to be “myths” in the 20th century through, for
example, not only the failure to liberate people from serfdom in large
parts of the world, but also their delivery into new forms of slavery by
the very ideologies and processes of the Enlightenment (Marxism, free-
market capitalism) that were meant to liberate them. Similarly, the be-
lief in technology and science’s ability to provide social freedoms and to
improve people’s lives has been challenged by, for example, the atomic
bomb and by the way in which technology has created new forms of
control such as surveillance. Lyotard argues that postmodern culture re-
places “grand narratives” (totalizing visions) with “small narratives”
and fragmentation, moving away from institutional knowledge, that is
regarded either as the product of an ideological system or as misinfor-
mation designed to perpetuate control, to personal or communal forms
of knowledge. Examples of these include the growth of conspiracy the-
ory and the distrust of government that it represents, the development of
new forms of spirituality at the expense of established religions, new
post-human or cybercultural accounts of information society, and the
general distrust of professional experts in contemporary culture.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

There are two key issues that the above discussions of postmodernism
articulate: firstly, the relationship of postmodernism to modernism, and,
secondly, the relationship of postmodernist literature to postmodern cul-
ture. While Lyotard offers an account of postmodernism that sees a rad-
ical break with modernity and the Enlightenment, by substituting frag-
mentation, anti-rationalism, and decentralization for system, rationality,
and totality, the other theories of postmodernity that primarily look at
cultural movements are less clear about whether postmodernism is a
transformation into a new form of cultural, aesthetic, and social forms
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INTRODUCTION • xxxix

or a continuation of modernist processes. The industrialized period of

the early 20th century, for example, can be said to share the same con-
cern over the emphasis on commodities and images and, indeed, many
postmodernist writers offer similar perspectives on an homogenous
mass produced culture that modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Louis-
Ferdinand Céline, or James Joyce presented.
Criticism of literature has also been divided over whether postmod-
ernist writers continue or break with the literary forms of modernism.
Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), for example, argues
that postmodernism significantly differs from modernism because it
deals with ontology and the textualization of reality (in which the focus
is on how postmodernist literature creates different types of textual
world), whereas modernism is more concerned with questions of epis-
temology and focuses on how reality or the material world are under-
stood or perceived. Other critics have adopted approaches to mod-
ernism and postmodernism that focus more on stylistic and structural
concerns. Fredric Jameson, in his seminal article “Postmodernism, or
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), suggests that the differ-
ence between the two is that modernist writing can be characterized by
the creation of an “individual style,” a position also accepted by Steven
Best and Douglas Kellner in The Postmodern Turn (1997), while post-
modernism is best understood in terms of the exhaustion of style (the
death of originality) and the pervasiveness of pastiche and imitation.
A common perception concerning the differences between modernism
and postmodernism has developed as a result of the taxonomy provided
by Ihab Hassan in the “Postface” to the second edition of The Dismem-
berment of Orpheus (1982). Here, Hassan sets out a binary relationship
which characterizes modernism primarily in terms of hierarchy, system,
synthesis, narrative, and presence and postmodernism in terms of play,
anarchy, negation, anti-narrative, and absence. Effectively, this presents
modernism as an attempt to create order or system out of a meaningless
world (tradition and religion for T.S. Eliot, versions of history for Ezra
Pound and Marcel Proust, or language and literature for James Joyce, for
example) and postmodernism as an embrace of meaninglessness and
fragmentation. Although in the rest of The Dismemberment of Orpheus
Hassan argues that postmodernism is an exaggeration of modernist
forms of dissolution, fragmentation, and disruption, his taxonomy of the
modernism and postmodernism has been widely adopted.
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xl • INTRODUCTION

This is despite the fact that many modernist texts either parody sys-
tem and hierarchy, such as Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigen-
schaften (The Man without Qualities), or foreground the self-referential
relationships created by language, such as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake, and have subsequently had a profound influence on postmodernist
writing because of the latter’s uncertainty over whether any meaningful
system exists that can provide order in the contemporary world. Thus,
when an ordering principle is offered in postmodernist fiction, as in the
case of “conspiracy” in Thomas Pynchon’s early fiction, the textual
structure of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch), history in Eduardo
Galeano’s Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), or the use of mathe-
matics in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, it is usually problematized in some
way and is shown to be unprovable and therefore of doubtful veracity
(Pynchon), an artificial self-reflexive fiction (Cortázar), an ideological
structure (Galeano), or entirely wrong (DeLillo). This nevertheless does
point to one important textual feature of postmodernist literature: the ar-
ticulation of strategies that either use conventional forms in order to de-
construct their utility as meaningful structures or which present discon-
nected or fragmented narratives to problematize the notion of “system”
(or “grand narrative”) by suggesting that such arrangements are either
meaningless fictions or ideological constructions.
The concern with fragmentation and the failure of meaning has also
led to minimalist and metafictional tendencies in the works of post-
modernism as well as to counterviews in criticism in which postmod-
ernism is seen as a development of modernism rather than as a new
form in itself (Patricia Waugh, 1984; Brian McHale, 1987). Several crit-
ics have noted that much writing that has been characterized as post-
modernist can actually be seen as either “late-modernism” or “ultra-
modernism” (John Mepham, 1991), particularly fictional writings that
have been influenced by the works of Jorge Luis Borges and which have
developed self-conscious metafictional strategies that draw attention to
the textual status of the story or novel, such as a famous example from
a story by John Barth: “Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness.”
The French nouveau roman in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, can be
seen as just such a “late-modernist” mode in its emphasis on the form
of the text, the use of writing as a way of creating consciousness, or the
creation of reality out fragments of language.
06-641_A-C.qxd 1/19/07 9:36 AM Page 1

The Dictionary

–A–

ABISH, WALTER (1931– ). American writer born in Austria whose first

published work was a collection of poetry, Duel Site (1970), but who
has since concentrated on fiction, publishing four novels, two short
story collections, and a memoir. As a writer, Abish is particularly con-
cerned with the relationship of the linguistic sign to what it represents
and his fictions investigate the arbitrary relationship between language
and reality in textual strategies that have resonances with structuralist
and poststructuralist theories of language. For Abish, reality and mean-
ing are constructed in texts by the ordering of words rather than
through their relationship to an external reality. “In So Many Words”
from In the Future Perfect (1977) alternates an alphabetical list of
words and paragraphs in which these words are ordered into sentences
in an arrangement that draws attention to the arbitrary structures of lan-
guage as opposed to any meaning determined by the referents of the
words in reality. A similar situation can be seen in the title story from
Minds Meet (1975) and in one particularly acclaimed short story from
In the Future Perfect, “Ardor/Awe/Atrocity,” which focuses on the
“lives” and emotions of its characters as they are determined by the ad-
ventures of a television hero called Mannix. Linguistic self-reflexivity
is articulated by the text in its representation of words which appear in
the titles for each section with a number in superscript always appear-
ing after them (“Ardor1” or “Thrust58”), a process that again draws at-
tention to the sign itself rather than its referent.
Abish’s longer fictions display similar fictive strategies and high-
light the textuality of the fiction being presented. 99: The New Mean-
ing (1990) is a found text while Alphabetical Africa (1974) is an ex-
perimental fiction that has a similar structure to the “constrained

1
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2 • ABSURDISM

texts” of the OuLiPo group. The novel arbitrarily constructs “Africa”

and its own narrative by adding words according to their position in
the alphabet. Thus, the novel’s first chapter only contains words be-
ginning with “A,” the second chapter adds words beginning with
“B,” the third words beginning with “C,” and so on until “Z” is
reached, at which point the novel begins to remove words beginning
with “Z,” then “Y,” then “X,” and so on until the final chapter where
only words beginning with “A” are used again. In mapping Africa as
a text that is constructed by an arbitrarily chosen system, not only
does Abish draw attention to the fictionality of his novel, but also
suggests that reality is governed by the system chosen to represent it.
The same is the case with Abish’s best-known novel, How German Is
It? (1980), which develops an idea first presented in the short story,
“The English Garden” (from In the Future Perfect), where the images
the narrator finds in a coloring book about Germany shape his per-
spectives about the “real” Germany. In How German Is It? Abish ex-
tends this metaphor to imagine a Germany based only on signs while
also meditating on how signs can not only create reality, but conceal
it. The novel thereby engages with reality in the form of history, in-
vestigating the ways in which postwar Germany has concealed the
history of Nazi Germany.

ABSURDISM. Form of writing, known in drama as the “Theater of the

Absurd” (a term coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same title),
that is less concerned with formal innovation than with a philosophy
based on the idea that the search for meaning is a futile task because
any system that promises such a construction has no basis in reality.
The roots of absurdism can be found in the philosophy of Søren
Kierkegaard as well as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s announcement of the
death of God and in his concern with the fictions of human activity,
while aesthetic precursors include the pataphysical works of Alfred
Jarry, Antonin Artaud’s anti-theater, Dadaism, and the novels of
Franz Kafka. Absurdist texts developed alongside existentialist phi-
losophy in the 1940s and 1950s, initially in France before finding
currency in other countries. Both existentialism and absurdism have
a concern with negation, with absurdism developing concerns with
the futility of existence by placing characters within a world where
there is no purpose or structure. Texts often focus on attempts to cre-
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ACKER, KATHY • 3

ate systems of meaning that subsequently prove to be empty or on the

deconstruction of existing systems of meaning in order to reveal that
they have no purpose except to create fictions of truth and order.
In this final version, absurdism has similarities to postmodernist
writing because of its similarities with the forms of fabulation de-
veloped by Jorge Luis Borges, whose works direct attention to the
creation of “fictions” for the sake of having a system to live by. Ab-
surdist works often have an allegorical element, as is the case with
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which uses its narrative about the United
States Air Force bombing campaigns in World War II to deconstruct
the arbitrary systems of postwar American society. Although a num-
ber of postmodernist novelists have used absurdist forms, including
Éric Chevillard, Stanley Elkin, and Thomas Pynchon, it is prima-
rily associated with the theater where, in works by Samuel Beckett,
Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, N.F. Simpson, and Tom Stoppard,
it developed self-reflexive forms that use the space of the stage and
temporal ambiguities in the narrative to play with the ideas of the
constructedness of reality and the systems that create it.

ACKER, KATHY (1947–1997). Avant-garde writer who was initially

associated with a “punk” writing ethos in the 1970s and early 1980s,
when her early works were published by small presses, and with the
avant-pop movement in the 1990s. Stylistically, Acker’s writing
was heavily influenced by the works of William S. Burroughs and
remained fairly consistent over the years, using strategies that in-
cluded nonlinear narrative forms, an atemporal narrative present, il-
lustrations, inserts, pornography, speculative and dystopian ele-
ments, and the use of Burroughs’ “fold-in” and “cut-up” techniques
to incorporate literary borrowings from other writers. Acker also
tended to reiterate similar concerns throughout her novels, particu-
larly masochistic forms of femininity and sexual domination and
abuse. These aspects recur as a continual demythologization of cul-
tural configurations of gender which Acker articulated in order to
foreground the violence and power she saw in ideological construc-
tions of the family and male-female relationships as sanctioned by
existing social structures.
This analysis was extended in her later works to map sexual rela-
tions as part of economic and power relations as a whole and led to a
06-641_A-C.qxd 1/19/07 9:36 AM Page 4

4 • ACKER, KATHY

fuller assault on the power structures that create inequality in class,

gender, and ethnicity, particularly social ideology and its creation of
concepts of “normality.” In this respect, Acker sought to both decon-
struct the accepted and “acceptable” realities within which people in
contemporary society have their lives and identities mapped out for
them and to challenge the narratives of behavior that are created by
the fiction-making processes of society and culture. The deconstruc-
tion of accepted realities, ideologies, and orthodoxies can be seen
even in Acker’s early works, often by reference to the forms of rep-
resentation that Acker felt sustained dominant belief systems. This is
the case, for example, in Hello, I’m Erica Jong (1982), which sati-
rizes feminist realist fiction for its complicity with the structures it
opposes. Great Expectations (1982) develops a concern with the de-
mythologization of literature as a canonical form through its textual
borrowings from Charles Dickens’ novel of the same name. Blood
and Guts in High School (1984), the book that made Acker’s name,
is written as a “scrapbook,” including illustrations, diagrams, apho-
risms, pornography, and sections written as a script, and develops
concerns with sexual violence. The novel also introduces “Jean
Genet” into the narrative and the use of writers as characters (albeit
in speculative versions) was a device that Acker returned to in later
works such as In Memoriam to Identity (1990) which contains char-
acters called Rimbaud and Verlaine.
After Don Quixote (1986), Acker’s writing began to contextualize
its accounts of violence more clearly by placing narrativizations of
taboo subjects such as female masochism, male violence, and
pornography within a larger social vision focused on power and mar-
ginality. In Empire of the Senseless (1988) Acker directs attention to
the dehumanizing forces of capitalism and its creation of a culture of
disgust through the representation of forms of sexual abuse and dom-
ination. The novel also configures forms of resistance, albeit in the
rather reductive identification of outlawry with revolutionary possi-
bility. Acker also developed fuller concerns with language and its
enunciation of gender power relationships at this time, extending
these in In Memoriam to Identity, which explores myths of individu-
ality in order to deconstruct both the language of power and Roman-
tic ideologies of identity; in My Mother: Demonology, A Novel
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ACKROYD, PETER • 5

(1993), which deals with the “machine” desires created by hetero-

sexuality; and in her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996).

ACKROYD, PETER (1949– ). British novelist, poet, biographer,

and critic who has written prolifically since he began his writing ca-
reer in 1971. His nonfiction works include, for example, literary bi-
ographies (Ezra Pound and His World, 1980; T.S. Eliot, 1984; Dick-
ens, 1990; and Blake, 1995), the critically acclaimed London: A
Biography (2000), as well as critical works on modernism and on
transvestism. Although best known as a novelist, Ackroyd’s first
published literary works were the poetry collections Ouch (1971),
London Lickpenny (1973), and Country Life (1978), written in the
form of Language Poetry and under the influence of writers such
as John Ashbery and J.H. Prynne. These poems demonstrate a
playful linguistic experimentation, with disrupted syntactic rela-
tionships, use of poetic fragments, and intertextuality. Along with
his focus on London and its history, this latter element is perhaps of
most importance in Ackroyd’s novels, which display a variety of
narrative voices, often taking the form of either a pastiche imitation
of other writers or the lexical patterns associated with a particular
period of English language. This is the case, for example, in The
Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1984) which is written in imitation
of Wilde as if it were his autobiography.
Although Ackroyd’s poetry plays with the linguistic structures of
English and his critical views favor modernist writers such as Ezra
Pound and Alain Robbe-Grillet, his novels are very respectful of tra-
ditional literary conventions. The most experimental elements of his
fiction are his blurring of generic distinctions between fiction and bi-
ography, which presents both as constructions of history or reality, and
his use of doubled narratives that shift from one perspective to another
or across time periods, as in the historiographic metafictions
Hawksmoor (1985) and Chatterton (1987), both of which play with
the relationships between past and present and between history and
fiction so that each bleeds into the other. English Music (1992) has
similar concerns with history, literature, and tradition in split first- and
third-person narratives, while The House of Doctor Dee (1993) has in-
terpenetrating narratives that again blend past and present in a story
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6 • AMERICAN PSYCHO

about the Renaissance alchemist and astrologer John Dee. Dan Leno
and the Limehouse Golem (1994) is a historiographic metafiction us-
ing underworld slang that incorporates historical figures, such as Karl
Marx and the music-hall performer Dan Leno, alongside fictional
characters in a mystery about a series of murders. Milton in America
(1996) uses a counterfactual premise to imagine an alternate life for
John Milton in New England where he founds a Puritan community,
while The Plato Papers (1999) develops fantasy elements within a sci-
ence-fictional framework by imagining the citizens of London in 3700
AD looking back to the “age of Mouldworp” (1500 to 2300 AD). Ack-
royd’s most recent works are The Clerkenwell Tales (2003), a sus-
pense story set in medieval London, and The Lambs of London (2004),
a historical fiction about Mary and Charles Lamb.

AMERICAN PSYCHO. Novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991,

which became a cause célèbre for its representation of sexual vio-
lence. The novel is told in the form of an unreliable first person nar-
ration by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy New Yorker who works on Wall
Street, and uses a cumulative style in which murders, commodities,
clothes, video rentals, analyses of CDs, visits to restaurants and clubs,
GQ articles, and trips to the dry-cleaners are endlessly listed. As the
novel progresses the fictional reality of events becomes problematic,
suggesting not only that Bateman is fantasizing his life as a serial
killer, but also possibly his whole life. The text problematizes Bate-
man’s version of events in several ways: by providing impossible de-
tail, placing him in situations that contradict his previous narration, or
by using self-reflexive devices (such as Bateman describing a TV in-
terview with a Cheerio). These latter strategies seem to draw attention
to the text’s fictionality, but primarily act as reality effects that map
Bateman’s increasing failure to comprehend reality and the empty fic-
tions of the commodified culture he inhabits. These two aspects are
linked together through the satirical focus that the novel develops as it
foregrounds the affectlessness and loss of individuality engendered by
postmodern culture’s serial forms of consumption. The self becomes
invested in identical commodities in which difference is erased and in-
dividuality is emptied out into external accessories. In order to replace
this loss, Bateman creates a fantasy of himself as a serial killer which
is the only way he can imagine individuality in a homogenous culture
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AMERIKA, MARK • 7

of commodities. This masculine articulation of power is questioned by

Ellis in the novel’s implication that male selfhood can only be
achieved through the subjection of women, whether this is through
Bateman’s fantasies of sexual violence or through the objectification
of women (as “hard-bodies,” for example) practiced by all the male
characters throughout the novel.

AMERIKA, MARK (1960– ). American novelist and digital artist

who is closely associated with the avant-pop movement for which
he acted as an advocate in the early 1990s. Amerika has edited col-
lections of short stories and written manifestos arguing that avant-
pop strategies are the only way to engage with contemporary cul-
ture. In “The Avant-Pop Manifesto” he claims that postmodernism
is dead and has been replaced by forms of avant-pop literature
which combine an avant-garde aesthetic with an engagement with
the mass media. The aim of avant-pop, for Amerika, is to parasiti-
cally feed off the false consciousness of mass culture in order to
subvert it. The Kafka Chronicles (1993), for example, offers a pas-
tiche of styles (including typographical experiments, puns in the
manner of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and metafictional
replication of material from Kafka’s fictions) in order to create a
sense of movement that ostensibly challenges the stasis of Ameri-
can culture that is represented in the inserted section “Amerika at
War: the Mini-Series,” which also parodies the ideologies of the of-
ficial American culture. Sexual Blood (1995) uses the conventions
of literary pornography ostensibly to mount an assault on individu-
ality as it is produced by sexual and gendered ideologies. The novel
works through a series of gender positions in its middle section,
which takes the form of a concept album, but concludes by privi-
leging an aestheticized ideology of the individual based on multiple
creative possibilities, a position that looks very much like the post-
modern schizophrenia produced by the culture that Amerika criti-
cizes. In recent years Amerika has become increasing involved in
the production of internet hyperfiction, including Grammaton
(1997) and a hypertext article called “Hypertextual Consciousness
1.0” (in which he discusses the possibilities created by hyperfic-
tional narratives), while also developing interactive internet media
art (PHON:E:ME and Filmtext) and digital film projects.
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8 • AMIS, MARTIN

AMIS, MARTIN (1949– ). British writer who is the son of Kingsley

Amis and one of a group of writers (also including Julian Barnes, Pe-
ter Ackroyd, and Kazuo Ishiguru) credited with reviving British fic-
tion in the 1980s by introducing vaguely experimental techniques or
alternative cultural perspectives. Although such a view lacks histori-
cal perspective, Amis’ fiction has nevertheless helped to popularize
metafictional forms of writing in the “playful literature” that he pro-
fesses to produce. Amis can also, however, be seen to be working in
the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, with the pastiche of pseudo-American
jargon and slang that Amis uses, along with the excessive qualities of
many of his novels, simply presenting an updated version of Waugh’s
social satire. Thus, while the naming of his characters (for example,
John Self, Keith Talent, Guy Clinch, and Clint Smoker) has often been
regarded as a form of fictional self-consciousness, this device is also
influenced by the names of the characters that can be found in
Waugh’s novels. With the exception of The Rachel Papers (1973), a
novel about young lust, Amis’ earlier fictions are Waugh without the
postmodernism, with both Dead Babies (1975) and Success (1978)
presenting satires on excess and wealth in contemporary Britain.
It is in Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) that experimental
forms of writing make their first significant appearance in Amis’ fic-
tion. The novel has a fractured time-scheme similar to the narrative
distortions found in the nouveau roman and takes place within the
frame of a metafictional detective story that self-consciously out-
lines its narrative processes in order to apparently guide the reader,
even though it finally refuses to provide a neat resolution. Social
satire becomes more evident in Money: A Suicide Note (1984), an
exposé of 1980s greed that adopts the excess of the culture it dram-
atizes, but which also ironically distances itself through the use of a
self-conscious first-person narration and the inclusion of Amis him-
self as a character. London Fields (1989) is Amis’ most important
novel and presents a novel about writing and perception within a
Waugh-esque satirical form. Metafictional elements are highlighted
in a fictionalized framework that lays bare the murder plot for the
reader by announcing which characters are the Murderer, Murderee,
and Foil before playfully subverting this structure. The novel also
makes it unclear whether the narrative is a novel being written by an
American author come to stay in London, a record of events during
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THE ANTI-AESTHETIC • 9

his stay, a record written as a fiction, or a fantasy that has developed

its own logic.
Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence (1991) maintains a con-
cern with narrative as a mode of representation by playing with tem-
porality and narrative convention in order to defamiliarize “reality.”
It tells the story of a Nazi war criminal, beginning with his return to
life at the moment of his death (an event that also brings into exis-
tence the narrator as a doppelganger within his consciousness) and
writing his life in reverse thereafter. In this reverse temporality, his
previous acts of murder now become acts of kindness as he returns
people to life, a shocking inversion that emphasizes the monstrosity
of the Nazi atrocities. Amis’ recent works have become less overtly
metafictional. The Information (1995) revisits the binary opposition
of success and failure first utilized in Success, this time with middle-
aged characters and set in the world of literature; Night Train (1997)
is a pastiche of a noir thriller; and Yellow Dog (2003) is a Dickensian
multiplot-novel with elements of social satire.

THE ANTI-AESTHETIC. Collection of essays (aka Postmodern Cul-

ture in the UK) edited by Hal Foster and published in 1983 which had
a significant impact on the study of postmodernism. Until the publi-
cation of The Anti-Aesthetic, postmodernism had generally been
studied in relation to individual disciplines such as literature, philos-
ophy, art, and architecture. Foster’s collection was one of the first
books, along with a collection of essays issued by the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in 1986 (which, however, still emphasized the
postmodern philosophy of poststructuralism) to study postmod-
ernism as a wider cultural and interdisciplinary phenomenon. Al-
though the collection offered essays on specific areas of postmod-
ernism, it was primarily important because of the inclusion of three
significant articles by Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, and
Fredric Jameson which dealt with wider cultural issues. The collec-
tion popularized postmodernism in many areas of study while also
developing the sense that society and culture had become qualita-
tively different, or postmodern, something compounded by a range of
subsequent publications that also theorized postmodernism as a cul-
tural activity, including Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture
(1989) and David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989).
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10 • ANTI-MIMESIS

ANTI-MIMESIS. Anti-mimetic texts avoid or refuse reference to any

reality that is external to them. An anti-mimetic piece of writing
(such as concrete poetry or the écriture associated with the Tel Quel
group) insists on the materiality of language alone, suggesting that
the words within the text are simply a chain of signifiers that create
their meaning by their relationship with or difference from other sig-
nifiers within the text rather than through any reference to an exter-
nal signified or referent. Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, for ex-
ample, is not about the real geographical Africa (an external
signified), but about the fictional “Africa” that is created within the
text by the arrangements of words. Similarly, Jean Ricardou’s short
story “Jeu” (“Game”) appears at first to be the story of a possible rape
on a beach, but at the end has a woman running up la page (page)
rather than la plage (beach) to signify that the story’s events only
have textual reality. Anti-mimesis is not specifically a postmodernist
device, and there are many critics (such as John Mepham) who would
argue that it is actually an ultra-modernist or late-modernist textual
strategy, but it has, in the forms of fabulation, metafiction, and fic-
tionality, come to be an important part of many postmodernist texts.

ANTI-NOVEL. Although the anti-novel has a long history (going back

to Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy) and
includes modernist works such as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,
Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake), critics have often regarded it as an important part of post-
modernist literature because the principles on which it is based draw
attention to the fictionality of the text. The anti-novel questions the
conventions of the traditional novel (plot, character, realistic setting,
conventions of dialogue) by substituting alternate tropes that admit
to the fictional nature of the text. While not necessarily overtly self-
conscious in directing attention to its own construction as a fiction,
the anti-novel uses anti-mimetic strategies that prevent the reader
from referring to an external reality as a way of explaining the logic
of the text by forcing him or her to focus on the internal meaning sys-
tems within the novel. Such processes include: the permutational
structures found in combinatory literature where a novel is con-
structed through the use of an underlying principle (as in the works
of the OuLiPo) or the renarration of incidents with variations (as in
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ANTIN, DAVID • 11

the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the “cubist” fictions of

Robert Coover); the overt use of fantasy and fabulation in the cre-
ation of textual realities that have no relation to empirical reality (as
in Harry Mathews’ Tlooth or The Conversions and Frederic
Tuten’s TinTin in the New World); and the way in which narrative and
language are foregrounded as the creators of the text at the expense
of verisimilitude (as in the works of the French Tel Quel group or
American surfiction). The radical textuality of the anti-novel is often
closer to the aesthetics of the modernist avant-garde (and its experi-
ment with the possibilities of form) and blurs the boundaries between
modernism and postmodernism.

ANTIN, DAVID (1932– ). American poet, performance artist, and

critic who is best known for his “talk poems,” a form he developed
in the early 1970s. Antin’s publications include Definitions (1967),
Code of Flag Behavior (1968), Meditations (1971), Talking (1972),
After the War (A Long Novel with Few Words) (1973), Talking at the
Boundaries (1976), Tuning (1984), What It Means to be Avant-Garde
(1993), i never knew what time it was (2005), and a series of inter-
views conducted with Charles Bernstein called A Conversation with
David Antin (2001). Antin’s “talk poetry” has its basis in performance
and develops out of live events in which he delivers an improvised
talk or lecture that moves across anecdote, philosophy, everyday
events, history, autobiography, politics, and satire. These “talks” are
recorded and transcribed (as in Talking, Tuning, and What It Means
to be Avant-Garde), devoid of punctuation and capitalization. Blank
spaces between fragments (where Antin has paused for breath) are
the only structural form that the poetry offers. Such a poetic practice
is intended to relocate poetry in its oral dimensions and focus atten-
tion on its creation as a linguistic event that has meaning in its utter-
ance, while also foregrounding the notion of “place” as a significant
factor in the creative process. In “Gambling” (from Tuning), for ex-
ample, Antin highlights the fact that he doesn’t want poetry simply to
be a reenactment of what has already been written, but to be a process
or act in itself.
Antin’s “talk poems” take the form of meditations that are both a
narrative of an issue, puzzle, intellectual problem or event, and a se-
ries of digressions. This manner of configuring texts results in a
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12 • APPLE, MAX

paradoxical synthesis and fragmentation in which a variety of dis-

courses are accumulated in one “place” (both the text and the
venue) as networks where meaning is created in the arrangement of
ideas and words as a process rather than as the result of an already
established system of meaning created in a preexisting written text.
Antin’s “talk poetry” shares similarities with improvised music, but
with language as the medium to be arranged and varied. This im-
provisation creates a “dialogic” matrix of multiple discourses that
Antin argues is a critique of the linear modes of thinking and logic
developed by Enlightenment rationality. In this sense, his poetry
can seen to be postmodern in its deconstruction of the ideologies
of modernity. Antin’s poems also involve a self-reflexive consider-
ation of their own construction, as in Tuning where he considers the
reading itself as well as more theoretical issues relating to the func-
tion of grammar in creating meaning. Similarly, the first two sec-
tions of “Novel Poem” in Codes of Flag Behavior have an inter-
textual configuration based on their origin in lines taken from
popular novels. Antin’s poems also, however, develop out of every-
day life and autobiography, as in i never knew what time it was.

APPLE, MAX (1942– ). American writer whose short stories parodi-

cally mimic the forms of realism by fastening on to certain of its con-
ventions (exactitude of detail, the concreteness of geographical
space, and idiosyncratic characters) to produce a self-conscious fac-
simile of dirty realism. In particular, Apple’s fictions adopt the spare
minimalist style associated with writers such as Raymond Carver
and Ann Beattie (and their fascination with the minutiae of contem-
porary commodified America) to offer parodies of the dirty realist
obsession with everyday places (as in the story “Gas Stations”) and
the uniformity of a nation of franchises and brands. Apple, however,
plays with the forms of realism in a variety of ways. One strategy is
to exaggerate the ability of realism to provide verisimilitude, as in the
title story of Free Agents (1984), which asserts a Kafkaesque insis-
tence on the formalities of realism in telling the story of a narrator (a
metafictional “Max Apple”) facing a revolt from his bodily organs
by presenting the narrative as if it could be a “real” possibility.
Apple also uses parody to spoof dirty realism’s obsession with
brands, franchises, and commodities. This can involve the ironic
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ASHBERY, JOHN • 13

presentation of franchises as a form of contemporary mythology, as

in the title story of The Oranging of America (1976), “Walt and Will,”
and in the novel, The Propheteers (1987), or by making references to
brands and commodities, but then directly commenting on their irrel-
evance to the story (“business talk” and “postmodernism”). Finally,
Apple self-consciously presents characters who are either caricatures
or figures with unusual obsessions as paradigms of the “real” Amer-
ica shown by dirty realism (as in “Eskimo Love”) in order to empha-
size the fact that dirty realism’s focus on “abnormality” as the “nor-
mality” of America is a partial view of the nation derived from its
own aesthetic practices rather than the “reality” it claims to observe.
While this analysis indicates that Apple’s stories have some metafic-
tional elements, his fiction can be better characterized either as mid-
fiction or ironic mimesis because he presents everyday life within
parentheses, acknowledging its existence at the same time that he
questions the forms through which it is represented.

ARNAUD, NOËL (1919– ). Serial French avant-gardist who has been

a member of most of the literary movements in France since the
1930s and who forms a link between modernist and postmodernist
experimental writing. His first involvement with the avant-garde was
as part of a neo-Dadaist group in the 1930s, subsequent to which he
joined the Surrealist group “La Main à la Plume” in 1940, the Collège
de ’Pataphysique in 1950, before becoming a founding member of the
OuLiPo in 1960, of which he was elected president in 1984 after the
death of François Le Lionnais. Much of Arnaud’s literary work has
involved critical accounts and discussions of avant-garde writers, in-
cluding Alfred Jarry and Raymond Queneau. He has also written a
biography of his close friend Boris Vian, much of whose work he has
guided through publication. As a member of OuLiPo, Arnaud has
contributed works to La bibliothèque oulipienne (The Oulipian Li-
brary), but his most important Oulipian work is Poèmes algol (Algol
Poems, 1968), a sequence of computer generated language poems
created using the Algol computer program.

ASHBERY, JOHN (1927– ). American poet and member of the “New

York School” of poetry who, during a period spent living in Paris be-
tween 1955 and 1965, helped to cofound the short-lived magazine
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14 • ASHBERY, JOHN

Locus Solus (named after a novel by Raymond Roussel, a writer

who has been an important influence on Ashbery) with Harry Math-
ews, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. Ashbery has published over
20 collections of poems since Turandot and Other Poems in 1953, in-
cluding: Some Trees (1956), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers
and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three
Poems (1972), The Vermont Notebook (1975), Self-Portrait in a Con-
vex Mirror (1975), Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), A
Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987), Flow Chart (1991), Can You
Hear, Bird (1995), and Your Name Here (2000). Of these, The Tennis
Court Oath and Three Poems have received a large degree of critical
attention, the former because it is Ashbery’s most experimental (and
opaque) collection and the latter (which is made up of three prose po-
ems) because it seems to foreground Ashbery’s postmodernist style
of writing. Some of Ashbery’s best-known poems include: “Self-
Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and “‘They Only Dream of America’”
from The Tennis Court Oath, “Soonest Mended” from The Double
Dream of Spring, “Wet Casements” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”
from Houseboat Days, and “A Wave.”
Ashbery’s work has divided scholarly opinion with regard to its
place in 20th-century aesthetics, with some views arguing that he is a
modernist poet and others that he is postmodernist. In recent years,
criticism has tended not only to adopt the latter view, but also to ar-
gue that he is the paradigmatic postmodern poet because his work dis-
plays features such as indeterminacy, polyphony, self-referentiality,
open-endedness, the mixing of literary codes, and the collapse of high
and popular culture. Ashbery’s poetry is complex and difficult to un-
derstand because it doesn’t reveal its meanings readily to the reader
despite the conversational style that many of his poems present. His
works include a plethora of unidentified references to philosophy and
literature, bathetic images and disjuncture for humorous effect, and
rapid changes of focus. The multivocal aspects of his writing develop
out of intertextual reference, the use of inserted speech by unidenti-
fied voices, changes in poetic voice and narrative, and syntactical dis-
connection, all of which create a decentered, meandering, and evasive
style. Three Poems exemplifies these tendencies with its mixture of
genres, range of literary and cultural references, blurring of high and
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ASHBERY, JOHN • 15

popular discourses, and self-reflexive considerations on the status of

art in relation to reality. Even when Ashbery uses identifiable popu-
lar cultural references in his poetry these produce difficulties for the
reader. “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” (from The
Double Dream of Spring), for example, imagines a story concerning
Popeye, but does so within the highly elaborate form of the sestina
and its enforced structure of repeated end-words. Similarly, “Daffy
Duck in Hollywood” uses animation for its textual motivation, taking
its title from a 1938 cartoon of the same name while seeming to use
the “avant-garde” 1953 cartoon “Duck Amuck” as its guiding princi-
ple in reproducing the many voices, narrative disjuncture, and self-
referentiality of this very self-reflexive and playful cartoon.
It is the question of how poetry stands in relation to reality that cre-
ates many of the difficulties in Ashbery’s poetry. Many of his poems
involve the struggle to understand whether art can represent reality or
whether it is simply a set of unrelated and fragmentary discourses that
either describes itself or the process of trying to represent reality.
“Scheherezade” (from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror) deals with
this issue and moves to the conclusion that representation produces
fictions of reality, while “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” meditates
on how representations construct reality in their distortions because
they are reliant on other representations. Taking as its motivation a
self-portrait painted by the 16th-century artist Francesco Parmigian-
ino, the poem works through platonic notions of reflexivity to suggest
that images of reality are actually images of images mirroring each
other in a self-reflexive loop. This issue is further complicated in
Ashbery’s poetry by a focus on the operation of the mind as it per-
ceives reality, a situation represented in “Soonest Mended,” for ex-
ample, which has often been regarded as a map of the cultural and
cognitive disconnections experienced by the postmodern conscious-
ness. “A Wave” extends these concerns by exploring the ways in
which cognitive processes work in relation to reality. At one point,
the landscape of the mind is described as being like a “golf-course”
in order to express the idea that thoughts are not natural but a prod-
uct of human society. The logic expressed in the previous lines, which
has led to this conclusion, however, is a result of the very processes
of the mind that have been described as like a “golf-course,” with the
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16 • THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

hint that the poetic voice may have been led to this conclusion in a
circular fashion by the discourse that it has created rather than by the
“true” nature of the mind itself.

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION. Novel by J.G. Ballard (aka Love

and Napalm: Export USA), published in 1970, that uses an experi-
mental collage form and questions conventional notions of plot and
character. The novel demonstrates the influences of Raymond Rous-
sel (including short sections entitled “Impressions of Africa” and
“Locus Solus”), Alain Robbe-Grillet, and William S. Burroughs.
The Atrocity Exhibition deals with taboo issues with regard to vio-
lence, particularly in its repeated articulation of the assassination of
John F. Kennedy in terms of sexual metaphors and perverse desires,
and it has become both a cult book and a focus of controversy in the
United States as a result of these configurations. Formally, the novel
presents a series of reenacted events with repeated images and loca-
tions (people lying on beds or taking a bath, Sikorski helicopters, im-
ages and adverts in Paris-Match, bridges and underpasses) that prob-
lematize the concept of reality by offering alternate versions that are
both serial and superimposed, something that is typified by the re-
peated death of Karen Novotny in similar, but slightly varied, ways.
The chapters have no real connection to each other with regard to the
development of a plot, but present iterations of similar events with re-
curring characters. Within the chapters, there is also a process of dis-
connection, with each paragraph taking the form of a fragment with
its own title that does not necessarily have any relation to the content.
Characters change role and identity throughout the novel, sometimes
dying and then reappearing or seeming to change names, such as Tal-
bot, who also appears to be Trabert, Talbert, and possibly Travers and
Traven. Conventional notions of plot and character completely dis-
appear in the final chapters where the novel presents iterations of
plans or images of violence focused around John F. Kennedy, Jacque-
line Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, as well as a list of people shoot-
ing each other in “The Generations of America.” The purpose of such
experimental strategies is not simply to focus attention on the text’s
fictionality but to map a culture of dissociation in which people have
lost touch with reality through the creation of perverse condensations
of images and fantasies of violence.
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ATXAGA, BERNARDO • 17

ATWOOD, MARGARET (1939– ). Canadian novelist and short story

writer whose works primarily focus on contemporary gender issues
with regard to social, cultural, and ideological configurations of fem-
ininity, either by presenting a critique of gendered power relation-
ships or by considering positions of feminine empowerment. Such
concerns can be found throughout Atwood’s fiction as, for example,
in The Edible Woman (1969), which articulates metaphors of female
self-consumption in an age of consumerism, Surfacing (1973), a
novel dealing with victimhood and the recovery of a female self out-
side masculine cultural parameters, Bodily Harm (1981), which de-
velops these concerns in relation to sexual power, and Lady Oracle
(1977), a novel about female empowerment. In Life before Man
(1980), Cat’s Eye (1989), and The Robber Bride (1993), Atwood fo-
cuses on relationships, with the former offering formal variation in its
use of narrative to present events from the different perspectives of
the characters.
Atwood’s best-known novel is The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), a
speculative fiction set in a dystopian future that reflects on the rise of
the New Right in the 1980s by presenting a society in which a rigid
militaristic hierarchy based on male dominance is created and where
women are oppressed either as submissive wives or as breeding-
machines. In her later novels, Atwood has developed more experi-
mental strategies, as is the case in Alias Grace (1996), a novel about
a woman’s conviction for her involvement in two murders, which
plays with memory within the frame of a detective narrative, and the
Booker Prize winning The Blind Assassin (2000), which presents an
ambiguous position of narration by interspersing history with ex-
tracts from a novel-within-a-novel. Atwood’s most recent novels are
Oryx and Crake (2003), a speculative fiction dealing with genetic
modification that tells its story in flashbacks from a posthuman fu-
ture, and The Penelopiad (2005), in which Penelope, the wife of
Odysseus, tells her story. In addition to these novels, Atwood has also
published several volumes of poetry and short stories.

ATXAGA, BERNARDO (JOSÉ IRAZU GARMENDIA) (1951– ).

Basque writer who has produced fiction, poetry, songs, radio plays,
and theater, as well as over 20 books for children. His international
renown is based on his works of fiction, within which Atxaga deals
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18 • ATXAGA, BERNARDO

with issues relating to Basque culture, language, and politics, partic-

ularly the relationship between Basque, Spanish, and European cul-
tures by reference to concerns with cultural marginalization and in-
clusion. Atxaga’s fiction can be characterized as midfiction because
it has a predominantly referential axis, but with some experimental
elements that vary from text to text. His first published texts were the
collections of poetry, Ziutateaz (The Towns, 1976) and Etopía (1978)
with his first important novel, Bi anai (Two Brothers), appearing in
1985. The events of this novel, dealing with two girls’ desires for one
of two brothers, are told through the successive narrations of the
characters whose representation of events is governed by the inner
voices through which perception is mediated. Atxaga has also pro-
duced novels published in Spanish in order to bring the concerns of
the Basque people to a national audience. El hombre solo (The Lone
Man, 1993) is a novel about an ex-member of the Basque separatist
movement ETA, who conceals two terrorists from the police and who
ponders on his actions through an inner dialogue with various people
he has known in the past. Esos Cielos (The Lone Woman, 1996), fol-
lows the journey of a female terrorist who has renounced her politi-
cal affiliations after her release from prison and is narrated from
within her consciousness, lasting only as long as her bus trip home.
Atxaga’s most recent work, Soinujolearen semea (The Accordionist’s
Son, 2004), written in Basque, shares similar personal concerns, but
on a larger historical scale, and traces a friendship that stretches from
the 1930s to the end of the 20th century.
Atxaga’s most significant novel, and the one that brought him to
the awareness of an international audience, is Obabakoak (1988),
which means “people or things of Obaba.” Obabakoak is a frag-
mented novel made up of a series of unrelated stories set in and
around the imaginary town of Obaba that have an implicit concern
with Basque culture and literature through the expression of the
need to invent a Basque tradition of writing in relation to, and as
part of, the texts of other cultures. The first two sections of the novel
present stories that are told as fabulations, first-person narrations,
or accounts of characters’ interior consciousnesses in response to
the location they inhabit as the narrative flows around and through
them. The third part (“In Search of the Last Word”) which forms the
second half of the novel narrates a short period of time in an au-
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AUSTER, PAUL • 19

thor’s life and presents meditations on the forms and functions of

literature, particularly in relation to intertextuality (or “plagiarism,”
as it is self-consciously and ironically referred to by the text). This
section offers pastiches of other fictions, including a story in the
style of Jorge Luis Borges and another with a metafictional strat-
egy that has resonances of the works of John Barth and William
H. Gass. There are also direct and indirect references to other texts,
including a man with a white beard and an urge to tell stories who
follows the author and his friend around and who evokes Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The narrative of this section is
a collage of inserted stories, but as so much of the novel is made up
of “inserts,” ultimately there is no master narrative within which
they can be enclosed.

AUSTER, PAUL (1947– ). American novelist whose works articulate

postmodern concerns with chance and system. Like a number of ear-
lier American postmodernist writers (most notably Robert Coover in
his 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry
Waugh, Prop., and Harry Mathews in his early novels), Auster’s fic-
tion is focused on the question of whether reality has any system of
order or whether it is a random set of phenomena and experiences
that cannot be understood by reference to any structuring principle.
The concern with chance and order also relates to issues of meaning
that Auster articulates in terms of formal and aesthetic patterning
whereby his texts play with surfaces and depths both self-reflexively,
as structural forms in which his texts present involuted and unre-
solved aesthetic systems, and self-consciously, in the use of writers
(including Auster himself as a fictional character) or similar figures
(such as detectives) who interpret the world around them in the
search for meaning. Such a configuration also, however, hints at the
closed loop of his concerns because the “reality” his characters inter-
pret is the fictional reality he, as the author, has constructed, suggest-
ing not only that any system of meaning is only ever “fictional,” but
also that chance and loss of order are themselves products of a fic-
tional world.
Such concerns can be seen in the three novellas that form The New
York Trilogy, “City of Glass” (1985), “Ghosts” (1986), and “The
Locked Room” (1986), which are among Auster’s most important
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20 • AUSTER, PAUL

works. All three involve detectives and writing as structural princi-

ples, with “City of Glass,” for example, combining both of these in
telling the story of an author called Quinn (who writes detective nov-
els under the name of William Wilson) taking on a case under the
name of Paul Auster because of a random phone call he decides to re-
spond to in order to fill the emptiness of his life. During the course
of the “investigation,” Quinn loses track of his subject and of his own
identity, finding nothing but a meaningless catalog of events and phe-
nomena in the notebook he keeps. “Ghosts” similarly deals with de-
tection and meaning but the involuted mirrors of its structure lead to
a “system” that has no significance except in its fictional creation,
while “The Locked Room” self-reflexively reuses elements of the
previous two novellas to create an inward-looking world that has an
aesthetic pattern as a fiction, but no ultimate meaning.
Among Auster’s other important works are Moon Palace (1989)
and The Music of Chance (1990), both of which maintain the interest
in chance by focusing on how people deal with a world that is ran-
dom. In these two novels, Auster presents situations in which his
characters try to find a meaningful system by giving in to randomness
as a conscious decision, either because they believe that to willingly
embrace chance is to find a governing principle for their lives (inex-
plicable though it may be) or because they have lost the will to con-
tinue the search for order. Other later novels by Auster develop ideas
found in earlier works, with Brooklyn Follies (2005) focusing its nar-
rative on randomly occurring events and Leviathan (1992) taking up
the issue of imposture and identity found in “City of Glass” and “The
Locked Room” by tracing the impact on the “real” self that is entailed
by adopting someone else’s identity (a “fiction” of the self). Timbuktu
(1999) and The Book of Illusions (2002) develop themes related to
writing, with the former (partly focalized through a dog called Mr.
Bones) concerning a writer who dies with all his works hidden away
unpublished and the latter dealing with the events that writing can
generate. Oracle Night (2004) is a novel about fictions, writing, and
identity that also involves a notebook, a familiar metaphor in Auster’s
work for disordered and fragmentary forms of writing that fail to map
the world and that act as a contrast to finished books that do have a
structure and a map of some kind of reality, even if this is a map of
an aesthetic or fictional reality—in other words, a map of itself.
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AVANT-POP • 21

AVANT-POP. A literary movement that developed in conjunction

with the revival of the Fiction Collective, in its reorganization as
Fiction Collective Two (FC2), in the 1990s. The avant-pop move-
ment formed out of collections of stories edited by Larry McCaf-
fery (Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, 1993; After Yes-
terday’s Crash, 1995) and by Mark Amerika and Ronald
Sukenick (Degenerative Prose: Writing beyond Category, 1995),
and published several manifestos (by, inter alia, Amerika, Euru-
dice, McCaffery and Sukenick) proclaiming the arrival of avant-
pop, theorizing its principles, and listing its major authors. Under
the editorship of Amerika and Sukenick many avant-pop authors
have been published by FC2 under the Black Ice imprint or had
their work included on the Alt-X Online Publishing Network web-
site. In addition to Amerika, Eurudice, and Sukenick, avant-pop
writers include Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Darius James, Bayard John-
son, Cris Mazza, Richard Meltzer, Kit Reed, and William T. Voll-
mann, while other writers such as Kathy Acker and Mark Leyner
have been co-opted into the movement at a remove.
The governing idea of avant-pop is that literary postmodernism is
dead because its self-conscious metafictions are based on an evasion
of contemporary culture. Instead, avant-pop proposes to utilize ex-
perimental (avant-garde) techniques that are devoid of metafictional
strategies in order to engage with a culture that has been pervaded by
mass media and popular cultural signs and to thereby create a “post-
postmodernist” form of writing. A term that avant-pop writers favor
as a description for their fiction is “glossolalia,” which expresses
avant-pop’s desire to break free of the perceived one-dimensional
strategies of postmodernist metafiction through the development of a
variety of experimental styles of writing and the mixing of forms and
genres in a cut-up style. Thus, although avant-pop writers sometimes
utilize the styles of past authors, in the form of pastiche or parody,
they do so in an eclectic manner and with the aim of revising the orig-
inal meanings and textual patterns in response to the new cultural
contexts within which they are placed.
Avant-pop writing thus emphasizes the view that it develops out
of, and is embedded within, popular culture, shaping styles that are
appropriate to the context, situation, consciousness, or psychological
perspective that is being explored. For example, Ricardo Cortez
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22 • BALLARD, JAMES GRAHAM

Cruz’s Straight Outta Compton (1992) has a rhythmical rap style, Ba-
yard Johnson’s Damned Right (1994), about a man obsessed with
movement, mimics the energy of driving at speed, Eurudice’s f/32:
The Second Coming uses fantasy to portray the relationship a woman
has with her vagina as a way of engaging with the politics of gender,
and Darius James’ Negrophobia (1992) uses a range of forms includ-
ing screenplay, poetry, dream-sequences, fantasy, and inserted stories
to investigate racism and sexual taboos. Avant-pop has as its aim the
desire to represent contemporary (American) culture in any way that
seems relevant and it can be regarded as a more realist version of
postmodernism in its use of experimentation that adapts its represen-
tation according to the reality of the situation being explored. It can
also, however, be seen to have modernist leanings, notably in its be-
liefs in the authenticity of reality and in the ability of texts to engage
with this reality in experimental form.

–B–

BALLARD, JAMES GRAHAM (J.G.) (1930– ). British novelist and

short story writer born in Shanghai where he was interned during
World War II by the Japanese, an experience which formed the basis
for his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984). In the
1960s and 1970s Ballard became a leading proponent of the New
Wave science fiction movement with his stories exemplifying the
shift from the dominant focus on outer space in traditional science
fiction to a concern with inner space that formed one of the important
principles of New Wave SF. In this period, he wrote stories such as
“The Voices of Time,” “Chronopolis,” and “The Terminal Beach,”
which serve as paradigms of a psychological version of science fic-
tion based on Ballard’s view that “the biggest developments of the
immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on
Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The
only true alien planet is Earth.” Such concerns also produced fabu-
lations that have some affinity with the stories of Jorge Luis Borges,
most notably in “Concentration City” and “The Watch-Towers,” with
the latter also focusing on the way in which power is exercised
through panoptic forms. Ballard’s first novels were science-fictional
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BALLARD, JAMES GRAHAM • 23

revisitings of modernist alienation in the style of Joseph Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness, all of which shared a postapocalyptic theme, and
included: The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The
Crystal World (1966).
In his shorter fiction he developed concerns with forms of con-
sciousness, social structures, and transformed patterns of behavior that
were to become important in his later writing. Ballard’s interest in the
scientific aspects of science fiction are governed by the ways in which
science can be used as a metaphor that maps social and cultural pos-
sibilities through the speculative reimagining of new forms of percep-
tion, identity, and desire, a concern that has also led him to engage
with wider cultural patterns and social relationships. Ballard has also
increasingly incorporated postmodernist issues within his texts, either
in the form of textual devices or by engaging with the pervasiveness
of postmodern culture, with his most accomplished works, The Atroc-
ity Exhibition (1970) and War Fever (1990) displaying both aspects.
The Atrocity Exhibition is similar in style to the experiments of the
nouveau roman and forms a disjunctive narrative out of a collage of
fragments and textual reenactments of events. Vermilion Sands (1971)
also has a mosaic structure, its component stories accumulating a vi-
sion of an artist’s colony in an irreal city that seems both very famil-
iar and very strange. The 1970s saw the publication of three related
novels, Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975),
which form a quasi trilogy focusing on urban industrial dystopias.
During this period, Ballard developed a fascination with the mecha-
nization and industrialization of everyday life in which everything
seemed to becoming science fiction. In Crash, for example, the in-
creased reliance of humanity on machines leads to new forms of per-
verse desire. The novel has been influential in the development of cy-
berpunk, while its deadpan affectless style has resonated with critics
and authors with an interest in postmodern identity.
Throughout this period, Ballard also developed interests in the
mythopoeic qualities of contemporary culture and its technology,
commodities, and images (the fetishization of which forms the main
focus of The Atrocity Exhibition). In exploring new cultural myths,
Ballard has himself become an important mythmaker of contempo-
rary life, particularly in the representations of theme parks, suburbs,
advertising, and commodities that can can be found in stories such as
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24 • BANVILLE, JOHN

“Motel Architecture,” “The Subliminal Man,” “The Largest Theme

Park in the World,” and in novel length variations of this latter story,
Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000). The most complete
example of such concerns is the short story collection War Fever
which includes stories on aspects of postmodern culture such as sim-
ulation (“The Secret History of World War 3” and “War Fever”) as
well as stories that develop postmodernist textual devices (“Answers
to a Questionnaire,” “Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown,” and “The
Index”). The most striking story in the collection is “The Enormous
Space” which combines both postmodernist textual devices and a
postmodern perspective in its story of a man who starts to believe that
his house is an entire universe. The story typifies Ballard’s concern
with the mutability of time and space and the way in which percep-
tion can change the dimensionality of existence and problematize the
determinacy of reality itself.

BANVILLE, JOHN (1945– ). Irish novelist born in Wexford whose

works incorporate aspects of postmodernism and magic realism. His
fictions tend to take the form of philosophical novels, but display
metafictional strategies, particularly in his historiographic metafic-
tions, by utilizing fabulation in the presentation of fantastic events
in everyday situations. His early novels are concerned with meta-
physical issues, but with Birchwood (1973) he generates a pastiche
form in the intermingling of Gothic fantasy with a romance quest,
while also making intertextual references to, for example, Charles
Dickens’ Bleak House. The “Revolutions” trilogy, which is com-
prised of Dr Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), and The Newton Let-
ter (1982), gave Banville international recognition. The novels are
historiographic metafictions that reflect on the fictional nature of
knowledge and deal with scientific attempts to understand the physi-
cal universe. Within the series, Banville develops more overt metafic-
tional characteristics in The Newton Letter which concerns a biogra-
pher writing a life of Newton. Mefisto (1986) can be seen as a
supplement to the “Revolutions” trilogy, because it extends concerns
with scientific systems in its story of a mathematical prodigy. A sec-
ond collection of novels (the “Frames” trilogy) followed Mefisto,
comprising The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena
(1995), and developed a focus on the importance of fictions as a way
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BARNES, JULIAN • 25

of structuring human experience. These novels also experiment with

temporal disjuncture and narrational indeterminacy in order to blur
the boundaries between “truth” and fantasy. Banville’s recent works,
Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002) have a Gothic form and privilege
pastiche as a textual process.

BARNES, JULIAN (1946– ). British writer who has written a range of

different fictions since his first novel Metroland (1981), a bil-
dungsroman about the escape from English suburbia. His novels in-
clude satires, relationship novels, and metafictional texts, with dif-
ferent modes of writing often overlapping in the same text, as is the
case with England, England (1998) where satire and postmodernist
concerns are interwoven. His novels are self-consciously constructed
as “novels of ideas,” often with a self-ironizing tendency so that even
those novels that are not obviously postmodernist, such as the rela-
tionship novel Talking It Over (1991), still break the frame of the fic-
tional discourse by having the characters directly address the reader.
These self-reflexive tropes produce Janus-like texts that refer inter-
nally to their own textual mechanics while also offering comment on
contemporary social, psychological, and political issues. Barnes’ fic-
tion, therefore, can be characterized either as midfiction or as am-
biguous postmodernism because of its ironic playfulness with regard
to apparently referential elements such as history and truth, personal
relationships, love, or the search for authenticity. These areas form an
important nexus for the creation of meaning in Barnes’ texts because
they provide readers with an anchor on a seemingly recognizable fic-
tional version of everyday life among the more self-reflexive and
metafictional forms that he uses.
Some of Barnes’ novels display more overtly postmodernist char-
acteristics, even while they retain this ironic mimesis, such as
Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters
(1989), and England, England. Flaubert’s Parrot offers a pastiche of
textual forms (biography and literary criticism), allusions, references,
and linguistic playfulness in its story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a re-
tired doctor, searching for the stuffed parrot that once belonged to
Flaubert, but alongside this quest narrative is a personal narrative that
deals with Braithwaite’s relationship with his wife. The novel thus ar-
ticulates both metafictional and referential discourses, although the
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26 • BARTH, JOHN

failure of Braithwaite’s quest and the novel’s implication that “real-

ity” may be ultimately unknowable (even when it exists in tangible
form) suggests a postmodern perspective on the indeterminacy of
truth. A similar concern with “truth,” history, and the past is evident
in A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters which approaches history
as a text rather than as a true record of events. Each of the chapters
offers versions of key events from history that diverge from the his-
torical record. The stories apparently offer the “truth,” but create am-
biguity with regard to the “grand narrative” of history by fore-
grounding its constructed nature in the suggestion that history is no
more “true” than the novel’s self-consciously fictional versions of the
past. Although England, England is written in the form of a fictional
biography, its postmodernist concerns have less to do with textual
formalism and more to do with the cultural phenomenon of the sim-
ulation. The novel is a satire that tells the story of an entrepreneur
who seeks to remove everything typically English to a theme park on
the Isle of Wight in order to create the quintessence of “Englishness,”
a substitution of the real by the copy where the copy becomes more
real than what it has displaced because the rest of England regresses
to the condition of a cultural backwater.

BARTH, JOHN (1930– ). American novelist whose work consistently

focuses on metafictional themes with regard to the ability, or inabil-
ity, of texts to create meaning. Barth’s metafictional strategies are a
result of his understanding of contemporary critical and postmodern
theories, out of which he theorized the “Literature of Exhaustion”
in 1967 and the “Literature of Replenishment” in 1979, theories
which describe Barth’s view that after modernism there are no origi-
nal stories to tell any more. For Barth this means that the writer must
turn to the form of the text itself as the content of the story he or she
is telling. These concerns are less evident in his earliest novels, The
Floating Opera (1956) and End of the Road (1958), which are more
concerned with existential anxieties over the mutability of the self,
but become more evident in The Sotweed Factor (1960), a metafic-
tional historical novel set in 18th-century Maryland. The novel nar-
rates the fictionalized adventures of a real person, Ebenezer Cooke
(author of a 1708 poem that has the same title as the novel) and his
involvement in the schemes of the fictional Henry Burlingame who
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BARTH, JOHN • 27

appears to be shaping history to his own ends and who acts as a sign
of the “author” inside the text. The novel mixes a range of genres and
styles, including 18th-century picaresque, Rabelaisian catalog, par-
ody, conspiracy theory, a Faustian narrative, a Candide narrative, and
the political thriller.
Barth’s next novel, Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus
(1966), is more akin to a Borgesian metafictional tale in its invention
of an alternate fantasy world that acts as both an allegory on, and a
substitute for, the actual world of the 1960s. The novel is set in the
microcosmic world of the University, which is divided into West and
East Campuses, in order to map the Cold War system, with the
eponymous hero, Giles, arriving at the former to study at New Tam-
many College (the United States). The novel offers a fictionalization
of contemporary politics, but uses this as the motor to critique the “ei-
ther/or” dualist discourses upon which Barth feels contemporary cul-
ture bases itself. Within its self-sustaining universe Giles Goat-Boy
maps the circular logic of “grand-narratives,” in which the construct-
edness of reality is revealed. Barth’s subsequent fictions take their
cue from the conclusions of Giles Goat-Boy that “reality” is itself a
fiction. Lost in the Funhouse (1968), a collection of stories that can
be understood in relation to the “Literature of Exhaustion,” offers
short fictions that investigate the nature of the fictional text. Chimera
(1972) is a set of interlinked stories that shifts Barth’s writing from
an aesthetic of “exhaustion” to one of “replenishment.” Where Lost
in the Funhouse mapped the failure of referentiality in language and
text, Chimera attempts to renew literature by creating new narrative
structures even while it meditates on the form and function of litera-
ture itself. Each story builds on and repeats its predecessor in a spiral
structure so that, although the form is the same, the content develops
into new stories.
Barth’s most important novel, LETTERS (1979) continues this
concern with the creation of meaning through the textual quest for a
master narrative. LETTERS also shares the pastiche forms of The
Sotweed Factor, albeit in an internalized form through the reuse of
characters from Barth’s previous novels and the replication of styles
and discourses associated with them. The novel also has an arbitrar-
ily created epistolary structure that determines the shape of the
novel’s “reality,” suggesting, in accordance with Giles Goat-Boy, that
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28 • BARTHELME, DONALD

it is systems of meaning and forms of perception that create meaning

rather than anything in “reality” itself. Barth’s later fictions have all
focused on storytelling and, while they still have predominantly
metafictional concerns, have increasingly adopted a mythic element.
Sabbatical (1982), The Tidewater Tales (1987), The Last Voyage of
Somebody the Sailor (1991), and Once upon a Time (1994) all focus
on the idea that the story is a journey by taking the Odyssey as their
model and using the metaphor of sailing to articulate their narratives.
Although there is less of a concern with the idea of the story as the
form of the text itself, with each novel utilizing its frame for the
telling of stories that have a distinct content, Barth still maintains a
concern with the metafictional act of fabulating narratives as a major
theme in his work, something that is also evident in his most recent
collection of stories, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004),
which imitates and gently parodies A Thousand and One Nights.

BARTHELME, DONALD (1931–1989). American writer best known

for his short stories, which were most often published in the New
Yorker before being published as collections. His books of short sto-
ries include Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices,
Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Guilty
Pleasures (1974), Amateurs (1976), and Great Days (1979).
Barthelme also produced three novels, Snow White (1967), The Dead
Father (1975), and The King, which was published posthumously in
1990, while a representative sample of his fiction was anthologized
in Sixty Stories (1981). Barthelme’s stories have a minimalist form
that is characterized by collage, fractured narrations, and syntactic
disjuncture and work by a process of association to create elliptical
and disconnected narratives in which it is not always clear what con-
clusion the story has reached. His fictions are dryly satirical accounts
of contemporary culture that use both parody and pastiche to de-
velop an ironic perspective as they explore the fictional-looking “re-
ality” of postmodernity. Barthelme has particular concerns with
commodification and image culture (and their creation of a junk-
world of “dreck”), the waning of reality, the attenuation of identity,
and the blurring of high and mass culture. This latter process also
takes place textually within Barthelme’s stories in their undifferenti-
ated use of popular cultural and literary references, a self-conscious
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BARTHELME, DONALD • 29

configuration of cultural material that that indicates Barthelme’s

awareness that his stories are as much a product of his culture as are
the phenomena that they explore.
Within this fictional framework Barthelme maps the experience
of contemporary culture through characters who are presented as
uncentered or dislocated within a disconnected and unreal culture,
and who respond by becoming solipsistic and unconcerned with re-
ality. In “A Film” (from Sadness), for example, the child-star of a
movie is abducted but no one seems to care, carrying on as if noth-
ing had happened. A similar situation is mapped in “The Crisis”
(Great Days) in which a group of revolutionaries follow the text-
book approach to social transformation by occupying the streets and
the post offices, but find that they have not grasped the realities of
a culture based on images (which requires them to take broadcast-
ing centers, bribe the army, make promises, and play golf with op-
position leaders), with the result that people ignore them and carry
on their lives within the culture of images. Here, Barthelme com-
ments on the way in which politics has lost touch with reality and
has entered the absurdities of the “facsimile culture” that he ana-
lyzes and which produces a “reality” that is simply a “universe of
discourses” (Snow White). Such is also the situation in “At the End
of the Mechanical Age” (Amateurs) where the end of the Mechani-
cal Age is described as “an actuality straining to become a
metaphor,” a transformation that Barthelme ironically suggests will
make it more “real” because it will have become a “fiction” in a cul-
ture where “reality” is a set of fictions.
Such concerns with fiction can also be found in the more metafic-
tional works that Barthelme produced, which include the novel Snow
White, a self-conscious exploration of the fictions of both fairy tales
and contemporary culture, and stories such as “Sentence” and
“Paraguay” (both in City Life). Most famous of these is “Paraguay”
which concerns a journey to Paraguay that is “not the Paraguay that
exists on our maps,” a premise that suggests either that this
“Paraguay” is a country that only exists as a fictional fabulation or
that the real country has not been properly represented in the “fic-
tions” that have been used to map it. This latter proposition also
draws attention to Barthelme’s concern with how knowledge is pro-
duced in a culture where nothing is real. In “The Party” (Sadness), for
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30 • BATCHELOR, JOHN CALVIN

example, knowledge becomes a series of disconnected assertions

about culture, history, and literature in which philosophy and ideas
are simply a matter of entertainment (represented by a football game
between the Osservatore Romano team and the Diet of Worms,
“Worms leading by six points”). This is the culture of “dreck” that
Barthelme analyzes, where nothing has any value, where popular cul-
ture and high culture circulate as equivalent signs, and where “truth”
becomes a facsimile of itself that is determined not by any inherent
meaning but by whether it accords with popular taste or not.

BATCHELOR, JOHN CALVIN (1948– ). American novelist whose

early work used speculative, magic realist, and postmodernist narra-
tive techniques. Batchelor’s first novel, The Further Adventures of
Halley’s Comet (1980), is set in the near future (focused around the re-
turn of Halley’s Comet in 1985) and concerns attempts by the super-
rich Means family to land a probe on Halley’s Comet that they will
use to claim ownership of any planets that are subsequently observed
from it. The novel’s main narrative principle is to present a clash be-
tween the remnants of the 1960s counterculture and the Means fam-
ily, who represent unfettered capitalist forces, but the novel also in-
habits a fabulational world that draws on references to feudalism and
Gothic romance, while also utilizing various inserts such as fictional-
ized histories, a serialized article on the “Straw People,” and a frag-
mented chronology in the prologue that narrates events in the years
when Halley’s Comet appeared in the skies above the Earth. The Birth
of the People’s Republic of Antarctica (1983) has a similar fabula-
tional quality, but its fantasy elements move more toward magic re-
alism in its representation of a fictional apocalypse and in its use of
Norse myth to drive the story of the accidental founding of a totalitar-
ian regime in the islands around Antarctica. The novel does have a ref-
erential axis in its satire on left-wing politics, a feature that is domi-
nant in Batchelor’s later novels which have become more political in
focus and traditional in form. These include American Falls (1985), a
novel set during the American Civil War that reflects on the “cultural”
civil war Batchelor sees occurring in 1980s America, the two “Tip”
Paine novels, Gordon Liddy Is My Muse: By Tommy “Tip” Paine, a
Novel (1990) and Walking the Cat (1991), which still have fabula-
tional elements in their Cold War vignettes, Peter Nevsky and the True
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BAUDRILLARD, JEAN • 31

Story of the Russian Moon Landing (1993), and a political thriller, Fa-
ther’s Day (1994).

BAUDRILLARD, JEAN (1929– ). French poststructuralist philoso-

pher and cultural theorist whose works have provided influential and
controversial accounts of postmodern culture. Baudrillard’s theories
are, in many ways, a touchstone for scholars as to whether postmod-
ernism exists or not as a meaningful concept in relation to contem-
porary cultural processes. Many academics reject his theories of sim-
ulation and the death of reality as part of a more general refusal to
engage with postmodernism as a description of culture, while those
who share his poststructuralist perspective tend to do so within ac-
counts that overstate the depthlessness of contemporary society. Bau-
drillard is particularly associated with the concepts of simulation, hy-
perreality, the death of reality, and the sign commodity. These ideas
developed out of his retheorization of Marxism in the 1970s and
stemmed from his view that the classic forms of Marxism no longer
applied to contemporary society. In works such as For a Critique of
the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), The Mirror of Reproduction
(1973), and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Baudrillard de-
veloped an account of culture which highlighted the importance of
sign production (rather than labor production) and which led to an
emphasis on signification and cultural activity, at the expense of eco-
nomic activity, as the dominant principles of postindustrial informa-
tional societies. Initially this process led to the theorization of the
“sign commodity,” a form of commodification in which Marxist no-
tions of use and exchange value were replaced by “sign value,” in
which a product gathers value through the signifiers that attach to it
(images of desire created by culture) and not by reference to its ma-
terial or economic existence.
During the course of this period, Baudrillard developed a fuller cri-
tique of Marxism, finally rejecting it as an account of social and eco-
nomic structures (which also led to the view that modernity was ob-
solete) in favor of a version of culture that focused on signs in which
those aspects of society that were regarded as determinants of social
and economic activity in Marxism (labor, capital, surplus value, ide-
ology) simply became components within the cultural system of
signs. Simulacres et simulations (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) is
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32 • BAUDRY, JEAN-LOUIS

the definitive moment when Baudrillard’s theories shift into a post-

modern account of culture, subsequent to which his analyses have
been driven by the theories of simulation and hyperreality. These
concepts describe postmodernity as a culture of copies in which “re-
ality” has been subsumed within the “simulacrum,” by which Bau-
drillard means not that material reality has disappeared, but that cul-
tural and social reality are generated by a preference for images
(media representations, digital experiences, and themed environ-
ments, for example) over reality; one element of which entails “real-
ity” having to become a facsimile of itself in order to be accepted as
a meaningful referent to itself. This leads to a hyperreal culture in
which fake “experiences” are perceived to be better than the “real,” a
situation that describes, for Baudrillard, “the death of reality” in
which images become the main reference point in the generation of
cultural, political, and social meaning, rather than reality itself. For
example, in a series of articles about the Gulf War, Baudrillard argued
that for people in the west the meaning of the war was created by its
visual representation, not by its reality. Although Baudrillard argued
that such representations involved distortion, his overall view is that
the simulacrum is not ideological, a problematic position that as-
sumes that there is no political motivation behind the production of
signs and images in contemporary culture.

BAUDRY, JEAN-LOUIS (1930– ). French intellectual and writer who

is nowadays best known for his work in film studies, particularly in
relation to apparatus theory. Baudry, however, has also produced
novels and was one of the key members of the Tel Quel group in the
1960s and 1970s. His fiction is typical of writings of the Tel Quel
group in that it is internally self-referential and focuses on the play of
language. His works include Le Pressentiment (The Premonition,
1962), Les Images (The Images, 1963), and Personnages dans un
rideau (Characters on the Screen, 1991). Personnes (Individuals,
1967), for example, uses the gendering of nouns in French and lin-
guistic proximities to create textual ambiguities through the blurring
of “he,” “she,” and “it” and to produce two or more readings of the
same sentence. The intention is to create polysemic language without
altering the signifiers and to thereby stress the multiplicity of mean-
ing inherent in language itself without having recourse to external re-
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BECKETT, SAMUEL • 33

ality. In addition, the book is structured into fragmentary sequences,

many of which self-consciously address the act of narration at the
same time as they narrate the events themselves.

BECKETT, SAMUEL (1906–1989). Irish novelist and playwright

who is one of the most important figures in postwar world literature
and whose significance was recognized in 1969 when he won the No-
bel Prize for Literature. Beckett lived for most of his life in France
and his postwar works were written in French before he then trans-
lated them into English. His early work, including the novel Murphy
(1938) and the collection of linked short stories, More Pricks Than
Kicks (1934), are modernist in style and display the influence of
James Joyce. Although very different in style, Beckett’s later works
share similar ideas to the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, expressing
a view in his novels and plays that human society, culture, and com-
munication are fictions with no inherent meaning. Where for Borges
this was a source of pleasure because it gave the writer the freedom
to imagine anything, for Beckett it is, at best, darkly humorous that
human beings and human society continue to construct and commu-
nicate even when none of it has any meaning, and, at worst, a source
of despair. These concerns are primarily developed in Beckett’s post-
war works, for which he is best known, and although many of these
texts are not specifically postmodernist, being more aligned with ab-
surdism and late-modernism in the minimalist aesthetic they adopt,
they nevertheless have a self-reflexive quality in their constant insis-
tence on the meaning and function of language and communication.
The trilogy made up of Molloy (1951), Malone Meurt (Malone
Dies, 1951), and L’Innommable (The Unnamable, 1953) displays
self-consciousness with regard to the process of the subjective voice
of the narration, which is unclear in its origin at many points. Mol-
loy, for example, expresses the problems of traditional linear narra-
tives in his statement “I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks,
can you imagine that?” while Malone comments on his own narra-
tion, tells himself stories—as if narrative itself constituted the
world—and concludes his monologue resolving never to say “I”
again, a vow he immediately breaks. Similarly, the character or voice
called “the unnamable” is primarily concerned with the meaning and
shape of the words he utters. These novels, like Watt (written
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34 • BECKETT, SAMUEL

1942–45, published 1953), focus on the world as a verbal construct.

Watt includes the view that “Nothing is known. Nothing,” suggesting
that there is no inherent meaning in reality nor even in the words that
describe it, while The Unnamable concludes with the words “I can’t
go on, I’ll go on,” implying that even human actions are a product of
words themselves as the sentence propels the narrator back into mo-
tion despite the desire to stop.
In these textual configurations Beckett’s work contributes to the
sense of exhaustion that John Barth sees as both the end-product of
modernism and the birth of postmodernism, a situation also found in
Beckett’s plays in their concern with issues of language. Beckett’s
most famous work, En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1953),
has been seen as both an allegory on meaning and as an absurdist dis-
play of the lack of meaning. Its textual ambiguities also, however,
correspond with a postmodern articulation of the indeterminacy of
truth and reality, while its content displays a self-reflexive concern
with the production of words themselves. This latter aspect can be
seen in the many Beckett plays that are concerned with people talk-
ing to themselves in order to fill the silence as, for example, in La
Dernière Bande (Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958), Dis Joe (Eh, Joe, 1967),
and Berceuse (Rockaby, 1981), or simply talking to fill the void, as in
Oh Les Belles Jours (Happy Days, 1961). These plays also dramatize
the “curse” of consciousness in the characters’ inability to avoid
thought and speech. In some respects, this is a postmodern version of
Romanticism’s desire to become part of the larger consciousness of
the universe by losing self-identity, except that in Beckett’s atomized
universe there is no escape from the self, no matter how minimal it
is, and no belief that there is any external consciousness to enter.
At times in Beckett’s work communication fails entirely and the
pointlessness of human activity comes to the fore, with the Quad
plays (1984), although relatively minor, being paradigmatic in this
respect. The plays consist of four actors speechlessly moving around
the four edges of a square in elaborate and hypnotic patterns that ap-
pear to have an underlying structure, but which are also implicitly
only programmed movements designed to pass the time. The plays
also have elements of self-reflexivity in their structure because they
ask the audience to consider whether they also have simply been
passing the time by watching four “programmed” actors passing the
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BÉNABOU, MARCEL • 35

time. Similar geometries of “action” are also presented in many other

late works (Le Dépeupleur [The Lost Ones], 1971; Compagnie [Com-
pany], 1980; and Worstward Ho, 1983), which move increasingly to-
ward abstract structures that are emptied of meaning and content and
exist only in the forms that communication and language present as
systems of signifiers.

BÉNABOU, MARCEL (1939– ). French writer of Sephardic descent

who was born in Meknes, Morocco and who joined the OuLiPo
group in 1969. For many years he has also been professor of Roman
history at the University of Paris VII. Like many Oulipians, Bén-
abou has written on the practice of writing, including pieces on
“Rule and Constraint” and, with Georges Perec, on PALF. His liter-
ary texts have been few, but quite influential, offering humorous
narcissistic writings that also reproduce an encyclopedic intertex-
tuality in their allusions to other writers, a device that Bénabou uses
to question the unitary nature of his texts. Pourquoi je n’ai écrit au-
cun de mes livres (Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, 1986)
offers a self-reflexive meditation on the difficulties of writing a
book by commenting self-consciously on its own construction in
discussions of the impossibility of filling up a blank page with writ-
ing and in meditations on all the books that it could have been. The
“non-book” (as Bénabou describes it) of Why I Have Not Written
Any of My Books also includes a series of chapters that emphasize its
status as a text, most notably in the page designated as “First Page”
(which begins “In the beginning, a short sentence”) that occurs well
into the text, as well as in chapters entitled “Proper Usage,” “Word
Order,” “Momentary Pause Number One,” and “Last Word.”
Jette ce livre avant qu’il soit trop tard! (Dump This Book While You
Still Can!, 1992) shares similar self-conscious concerns but transfers
attention from the act of writing to the act of reading. The novel con-
cerns a narrator who becomes lost in a world of signs when he tries
to uncover the hidden meanings he believes exist in a book he has
come across. The story is primarily composed of the different forms
of interpretation the narrator adopts in reading the book as he drifts
out of the real world (and a relationship with a woman called Sophie)
and into his textual world. In the course of telling its narrative the
novel becomes an interpretation of itself, offering hints about its own
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36 • BENNI, STEFANO

interpretation in the hermeneutic strategies adopted by the narrator

and in the use of intertextual allusions such as characters based on
other writers or readers of signs, including Flauzac (whose name is a
combination of Flaubert and Balzac) and characters based on Kafka
and Freud. Jacob, Ménahem, et Mimoun: Une épopée familiale (Ja-
cob, Menahem, and Mimoun: A Family Epic, 1995) is ostensibly an
autobiographical work about Bénabou’s own family, but becomes a
playful exercise describing his attempts to write the intended book
rather than the book he has completed. Bénabou’s most recent work,
Écrire sur Tamara (To Write on Tamara?, 2002) is more conventional
in form in its presentation of the narrator’s memories of his life and
a love affair in late 1950s Paris, but still displays self-reflexive fea-
tures through the narrator’s concern with the act of writing about
Tamara, his interpretations of previous attempts to describe his expe-
riences, and the inclusion of another version of the events at the end,
which might be Tamara’s view of things or the narrator’s imagination
of her perspective.

BENNI, STEFANO (1947– ). Italian writer whose work generally has

a comic or parodic tone. His novels and stories make substantial use
of neologism, puns, and parodies of literary styles, but also pastiche,
a range of genres including the detective novel, in Comici spaventati
guerrieri (Comic Frightened Warriors, 1986), and science fiction, in
Terra! (1983) and Baol: una tranquilla notte di regime (Baol, 1990).
Terra!, for example, is a postapocalyptic novel that parodies SF con-
ventions and satirizes Cold War politics while also including ele-
ments of fabulation. Bar sotto il mare (The Bar Beneath the Sea,
1989) has more of a pastiche quality, but also makes use of fantasy.
Set in an imaginary place it shares similarities with some of Italo
Calvino’s fiction because all of the characters have to tell a story be-
fore the night is over. Some of these involve fantasy, such as an ex-
traterrestrial visiting Earth or the Devil in a restaurant, while others
involve parodies of various writers, including Herman Melville,
Raymond Queneau, Gustave Flaubert, and T.S. Eliot.

BENS, JACQUES (1931–2001). French novelist and poet who was

one of the founding members of OuLiPo in 1960, as well as a mem-
ber of the related “workshops” OuLiPoPo (Ouvroir de Littérature
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BERNHARD, THOMAS • 37

Policière Potentielle—Workshop of Potential Detective Fiction) and

OuCuiPo (Ouvroir de Cuisine Potentielle—Workshop of Potential
Cuisine), the latter of which he cofounded with Harry Mathews. His
concern with constraints and combinatory possibilities works
through in all his writings and can also be seen in his enthusiasm for
crosswords. Bens divided his “prose” into different subcategories,
some of which overlap within specific texts. These are: versified
prose, including 41 sonnets irrationnels (41 Irrational Sonnets, 1962)
and Métagrammes (1967); romantic prose, including Les dames
d’onze heures (The Eleven O’Clock Ladies, 1994); meditative prose,
such as La cinquantaine à Saint-Quentin (Fifty in Saint-Quentin,
1989); didactic prose, including critical work on Boris Vian and
Raymond Queneau; dramatic prose; the records of OuLiPo meet-
ings that Bens referred to as “secretarial prose”; and other writings
that include crosswords and work on cuisine.

BERNHARD, THOMAS (1931–1989). Austrian novelist and play-

wright born in the Netherlands who wrote over 70 novels, novellas,
and plays and who not only outraged his fellow Austrians by attack-
ing the country for its perceived vulgarity, lack of appreciation of cul-
ture, and reactionary politics but also aroused the anger of politicians
by recording his low opinion of them. In his drama, which he turned
to in the 1970s, Bernhard generally adopted the forms of absurdism
and developed a sense of existential nihilism or despair. His dramas
include: Ein Fest für Boris (A Party for Boris, 1969), Der Ignorant
und der Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus and the Madman, 1972), Die
Jagdgesellschaft (The Hunting Party (1974), Die Macht der Gewohn-
heit (The Force of Habit, 1974), and Die Berühmten (The Famous
Ones, 1976). Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz (1988) is typical of
his drama in its expression not only of the disintegration of individu-
ality that can be found in Bernhard’s other works, and its criticism of
the persistence of National Socialist sentiments in Austria, but also in
the furore it aroused. The play, commissioned for the hundredth an-
niversary of Vienna’s Burgtheater, concerns the 1938 Anschluss and
was condemned in the press before it had been performed and by
President Kurt Waldheim afterwards.
Bernhard’s novels are complex and tortuous in style, being writ-
ten as a stream of consciousness that is contained within only one
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38 • BERNHARD, THOMAS

paragraph; although Auslöschung (Extinction, 1986) has two chap-

ters and thus two paragraphs. Stylistically, Bernhard uses long sen-
tences that often shift quite suddenly from monologue to free indi-
rect discourse or reported speech while themes or ideas are
endlessly repeated as, for example, in Extinction where the narrator
constantly returns to the stupidity of his family and the failings of
Austria. The novels share the same features, often being narrated by
people who are variations of each other, usually pathological or ob-
sessional (but showing enough self-awareness to recognize their
own hypocrisies or contradictory behavior), while generally offer-
ing a despairing account of contemporary culture or existence. For
example, in Frost (1963) the narrator’s discourse is gradually af-
fected by the madman he is observing and becomes increasingly in-
sane, while in Das Kalkwerk (The Lime Works, 1973) a scientist
who lives in an abandoned lime quarry kills his wife because of his
inability to finish a book. Bernhard’s novels are also notable for
their narrators’ invectives, in which a rant about a minor subject
such as the reliability of housekeepers seems to have the same value
as a tirade about politics or religion. In addition to these concerns,
Bernhard also attacks the way that falsehood has become the new
“truth” in contemporary culture, a position similar to Jean Bau-
drillard’s theory of the simulation, except that Bernhard only sees
negation in such a development. In this respect, he adopts a mod-
ernist position with regard to the emptiness of culture, despising the
falsity created by money, commodities, and mass culture for aes-
thetic reasons (its tastelessness and the loss of value) rather than as
a political and social response to the exploitation of people.
Bernhard’s most important novels, in addition to those already
mentioned, include a sequence of romans à clef made up of Die Ur-
sache (The Cause, 1975), Der Keller (The Cellar, 1976), Der Atem
(The Breath, 1978), Die Kälte (The Cold, 1981), and Ein Kind (The
Child, 1982), which have been translated under the collective title
of Gathering Evidence; a trilogy of novels dealing with art com-
prising Der Untergeger (The Loser, 1983), Holzfällen (Cutting Tim-
ber, aka The Woodcutters, 1984), and Alte Meister (Old Masters,
1985); Korrektur (Correction, 1975), Beton (Concrete, 1982), and
Wittgensteins Neffe (Wittgenstein’s Nephew, 1982). Concrete is typ-
ical of Bernhard’s writing, being written in the form of an interior
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BERNSTEIN, CHARLES • 39

monologue (although it is actually an autobiographical account

written by a middle-aged man) about a few days in his life during
which he decides to leave Austria for a break in Mallorca. The novel
has an intriguing narration which is both “reliable” and “unreliable”
because the narrator is a selfish hypocrite who changes his mind
about everything, leading to uncertainty over the fictional reality
that is created. A similar situation can be found in Wittgenstein’s
Nephew, a “novel” written in the form of a series of fragmentary im-
pressions that is ostensibly a memoir about Paul Wittgenstein, but
which becomes more of a consideration of the author-narrator’s
opinions in its use of the same splenetic and self-deprecating humor
found in Bernhard’s other novels.

BERNSTEIN, CHARLES (1950– ). American poet and coeditor, with

Bruce Andrews, of LⴝAⴝNⴝGⴝUⴝAⴝGⴝE magazine, which
founded and fostered the development of Language Poetry on the
East Coast of the United States in the 1970s, and for which he also
coedited, with Andrews, The L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E Book, an
anthology of the movement’s most important writings, in 1984. In ad-
dition to writing poetry, Bernstein has also produced libretti and au-
tobiographical and semifictional prose, but his most significant non-
verse works are the theories of poetics, composition, and
performance found in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (1986), A
Poetics (1992), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (1999). For Bern-
stein, however, the theory and practice of poetry are inextricably in-
tertwined, expounded in his paraphrase of Carl Von Clausewitz that
“poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means,” with the result
that his poetry is very intellectual, as he considers the workings of
language or meditates on theoretical ideas, while his theories of po-
etics are often written in verse form. Although most Language Poets
have placed great emphasis on critical, conceptual, and aesthetic con-
cerns, Bernstein is probably the most significant of its theorists and
he continues to explore the critical, historical, and linguistic contexts
for the production of poetry as Professor of English at the University
of Pennsylvania.
Bernstein’s first collections of poetry were the self-published
Asylums (undated) and Parsing (1976) prior to the foundation of
L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E in 1978, when his first commercial
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40 • BERNSTEIN, CHARLES

collection, Shades, also appeared. Since then, Bernstein has pub-

lished and performed poetry in a variety of forms, continuing to de-
velop concerns with the semiotics of language and the textual pro-
duction of meaning by reference to contemporary literary and
linguistic theory in collections such as Controlling Interests (1980),
Islets/Irritations (1983), Dark City (1994), Republics of Reality:
1975–1995 (2000), and With Strings (2001). Bernstein’s poetry is
principally based on the movements of language and on the nonref-
erential nature of words, which Bernstein prefers to call “polyrefer-
ential” in order to highlight the multiple meanings that poetry can
produce when detached from a representational mode of expression.
His poetry explores the signifier-signified relationship, generating
meaning from relationships between signifiers rather than through
external reference to signifieds. His work can be described as a po-
etry of disconnection where phrases or words stand against each
other instead of flowing serially from word to word in conventional
syntactic forms, as for example, in the opening lines from “An Affir-
mation”: “I am not I / when called to account- / plaster over, dumbly
benched / the corrosive ardency / of blinkered identification.” The
syntactic and lexical arrangements here direct attention to individual
words or short phrases creating a disjunctive pattern of meaning. The
words demand interpretation in terms of their disconnection or dif-
ference rather than their consonance with each other. His poetry also
utilizes such techniques to problematize the roles of time and narra-
tive movement in the creation of meaning by forcing the reader to fo-
cus on the immediacy or materiality of the words.
Despite this concern with nonreferentiality, Bernstein also insists
on the sociality of language, where language becomes the medium
of consciousness as a social construction. For Bernstein, poetry pro-
vides ways of defamiliarizing and disrupting the existing social
codes of language whilst also creating new channels of expression.
He uses what he refers to as “dysraphisms,” a term that describes
juxtapositions of mismatched discourses in his poetry, and which
might contrast a commonplace expression with an elegant poetic
sentiment or an advertising slogan with semiotic theory. The multi-
plicity of styles and forms that appear in his poetry as a consequence
become a way of expressing the polysemy that poetic writing opens
up as well as a means of avoiding the conventions and expectations
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BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS • 41

of traditional poetic discourses which would delimit the possibilities

of language: all forms of language are available to poetry in his
work, not just the conventionally poetic. In this respect, Bernstein’s
theory and practice of poetry is very similar to the Tel Quel group’s
theory of écriture (and its erasure of boundaries between different
types of discourse), with any style, syntax, or vocabulary available
for inclusion within a poetic work.

BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS. A group of avant-garde American po-

ets who gained their name from their association with Black Moun-
tain College, an experimental school of art that operated between
1933 and 1956 in North Carolina. The group came into existence in
the 1950s as part of a wider nexus of artists that included John Cage
and Merce Cunningham, all of whom had a desire to experiment with
aesthetic form. The Black Mountain Poets included Paul Blackburn,
Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Charles Ol-
son and developed a form of poetics that had links with Beat litera-
ture, but which took its direction primarily from the ideas promoted
by Olson in an essay called “Projective Verse” that was published in
1950. The main principle of the projective poetry adopted by the
Black Mountain Poets (which also gave the group the alternative
name of “Projectivists”) was to create what Olson referred to as an
“open field” for poetry where form followed on from content, and
which Levertov reformulated in the phrase “form only exists in the
content and language,” in “An Admonition.”
The poetry of the Black Mountain Poets thereafter developed a
free-form style in which “perceptions” developed organically out of
each other and created the form in their expression rather than be-
ing constrained by the perceived artificiality of poetic convention
(verse form, diction, rhythm) which imposed structures on the ex-
pression of the poet. In this respect, the poetics of the Black Moun-
tain group can be seen as an attempt to create an authentic voice
that is not restricted by formal structures because the poem invents
these as it develops. This can also be seen in the stress on the im-
portance of the utterance which led to simulations of speech in po-
etic diction and to an emphasis on the delivery of the poem. The
open form of the poetry of the Black Mountain group suggests the
influence of modernism, but the group can also be regarded as a late
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42 • BLANK FICTION

version of Romanticism in its desire to create organic poetry that

has content as the basis of expression rather than formal structure.
The emphasis on words and their open expression also had influ-
ences on the Language Poets who refined the poetics of the Black
Mountain Poets by focusing on the word itself and its expression
within syntactic or linguistic relationships.

BLANK FICTION. A name given to a form of fiction that developed

in the United States in the 1980s that charted the experiences of the
“blank generation,” a term used to refer to a group of young people,
predominantly from wealthy white families, whose life of privilege
seemed to lead to affectless behavior and cultural alienation. Blank
fiction presents the life of the “blank generation” as an endless cycle
of consumption (of commodities and experiences) that is made pos-
sible by extreme wealth. This leads narratively to a loss of contact
with social reality and the sense that everything has become inau-
thentic or fake because the ability to buy anything with money guar-
antees that it is only ever experienced as an artificial product not as
something that is spontaneous or “natural.” The characters in blank
fiction, however, are constantly trying to regain authenticity, spon-
taneity, and “naturalness,” usually through acts of sex and drug tak-
ing or through increasingly extreme and risky behavior. Such con-
cerns are developed in the work of Bret Easton Ellis (whose Less
Than Zero, published in 1985, is the paradigmatic text of blank fic-
tion), Jay McInerney (in novels such as Bright Lights, Big City, 1984,
and Brightness Falls, 1992), and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York,
1986). Blank fiction develops as a response to the fetishization of
money and commodities in Ronald Reagan’s America and implies
that money creates a society that is not only artificial but also self-
destructive. Blank fiction’s concerns with commodification, simula-
tion, and inauthenticity have been adopted by Generation X litera-
ture which places them within a corporate and middle-class milieu
and suggests that they have pervaded American society.

BONNEFOY, YVES (1923– ). French poet whose work has been in-
fluenced by Surrealism but whose main concerns involve the re-
assessment of Romantic concepts of life, death, and transcendence
through an exploration of the relationship between writing and real-
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BORGES, JORGE LUIS • 43

ity. Bonnefoy’s first work was published in 1946 and since then he
has published numerous texts, including his best-known work, Du
Mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (On the Motion and Immo-
bility of Douve, 1953), which takes its title from the first poem, a
piece that uses the allegorical figure of Douve as a symbolic focus for
considerations of nature, consciousness, and poetry. Other poetry col-
lections by Bonnefoy include: Hier régnant désert (Yesterday’s
Wilderness Kingdom, 1958), Pierre écrite (Words in Stone, 1964),
Dans le leurre du seuil (In the Lure of the Threshold, 1975), Ce qui
fut sans lumière (In the Shadow’s Light, 1987), Début et fin de la
neige (The Beginning and the End of the Snow, 1991), and Les
planches courbes (The Curved Planks, 2001).
Bonnefoy’s poetry is founded on a tension generated by the at-
tempt to write about a potentially ineffable reality, the utility of which
is questioned by the apparent futility of representing something that
may be unrepresentable. In dealing with these issues Bonnefoy ex-
plores nature and being, based on a belief in the existence of reality,
in order to renew and reify their meanings (a principle expressed in
his permutation of simple elemental images such as “tree,” “stone,”
“fire,” “water,” and “wind”). However, his poetry also engages with
the question of whether any language can properly represent reality,
the result of which is a self-reflexive tendency to explore the forms
and practices of writing that leads further away from representation
as it shifts to concerns with memory and perception and their media-
tion through a language that seems more able to express concepts and
signs themselves than it does “reality.” In addition to his poetry, Bon-
nefoy has also written an autobiographical work, L’Arrière-pays (The
Hinterland, 1972), and numerous nonfictional works on philosophy,
poetics, literature, and painting, selections of which have been trans-
lated into English in The Act and Place of Poetry (1989).

BORGES, JORGE LUIS (1899–1986). Argentine writer whose stories,

the most important of which were written in the 1930s and 1940s, had
a profound influence on the development of postmodernist fiction. His
beautifully wrought short stories established not only many of the aes-
thetic practices that became important in postmodernist writing, but
also had a profound influence on both postmodern theory (Jean Bau-
drillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard)
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44 • BORGES, JORGE LUIS

and the theorization of postmodernism as a cultural and aesthetic

phenomenon. His stories usually take as their subject matter the
world of books and literature, and he is one of the most learned of
writers because of his abiding interest in books, language, and ideas
in all their forms. The range of influences on Borges’ work indicate
the literariness of his fiction and include Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Re-
sartus, Sir Thomas Browne, Lewis Carroll, Herman Melville, James
Joyce, Samuel Butler, Thomas de Quincey, and Cervantes. Borges’
fictions also demonstrate his affinities with the detective genre, often
taking the form of a literary investigation, although his stories also
often fail in their plan, even while a “denouement” is provided, en-
dowing such fictions with the form of the anti-detective formula.
Borges’ fictions are predominantly in the style of fabulation and in-
volve the imagination of a book, idea, or world that does not exist,
but which Borges conjures into fictional existence. The “found text”
is a common device in Borges’ work with a narrator discovering a
book that indicates the existence of something that had not previously
been imagined and deciding to investigate further. The story subse-
quently reveals a pervasive but hidden reality at work within the
world of appearances, suggesting that “reality” as it has been under-
stood is simply a myth or a “fiction.”
The titles of Borges’ most important books testify to his concern
with the empty systems or convoluted fictions that humanity has in-
vented out of nothing and they include: Ficciones (Fictions, 1956),
Labyrinths (1970), and El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of
Imaginary Beings, 1967). The most famous of Borges’ stories, “Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” deals with this very issue, telling the story of
an imaginary world created by a secret society whose ideas and his-
tory, when they are made known, become the main cultural, histori-
cal, and philosophical ideas circulating within the world. Although
there are some ambiguities about whether Tlön might be a real place
that has been “imagined” by the secret society, a world created by
suggestion, or even a world imagined by the writers of the equally
imaginary Uqbar, the main point of the story is to comment on the
way in which humanly created fictions become reality. The story’s
conception (a fiction about a fiction that becomes real) conspires with
this concept because, even if within the story Tlön is real, it is never-
theless a fiction, and its reality only exists because Borges has cre-
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BORGES, JORGE LUIS • 45

ated it as a fabulation. What the story also suggests is that humanity

entraps itself in its own fabrications, its understandings of the uni-
verse having no basis in physical reality because they are arbitrary
and invented “stories.” In this respect, Borges’ fiction can be seen to
correspond with later postmodern theories of the death of the grand
narratives and simulation, which Borges’ fictions helped to inspire.
Borges also has a particular interest in related areas such as fakes
and frauds, in particular the dissimulation that looks so real that it be-
comes indistinguishable from reality. “Pierre Menard, Author of Don
Quixote,” for example, tells the story of an author who plans to write
Don Quixote, not by copying it out, but by immersing himself in
16th-century Spanish culture and history so that he can imagine and
write it himself as an “original” piece. His plan leads only to the pro-
duction of a few fragments of Don Quixote, but these are interpreted
by the narrator as having a different meaning to Cervantes’ Don
Quixote, even though they are identical, because they have been pro-
duced in a different age. The story has often been read as an allegory
on pastiche, but is just as much a criticism of the fabulations created
by scholarly criticism. This concern with things that have already
been conceived forms an important part of Borges’ stories. “The
Aleph,” for example, represents a disc that makes visible the infinite
possibilities of the universe and plays with the idea that if the possi-
bility of infinity is an already existing actuality, then there is no such
thing as possibility. Everything that is or could be already exists (or
will exist in time) and anything that doesn’t exist is an impossibility
that can neither come into existence nor be imagined. Reality be-
comes fixed and determinate (even in its infinite scope) and there can
be no such thing as imagination, only “recording.”
“The Library of Babel” focuses on a similar idea in its fabulation
of the universe as a library where all books have already been written,
not only those with structured sentences and recognizable words, but
books made up of letters in all their permutations (including a book
composed entirely out of the letters “MCV”). The story implies that
language has within it measureless but finite possibilities, but also
suggests that even though all books are possible, because they have
already been written, all possibilities have already been exhausted.
The story also has metafictional features in its concern with lan-
guage, suggesting that recognizable words are arbitrary constructions
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46 • BOYLE, THOMAS CORAGHESSAN

in the vastness of the “cacophony” of the library. Meaning is an iso-

lated phenomenon or a temporary fiction because new languages with
new meaning systems will come into existence and consign existing
languages to the nonsense of the past. “The Library of Babel” also
questions the concept of individuality. The narrator comments that the
account he is writing already exists somewhere in the library which
means that it is not therefore a product of his own “individual” cre-
ative vision because all things have already been written or said.
This concern with the ways in which individuality and free will are
questioned, particularly through the ways in which humanly created
“fictions” become forms of self-entrapment is a key concern of
Borges’ fabulations. “Death and the Compass,” for example, tells the
story of a detective who traps himself within the plans of a master
criminal because he creates a “fiction” (or “labyrinth”) that becomes
a reality as a result of his having “imagined” it. Similarly, “The Gar-
den of Forking Paths” focuses on the ways in which fictions enter
everyday life and begin to control it. The story has often been seen as
an expression of the multiplicity of reality, but its tale of a writer who
has created a labyrinth of infinite possibility in the form of a novel
(where events bifurcate endlessly into different paths) actually pro-
poses the creation of a totalizing blueprint for reality in which chance
becomes determinism, and where fiction has become the reality that
drives the narrator to a particular place at a particular time to die.

BOYLE, THOMAS CORAGHESSAN (1948– ). American novelist

and story writer, born Thomas John Boyle, whose fiction is part of
the more referential wave of postmodernist writing that developed in
the United States in the 1980s. Boyle’s early works are parodic in a
postmodernist fashion, but his writing began to develop a more
satiric edge in the 1990s. After the publication of his first short story
collection, Descent of Man, in 1979, Boyle produced Water Music
(1981), the first of several novels that utilized metafictional and pas-
tiche textual devices. Water Music fictionalizes the activities of the
explorer Mungo Park as he searches for the source of the Niger, dur-
ing which he metafictionally ponders on, and lives, his life as a text.
His concern with what is expected of him, as governed by future his-
tories of his life, creates a narrative that leads him to his death be-
cause such an eventuality is demanded by the conventions of his “fic-
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BRADFIELD, SCOTT • 47

tion.” Boyle’s second novel, Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (1984),

introduces satiric elements in its parody of American success stories
in the Horatio Alger mode, telling the story of a group of characters
who set up a marijuana plantation in order to pursue the capitalist ide-
ology of economic gain. Boyle’s most important novel, World’s End
(1987) returns to historiographic metafiction and alternates histori-
cal periods within the setting of the Hudson Valley. The structure of
the novel’s alternating timelines focuses attention on important mo-
ments in the definition and redefinition of American values.
The satiric element in Boyle’s work becomes more important after
World’s End, although Riven Rock (1998) shares a similar form as a
historiographic metafiction in its tale of sanity and insanity in the first
half of the 20th century. In a series of novels and collections of short
stories, Boyle has either parodied contemporary obsessions or at-
tacked the cultural values of the United States. The former approach
can be found in The Road to Wellville (1993), a comic novel about
John Harvey Kellogg’s health farm which uses history to parody con-
temporary obsessions, Drop City (2003), which parodies 1970s coun-
tercultural attitudes, and The Inner Circle (2004), which uses Alfred
Kinsey as a way of questioning the norms of sexual activity in post-
war America. The second approach, in which American ideology is
questioned, occurs in East is East (1990) and The Tortilla Curtain
(1995), both of which deal with intolerance and racism with respect
to immigrants to America, while both parodic and satiric approaches
can be found in the many books of short stories that Boyle has pub-
lished: Greasy Lake and Other Stories (1985), If the River Was
Whiskey (1989), Without a Hero (1994), After the Plague (2003), Hu-
man Fly and Other Stories (2005), and Tooth and Claw (2005).

BRADFIELD, SCOTT (1955– ). American novelist and short story

writer whose fictions present defamiliarized and disorienting ver-
sions of America using a number of styles, but which often rely on a
parodic or ironized realist mode of expression to draw attention to
the incongruous narrative content. Bradfield’s fiction often focuses
on the internal narrative lives of his characters, focalizing events
through their skewed perceptions to represent an out of kilter Amer-
ican culture. Bradfield’s first published work was the collection of
stories The Secret Lives of Houses (1988; exp. edn. published as
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48 • BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD

Dream of the Wolf, 1990; rev. edn. published as Greetings from Earth
in the UK, 1993; in the U.S., 1996) which was followed by The His-
tory of Luminous Motion (1989), a novel that focuses events through
a seven-year old whose hazy sense of reality and fantasy normalizes
his monstrous acts within the frame of the narrative. What’s Wrong
with America (1994), about an old woman who apparently kills her
husband, and Good Girl Wants It Bad (2004), about a teenager on
death row, deploy similar strategies. Both are told in the form of un-
reliable first person narrations that problematize the fictional reality
of the novels. In the former novel, the difficulty of discerning the “re-
ality” of the novel’s events is compounded by the narrator’s erratic
hold on reality and by a coda, written by her grandson, in which he
admits that he has made minor changes to his grandmother’s account
of events, an admission that also questions the status of a letter from
his grandfather (saying that he went off with another woman) that he
includes. Bradfield has also written a number of fable-like fictions
told from the perspective of animals, in the novel Animal Planet
(1995), which offers a parodic account of contemporary culture, and
in stories such as “Dazzle” in Greetings from Earth and those col-
lected in Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance (2005).

BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD (1935–1984). American novelist whose

fictions are generally characterized by a minimalist aesthetic and a
spare style of writing that makes great play of incongruous
metaphors. Brautigan’s work can be roughly separated into two
phases, beginning in 1960s when his novels adopted an alternative or
countercultural way of thinking while also using self-consciously
fictional strategies that generated a skewed vision of reality. The nov-
els of the 1960s, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout
Fishing in America (1967), and In Watermelon Sugar (1968) all ex-
press a vision of a possible America that could come into existence
either as a result of an act of imagination or through an act of mem-
ory in which a culture that has been lost can be revived. Such is the
subject matter of A Confederate General from Big Sur which tells the
story of Lee Mellon’s establishment of a “country” in Big Sur and the
Beat lifestyle lived there by its “inhabitants.” The novel looks back
nostalgically to an America that has disappeared, but suggests the
creation of a new America in the nonconformist attitudes of the char-
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BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD • 49

acters. The novel has elements of metafiction, most notably in its fa-
mous conclusion in which there are initially five alternative endings
before a final section entitled “186,000 endings per second” that ar-
ticulates possibility outside of existing social reality while also sug-
gesting that forms of representation can reflect neither the operations
of time nor the possibilities of reality.
Brautigan’s other 1960s novels both share similar concerns. Trout
Fishing in America is a book of fragments with each chapter offering
a view of what “Trout Fishing in America” might be. The phrase it-
self does not refer to the literal act of “trout fishing in America,” but
to idyllic moments or hopes that represent anything that can be imag-
ined; at one point, for example, “Trout Fishing in America” eats a
meal with Maria Callas while at another it becomes a hotel. Brauti-
gan implies that the flexibility of language allows anything to be a
referent for “Trout Fishing in America” and the vignettes that make
up the novel play metafictional games in which it refers to things not
possible in everyday life. A similar fluidity with regard to meaning
occurs in In Watermelon Sugar where “watermelon sugar” again
takes on different forms as and when the signifiers representing it
change. The novel also takes place in an alternative community
called iDEATH which exists in opposition to a realm of death and
consumerist waste called inBOIL, presenting an opposition between
America as it is and America as it could be.
By the end of the 1960s Brautigan’s fiction had begun to flirt with
the failure of representation. As a response, from The Abortion: An
Historical Romance 1966 (1971) onwards, he mixed existing genres
in a pastiche style to map out a means by which new narrative forms
could be configured. Dreaming of Babylon (1977), for example, com-
bines detective fiction with a fantasy historical narrative about ancient
Babylon (a narrative that also transgresses chronological boundaries),
while The Hawkline Monster (1974) is subtitled “A Gothic Western,”
but also incorporates science-fictional elements. Willard and His
Bowling Trophies (1975) mixes absurdism with an incongruous story
of revenge while also involving a tragicomic story about a failing ro-
mance in which a couple become involved in sadomasochism. In all
these novels, the intersection of genres provides a means by which
narratives can be multiplied in an accumulation of stories and plot-
lines that develop out of the initial genre basis, providing possibilities
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50 • BROOKE-ROSE, CHRISTINE

that seem precluded by the reality of America that resulted once the
1960s counterculture had failed to change its social landscape. These
fictions are inward looking and deal with characters’ inability to face
up to reality, as typified by Sombrero Fallout (1976), which tells the
story of a novelist who is incapable of writing a novel (because he is
unable to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend has left him),
but who finds that his book continues to write itself in the waste bin
where he has thrown it.

BROOKE-ROSE, CHRISTINE (1923– ). British novelist, translator,

and scholar born in Switzerland who taught Anglo-American litera-
ture at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes from 1968 until her
retirement. Brooke-Rose’s early novels, including the satirical The
Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were con-
ventional in form, although The Dear Deceit (1960) presented its
narrative in a reverse chronology. Brooke-Rose is best known for
her experimental fictions, many of which take the form of post-
modernist science fiction, beginning with Out (1964), which is set
in a future dystopian world as experienced through the conscious-
ness of its unnamed narrator. The novel is similar to Alain Robbe-
Grillet’s early novels and problematizes the representation of real-
ity through its layers of fictionality in which a fictional future
“reality” is narrated as a cognitive fiction without any external ref-
erents to guarantee its reliability. Brooke-Rose’s next novel, Such
(1966) meditated on patterns of perception by using scientific
metaphor to create a fictional reality in which an astronomer per-
ceives other people as waves and particles.
This investigation of the mediation of reality continued in Be-
tween (1968), a novel about a translator that examines the realities
created by language and communication. Thru (1975) is Brooke-
Rose’s most experimental novel and presents metafictional and in-
tertextual discourses to articulate the “impossibility of fiction” in
a novel that destabilizes and erases itself as a distinct text even as it
progresses. After a nine year gap, Brooke-Rose produced Amal-
gamemnon (1984), a novel written in future and conditional tenses
that forms the first volume in a loosely related science-fictional tril-
ogy. The novel also charts concerns with the death of humanism
that are developed in Xorandor (1986), a novel about the discovery
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BURROUGHS, WILLIAM SEWARD • 51

of a silicon-based culture by two children that includes computer

printouts as part of its textual matrix, and Verbivore (1990), which
moves the action forward into a society without electronic media.
After Textermination (1991), a metafictional novel set at a confer-
ence of literary characters, Brooke-Rose produced two novels in
which the narrative is passed from the consciousness of one char-
acter to another: Next (1998), which uses the alphabet as a structur-
ing device, and Subscript (1999) which traces the course of evolu-
tion from the first living cell onwards.

BURROUGHS, WILLIAM SEWARD (1914–1997). American nov-

elist who produced radically nonlinear experimental writings that
generated discontinuous narratives characterized by discursive
transformation. Burroughs was initially part of the Beat Generation
alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and his early novel,
Junkie (1953), a linear account of drug addiction, can be regarded as
part of the Beats’ countercultural ethos. With The Naked Lunch
(1959), which was initially published in Paris, Burroughs began to
develop avant-garde techniques that were to recur throughout his
works. The most important of these were the “cut-up” technique
(first used in The Soft Machine, 1961), which involved the random
rearrangement and transcription of pieces of text that Burroughs lit-
erally cut up with a pair of scissors, and the “fold-in” method (first
used in The Ticket That Exploded, 1962), based on a similar princi-
ple, but using separate pieces of writing (textual “borrowings” from
other writers and from cultural material such as newspapers, lyrics
from songs, flyers, and so on) that were then “folded” into Bur-
roughs’ own writing as part of a cumulative process. This resulted in
texts that were dissonant syntactically and which produced jarring
images and disconnected narratives.
It was also in The Naked Lunch that Burroughs developed many of
the features that became associated with his fiction, including a cast
of recurring characters and concerns with ideology, reality, and “sys-
tems of control.” Burroughs’ novels are important as postmodernist
fiction because of the way in which they use textual forms to enact
social processes. His texts are dominated by the representation of
pervasive forces of control and by attempts to create resistance to
power matrices. Such configurations are mapped linguistically and
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52 • BURROUGHS, WILLIAM SEWARD

narratively, presenting control through the use of binary structures,

linear plots, and conventional syntax or forms of meaning, while
generating forms of resistance through derangements of such “ide-
ological” patterns in the use of disconnected narratives, the creation
of “both/and” relationships (in which figures, ideas, or events are
both one thing and their binary opposite simultaneously, such as the
Nova Police), and disjunctive forms of linguistic meaning gener-
ated by “cut-up” and “fold-in” textuality. This latter aspect was par-
ticularly important to Burroughs because of his view that language
in its existing meanings was the vehicle of control systems and ide-
ology. In his deconstruction of language systems and embrace of
plurality and difference, Burroughs can be seen to adopt a post-
modern way of thinking, an area that many scholars have focused
on in discussing his work.
The novels that followed The Naked Lunch form a series that is
sometimes known as the “Nova” trilogy and develop these concerns
in a variety of forms. The Soft Machine exacerbates forms of narra-
tive dynamic but finds that it creates a paradoxical narrative and ide-
ological stasis of its own in its oscillations between control and re-
sistance. The novel also more fully explores fantasy realms available
through the fictionalization of “reality” in a series of dystopian rep-
resentations. The Ticket That Exploded is the most radical of Bur-
roughs’ early novels in terms of its use of language, with the constant
rearrangement of the same material through the “cut-up” and “fold-
in” forms focusing on repetition as a form of resistance. Resistance
takes the form of Operation Rewrite which involves the repetition of
language through a strategy of intercutting words with the discourses
of ideology. These words and phrases are then played back adding
new arrangements to the blueprint of history and subtly changing the
existing system of cultural meanings. Nova Express (1964) takes
place in an SF universe and offers a subversive polyphony of voices
as a form of resistance to the “Reality Studios” (a metaphor for the
world of simulation created by ideology as a facsimile of reality) and
develops conflict as a narrative principle in the cosmic struggle be-
tween the Nova Police and the Nova Mob.
After the “Nova” trilogy, Burroughs continued his concerns with
power and resistance in The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969),
Exterminator! (1973), and Port of Saints (1973). In these novels,
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BUTOR, MICHEL • 53

more utopian elements show through, particularly in The Wild Boys,

where existing power structures are overthrown, and these aspects
are further developed in the late trilogy made up of Cities of the Red
Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1984), and The Western
Lands (1987). Cities of the Red Night configures a narrative that in-
tercuts mimetic and fantasy story spaces within a linear form. The
plot concerns Clem Snide’s search for the tapes on which Creation
has been encoded. Snide discovers that he must travel through time
to erase the Creation tapes, the destruction of which negates their sys-
tematization of experience. The use of time travel generates a narra-
tive that transgresses the linear and mimetic frames which Burroughs
uses to dramatize social control. The eventual result is a complete
collapse of cause and effect sequence. The characters leap from one
century to another and from one place to another, continually dis-
placing the narrative in order to generate a dynamic form. In The
Place of Dead Roads Burroughs uses the Western to tell the story of
a band of anarchist gunfighters who wage war on contemporary
power systems such as religion, a concern developed in The Western
Lands (which also focuses on ancient Egyptian mythology), in the
war between a group of secret agencies and multinational corpora-
tions. In addition to these important works, Burroughs also produced
a collection of essays, The Adding Machine (1986), and an anthology
of interviews and other writings, with Daniel Odier, called The Job:
Topical Writings and Interviews (1974).

BUTOR, MICHEL (1926– ). French writer of the nouveau roman

who has created a number of different experimental forms during his
writing career with the result that his fiction is more varied than the
works of most novelists associated with the movement. Butor’s
early works are more typical of the experiments of the nouveau ro-
man, most notably in La Modification (Second Thoughts in the UK;
A Change of Heart in the U.S., 1957), but also in Passage de Milan
(Passage to Milan, 1954), L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time, 1956),
and Degrés (Degrees, 1960), all of which experiment with textual
narration and its construction of consciousness and perceptions of
reality. Passing Time, which is set in Bleston, a fictionalized version
of Manchester (where Butor spent two years teaching at the univer-
sity), deals with the experience and reconstruction of reality and
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54 • BUTOR, MICHEL

time through the use of narrative as a structuring principle. The main

character, Jacques Revel, finds that he is unable to comprehend his
life in Bleston except by reference to the texts that he reads and pro-
duces (“The Bleston Murder” and his diary respectively), but these
textual realities begin to overlap with experiential reality with the re-
sult that Revel cannot tell the difference between the two. Degrees
similarly plays with and parodies the ability to narrate and recom-
pose reality through its continuous recording, but it is in Second
Thoughts that Butor most clearly plays with textuality in his use of
a second-person narration in which the narrator addresses both him-
self and the reader. The novel also foregrounds its own fictionality
when it shifts from the formal “vous,” which the narrator uses when
considering whether to leave his wife, to a personal “tu” form at the
end when he tells himself to write an account that will become the
book the reader has just experienced.
After Degrees Butor’s writing shifted into a new phase that can be
described as the nonfictional production of fiction. Alongside a se-
ries of essays on art, literature, and culture that explores the aesthet-
ics of intertextuality and the cross-fertilization between different
media in five volumes of Répertoire (1960–1982), selections from
which have been translated into English in Inventory (1970), Butor
created a series of “narrations” that blurred the boundaries of text
and reality and narration and narrative, beginning with Mobile in
1962. Mobile is subtitled “Study for the Representation of the
United States” and presents a catalog in collage form that incorpo-
rates found texts (in the form of “cultural intertextuality”) and an ob-
jective narration that “lists” America. Où (Where/Or, 1971) offers a
similar narration of place, and Boomerang (1978)—selections of
which have been translated into English as Letters from the An-
tipodes (1981)—uses a similar collage form that blurs quotation and
original narration in developing different narrative lines that enact
different textual journeys across Australia. In between these works,
Butor wrote Description de San Marco (Description of San Marco,
1963) and 6 810 000 litres d’eau par seconde (Niagara, 1965),
which blur narrative with “reality,” along with Portrait de l’artiste
en jeune singe (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape, 1967), a novel
that plays with intertextuality, autobiography, and reality in its tale
of a narrator who dreams stories in the manner of Scheherezade.
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BYATT, ANTONIA SUSAN • 55

During this period, Butor also began to publish an ongoing journal

in Illustrations (4 vols., 1964–1976) and then added to his repertoire
from the 1970s onward with a series of dream narratives in the five
volumes of Matière de rêves (The Stuff of Dreams, 1975–1985) and
a series of Improvisations (1984–1993).

BYATT, ANTONIA SUSAN (A.S.) (1936– ). British novelist and critic

who writes what she refers to as “self-conscious realism.” Her nov-
els are rooted in the past traditions of writing, particularly the Victo-
rian period of English literature (in her use of the multiplot narrative,
for example) which has led to a division of critical opinion over
whether she is a “Victorian” or a postmodernist writer. The literari-
ness of her works is also manifest in her philosophical concerns, the
location of her works within a world of writers and academics, and
her use of symbols to construct the narrative discourses of her nov-
els. Many of Byatt’s novels adopt a form of ironic mimesis which
can be found in the dichotomy between a yearning for the authentic-
ity of experience (Romantic or Victorian notions of “sensibility”) and
her awareness that novels are created out of textual rhetoric, a facet
that is exemplified by her use of styles that range across realism, fairy
tale, allegory, pastiche, and the novel of ideas. Byatt’s first novel was
Shadow of a Sun (1964), but it was in The Game (1967) that she be-
gan to develop self-reflexive concerns with the process of writing.
The novel is focused on two characters, one a novelist who believes
in the truth achieved by writing, the other an Oxford don who real-
izes that reality becomes mutable when it is expressed in language,
but who yearns to avoid the self-consciousness within which she is
trapped so that she can feel “reality” authentically.
After this novel Byatt began the “Frederica” Quartet (aka the “Pot-
ter” Quartet), a series set in the 1950s and 1960s, which she has only
recently completed and that extends concerns over authenticity and
inauthenticity in relation to both writing and reality. The Virgin in the
Garden (1978) focuses on the artifice of the performance of a verse
drama about Elizabeth I; Still Life (1985) attempts to create a writing
of authenticity in its focus on “things” and experience; Babel Tower
(1996) deals with art and literature by focusing on a court case con-
cerning a book banned for indecency; and A Whistling Woman (2002)
concludes the series by looking at both the process of writing and at
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56 • CABRERA INFANTE, GUILLERMO

the simulations of television, commenting self-reflexively on itself

while retaining a referential focus on the “fictions” of reality. Byatt’s
most famous work is Possession (1990), a poststructuralist text about
texts that takes the form of a literary detective story and which in-
vestigates the lives of two fictional authors, while also including a
long pastiche of Victorian verse. The two novellas that comprise An-
gels and Insects (1992) also have a basis in Victorian culture and lit-
erature and incorporate similar patterns of intertextuality while The
Biographer’s Tale (2000) is another literary game that includes found
texts and which returns to the relationship between language and re-
ality found in Byatt’s earlier work. Byatt has also produced several
collections of short stories, including Sugar and Other Stories
(1987), The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s
Eye, a pastiche of fairy tales in a contemporary setting, and most re-
cently, Little Black Book of Stories (2003).

–C–

CABRERA INFANTE, GUILLERMO (1929–2005). Cuban writer

who became a British citizen after many years living in the United
Kingdom. After his initial support for the Cuban Revolution Cabrera
Infante lost favor with the government of Fidel Castro and left the
country in 1961, living in Brussels and Madrid before finally settling
in London in 1966. His writing is characterized by a playful and hu-
morously punning cross-generic style that embeds a plethora of in-
tertextual literary references within his texts. His works include Ex-
orcismos de esti(l)o (Exorcisms of Style, 1976), Vista del amanecer
en el trópico (A View of Dawn in the Tropics, 1979), a novel focused
around vignettes of Cuban history, Holy Smoke (1985), a work writ-
ten in English about the history and culture of cigar smoking that
was later translated into Spanish as Puro Humo, and Mea Cuba (My
Cuba, 1991), a collection of essays on Cuban history, literature, and
culture. He is best known, however, for two works: La Habana para
un Infante Difunto (Infante’s Inferno, 1979) and Tres Tristes Tigres
(Three Trapped Tigers, 1965), which literally translates as “Three
Sad Tigers.” Infante’s Inferno is an autobiographical novel set in Ha-
vana that follows a young man’s sexual adventures as he comes of
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CADIGAN, PAT • 57

age in prerevolutionary Cuba. It is written in Cabrera Infante’s trade-

mark punning style and plays many literary games with language.
The novel also questions its own status, by suggesting that the novel
may be a work of fantasy, while also celebrating popular culture and
cinema as creators of important contemporary narratives.
Cabrera Infante’s masterpiece, Three Trapped Tigers, is a maxi-
malist novel that forms around a dialogue concerning the relevance
of popular culture (particularly Cuban music and American cinema)
and high culture (literature, art, and philosophy), with the first half
focusing on vernacular cultural and linguistic forms and the second
half on the transformation of literary language and ideas into every-
day colloquial language. The novel draws strongly on the works of
James Joyce, particularly Ulysses, but with a middle section that is
more resonant of Finnegan’s Wake. This section comes about after
the death of a character called “Bustrófedon” who paradoxically be-
comes more alive textually as the novel starts to simulate his imagi-
native linguistic contortions by developing its own language, includ-
ing neologisms involving the use of “Bustro” along with numerous
anagrams, puns, and palindromes. These develop in addition to the
already numerous puns and intertextual references and include puns
on the names of writers, artists, and philosophers as well as literary
games with famous sayings or quotations. Structurally the novel is a
fugue that develops a multivocal configuration around a central nar-
rative while also presenting a collage of textual materials and voices
that, after an emcee has introduced the text, begins with a set of sto-
ries in various forms told by a diverse group of unidentified charac-
ters (including a monologue by a dead man). In addition to the nar-
ratives of the main characters there are inserted sections involving
psychiatric sessions, the story of the Campbells and a walking stick
told in different styles, and the retelling of Leon Trotsky’s death
through parodies of various Cuban writers including José Lezama
Lima and Alejo Carpentier.

CADIGAN, PAT (1953– ). American science fiction writer, resident in

the United Kingdom since 1996, who is particularly associated with
cyberpunk literature. She was the only woman writer to have her
work included in Bruce Sterling’s seminal 1986 cyberpunk collec-
tion Mirrorshades and has often been referred to as “the Queen of
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58 • CADIGAN, PAT

Cyberpunk” as a result. Her short stories range across a variety of sci-

ence fiction forms and ideas, but her major works, Mindplayers
(1987), Synners (1991), Fools (1992), and the recent Dora Konstan-
tin novels, Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and Dervish Is Digital
(2000), are predominantly based in cybercultural concerns such as ar-
tificial reality and information networks and have a future-noir set-
ting in a world of corporate politics, criminal underworlds, and op-
positional “authentic” street cultures. Synners is paradigmatic in this
respect because it includes all the major elements associated with cy-
berliterature: an alternative “street” culture, subcultural rebels and
hackers, corrupt corporations, digital artists, and the transcendence of
the material world through the entry into cyberspace. One of the key
themes that Cadigan develops out of Synners is the possibility that
the development of artificial realities will create alternative sensory
worlds that are coterminous with or indistinguishable from physical
reality, a concern that leads to experiments with the language of cog-
nition and perception. In particular, her stories and novels deal with
the question of how texts, language, and culture can either understand
or express a virtual reality that is in itself “false” and yet which not
only appears to be “real” but which is also treated as if it were “real”
by the characters within her novels.
Cadigan uses this concept to dramatize contemporary postmodern
culture and, in particular, the collapse of reality into image in the
circulation of the simulacrum, concerns that are dealt with in stories
such as “Johnny Come Home” and “Pretty Boy Crossover,” both of
which deal with the problematic identities that are generated by ar-
tificial realities. Within this context, Fools is Cadigan’s most exper-
imental novel, dealing with identity murder and memory transfer as
focalized through the perspectives of characters who have had their
memories erased and implanted. Filtered through a character called
Marceline—whose perceptions alternate between her own and those
of an implanted character called Marva—the narrative shifts focus
abruptly depending on which figure has control of perception at any
given time, a transfer signaled by a change of font, but with no ex-
planation as to what has happened. The reader therefore must attune
him- or herself to these changes in focus in order to structure the
narrative meaningfully, a situation that is further complicated when
it is revealed that Marceline has a third passenger in the form of an
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CALDER, RICHARD • 59

agent from the “Brain Police” who is investigating an illegal “mind

suck.” Such textual strategies reveal that “identity” is a constructed
concept, particularly when Marva and Marceline start to experience
each others’ memories.

CALDER, RICHARD (1956– ). British writer of postmodernist sci-

ence fiction whose novels are pastiche works that mix traditional
science fiction, cyberpunk, horror, and Gothic styles. His novels
present an off-kilter or alternate version of the world by projecting a
fantasy vision of postmodern culture where hybridity and simulation
have become all-pervasive. The cause of this transformation of hu-
man society is ostensibly advanced forms of technology such as nan-
otechnology or bioengineering. However, the Gothic elements within
Calder’s fiction reveal that the technologies that have created these
changes are a product of repressed human desires unleashed by the
collapse of cultural values and social hierarchies. In his fictions, it is,
therefore, fantasy itself that generates the culture that Calder repre-
sents rather than technology, a fabulational device that imagines hu-
man society as a set of fictions, myths, or ideologies that create per-
verse sexual desires and exaggerated versions of gender identities.
The implications of such articulations are that it is desire and power
that have created contemporary culture. Thus, although Calder’s nov-
els have a retro element, they also offer a demythologization of
power relations in postmodernity by tracing a genealogy of the cul-
tural logic that produced it.
Calder has written a number of novels dealing with such issues, the
most important of which are the novels that form the “Dead” trilogy
(Dead Girls, 1992; Dead Boys, 1994; and Dead Things, 1996). These
three novels present an increasingly Gothic vision of society through
the constantly revised story of the creation of hybrid and artificial hu-
mans, enacted through a disorienting narrative that uses temporal dis-
juncture and sudden shifts in perspective to reveal new layers of the
matrices of power. Dead Girls tells the story of how cyborg “dolls”
were created apparently by nanotechnology but actually by the release
of masculine desires. Dead Boys revises this story by rewriting the pre-
vious novel’s narrative, in conjunction with a revision of history and
myth, in order to imagine a world of male vampires and submissive fe-
male victims which Dead Things concludes by revealing the underly-
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60 • CALVINO, ITALO

ing death-instinct of such a configuration of desire and power. The tril-

ogy uses these narratives to focus on the historic and mythic origins of
the world Calder imagines (with Dead Girls, for example, utilizing a
perverse version of fairy tale conventions to dramatize the simplified
and brutal nature of this fictional society), but the overall point is to di-
rect attention to the self-consuming deadness of postmodern culture
and way in which it transforms human beings, ideas, and values, along
with gender and social relations, into commodified “things” or lifeless
simulations. Calder’s subsequent novels have developed the pastiche
elements of the “Dead” trilogy by exaggerating the Gothic features and
introducing baroque motifs, as in Malignos (2000) and Lord Soho
(2002) with further mixing of genres such as adventure narratives, sto-
ries of the criminal underworld, and the western being added in later
novels like The Twist (1999). In relation to their demythologization of
postmodern culture, Calder’s novels, through their metaphors of power
and desire, imply that a culture where people become things or prod-
ucts is inescapable, because such a culture expands until it pervades all
forms of human activity, although Cythera (1998) holds out the fantasy
of escape to a world outside.

CALVINO, ITALO (1923–1985). Italian writer born in Cuba whose

family relocated to Italy shortly after his birth. After World War II
Calvino joined the Italian Communist Party, writing for the official
paper L’Unità until his public resignation in 1957. In the late 1960s
he moved to Paris, becoming a member of the OuLiPo group and
meeting with notable semiotic theorists including Roland Barthes,
before returning to Italy in 1980. This period was to have an impor-
tant influence on his subsequent writing, leading to the development
of new experimental techniques and a poststructuralist perspective in
his fiction. Although there are different phases in Calvino’s writing
career (from neorealism in the 1940s, through fabulation in the 1950s
and early 1960s, to fiction that offers radical innovation from the late
1960s until his death in 1985), Calvino’s works predominantly focus
on imagining the impossible. Through concerns with the text’s abil-
ity to conjure into existence anything it wants Calvino reflects on a
variety of issues regarding fiction, including the text’s ability to pro-
duce wonders that have no real objective existence, considerations of
the nature of writing and communication, as well as meditations on:
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CALVINO, ITALO • 61

the text as an object, the author-reader relationship, and the figure of

the interpreter (or reader) who becomes an author. However, these are
not deadly earnest theorized investigations of textuality because
Calvino has a comic sense of the infinite possibilities of fiction, with
the result that his novels have an ironic humor that makes their lan-
guage games highly pleasurable to read.
Calvino’s early postmodernist fabulations are similar to the sto-
ries of Jorge Luis Borges and Leo Perutz, while also having their
basis in an interest in traditional folktales, reworked versions of
which Calvino published as a collection entitled Fiable italiane (Ital-
ian Folktales) in 1956. The novellas collected in I nostri antenati
(Our Ancestors, 1960)—Il Visconte Dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount,
1951), Il Barone Rampante (The Baron in the Trees, 1957), and Il
Cavaliere Inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight, 1959)—all present
impossible tales set in a mythical version of the past. The Cloven Vis-
count tells the story of a soldier who is hit by a cannonball in the war
against the Turks, but who continues his life with only one half of his
body remaining. The Baron in the Trees concerns a boy who takes to
the trees one day and who never sets foot on the ground again, even
in death when his body is transported to the skies by the anchor of a
balloon. The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of a paladin of Charle-
magne who is nothing more than an empty suit of armor and a voice.
While it is the marvel of the impossibilities told in these fictions that
is the main interest there are also concerns with issues of fictional-
ity, which can be found in the speculation at the end of The Baron in
the Trees over whether any of the events happened or whether they
are just a product of a “thread of ink.”
From the mid-1960s onward, Calvino’s fictions developed a range
of different styles that become more experimental. Le cosmicomiche
(Cosmicomics, 1965) is a collection of stories developing imagined
possibilities out of a range of scientific hypotheses, linked by a nar-
rator called Qfwfq who has “experienced” all of them. The most fa-
mous of the stories, “All at One Point,” begins from the proposition
that all matter was concentrated at one point before the universe be-
gan to expand and has Qfwfq reminiscing about the truth of a uni-
verse where everyone was packed into a space that had no existence
as space. These stories stretch scientific knowledge to impossible
levels of fictionalization, questioning science not only by taking
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62 • CAREY, PETER

scientific theories to exaggerated extremes, but also by offering con-

testing “fictions.” Calvino’s most radical experiments occurred in the
novels he produced in the 1970s, all of which deal with the text as a
linguistic or cultural construct. Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities,
1972) imagines cities in textual form in a series of imagined ex-
changes between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and meditates on
whether the “real” world is a product of the imagination or, if it is
real, how far it is shaped by the imagination. Il castello dei destini in-
crociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1973) has as its structure a
generative strategy in the OuLiPo style, based on a series of stories
told by travelers who are struck mute and can only communicate
through the use of Tarot cards. The narrative displays the cards for the
reader and then offers the narrator’s interpretation, creating this as the
“true” story of each traveler whether it is authentic or entirely imag-
ined. With this strategy, Calvino foregrounds poststructuralist theo-
ries of the reader as the creator of a novel because it is his or her in-
terpretation that gives meaning to the text. Se una notte d’inverno un
viaggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveller, 1979) develops these
ideas through its structure of foreshortened novels, alternating vari-
ous first chapters with a story in which the reader becomes a charac-
ter in order to focus attention on the author-text-reader relationship.

CAREY, PETER (1943– ). Australian novelist whose fiction uses post-

modernist and speculative devices such as fabulation and the inves-
tigation of fiction making to explore concerns with history and na-
tional identity. His first fictional works were the collections of stories
The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979) and the satir-
ical novel Bliss (1981). Carey’s next novel, Illywhacker (1985), es-
tablished his literary reputation and developed concerns with fiction-
making in its story of Herbert Badgery, a self-confessed liar, who
weaves a tapestry of stories and comic incidents. Although the novel
has a fabular form, it uses its “fictions” to celebrate the authenticity
of Australia and its history in opposition to a contemporary global
corporatized culture. Oscar and Lucinda (1988) is probably Carey’s
most important book and uses fantasy, fabulation, and magic realism
to explore Australia’s past through a series of narrative games and
“fictions.” The novel uses these to investigate fiction-making
processes in relation to history by spinning an inventive “myth”
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CARPENTIER, ALEJO • 63

around colonial relationships. After The Tax Inspector (1991), Carey

published The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), a political fabu-
lation set on the fictional island of Efica (Australia) that deals with is-
sues of power and national identity in telling the story of Tristan
Smith’s journey to the dominant nation of Voorstand (the United
States). Jack Maggs (1997) is a Victorian pastiche that uses Charles
Dickens’ Great Expectations as the motor for its narrative about fic-
tion and reality, a concern that Carey returns to in True History of the
Kelly Gang (2001) which narrates the exploits of the outlaw Ned
Kelly in documents he has written in order to tell his daughter the
truth, and which presents both an exercise in myth making and an in-
vestigation of how fact and fiction depend upon narrative construc-
tion. Carey’s most recent novel is My Life as a Fake (2003) which al-
though set in Malaysia deals with Australian literary and cultural
concerns in an involuted narrative about a poetic hoax and the quest
for a concept of literary authenticity.

CARPENTIER, ALEJO (1904–1980). Cuban novelist and critic

who used aesthetic practices that were influential on realist, exper-
imental, and postmodernist writers of the Latin American literary
“Boom” of the 1960s, and who developed the concept of “lo real
maravilloso” (“the marvelous real”) which became important in the
development of “magic realism.” In his early career before World
War II, Carpentier developed leftist sympathies in opposition to the
dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and spent time in prison in the
1920s before traveling in exile to France where he developed affini-
ties with the surrealists. He lived in Venezuela from 1945 until his
return to Cuba in 1959 after the Revolution and was then appointed
as ambassador to France. As a writer, Carpentier’s texts are influ-
ential because of their interest in alternative views of consciousness
and reality, and their concerns with myth, metaphor, symbolism,
and language. In an early work, Ecue-Yambo-O (Praise be to God,
1933), for example, Carpentier integrates oral traditions from Afro-
Cuban culture with a literary European tradition in order to express
a variety of cultural realities. Carpentier’s first major work was De
reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) which
dealt with Haiti’s struggle for independence from France and which
contained, in the introduction, the theory of “lo real maravilloso,” a
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64 • CARTER, ANGELA

concept based on surrealist principles that envisaged Latin America

as somehow more irreal or irrational than Europe or North America
and capable therefore of creating mysterious realities.
This viewpoint is developed in Carpentier’s most important novel
Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953), which opposes the im-
position of modernist systems on American culture (which have cre-
ated artificial rational forms of living) with the deeper, more pro-
found and unpredictable reality of Latin America in telling the story
of a musician’s return from a self-imposed exile in New York to his
Latin American home. The novel also develops concerns with the
source of art, inspiration, and originality in opposing the artificial
city with the authenticity of nature even when the narrator returns to
Latin America, where he finds that the “true” reality and source of
inspiration is in the primeval jungle inhabited by mixed-race mesti-
zos who, for Carpentier, symbolize the source of both the diversity
and mystery of Latin American culture. Of Carpentier’s later works,
El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1962), a historical
novel set at the time of the French Revolution, and Consagración de
la primavera (The Consecration of Spring, 1978), a work that shifts
across time frames to consider different revolutionary moments in
the 20th century, are notable, but it is El recurso del metodo (Rea-
sons of State, 1974) that has gained most attention. The novel is set
in the past and tells the story of a fictional dictator in order to un-
derstand the persistence of modern totalizing (and totalitarian) sys-
tems in the present. The novel was hailed as an important investi-
gation of contemporary power in Latin America but, as Gerald
Martin has noted (1989), the novel’s focus on the dictator’s absurd-
ities fictionally misreads the cruelty and oppression practiced by
real dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

CARTER, ANGELA (OLIVE STALKER) (1940–1992). British nov-

elist and short story writer whose innovative fiction established her
as one of the most significant figures in postwar English literature.
Carter created a distinctive body of work by combining a range of
styles that foregrounded symbolism and parody in order to imagine
an exotic and disturbing fictional world that refracts social and cul-
tural reality. Her works explore cultural, sexual, and gender issues us-
ing postmodernist experiments with narrative and representation that
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CARTER, ANGELA • 65

frequently involve the self-conscious use of popular genres such as

science fiction, fairy tale, Gothic horror, and fantasy alongside popu-
lar cultural forms such as music hall, folktale, and myth. For a long
time the influence of non-English literary traditions on Carter’s work
and her concerns with fairy tale led to her fiction being primarily un-
derstood either as forms of magic realism or as dramatizations of
Freudian sexual politics, but the plurality of styles evident in her nov-
els gestures equally toward a revisionist tendency in which textual
forms are redefined and invested with new meanings in order to con-
sider contemporary political and cultural concerns. The stories in The
Bloody Chamber, for example, involve the reuse of fairy tales both to
investigate contemporary cultural attitudes (including sexual vio-
lence and gender) and to question the forms of representation that
naturalize accepted ideologies.
Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (aka Honeybuzzard in the U.S.,
1966), was a thriller with elements of horror that dealt with sexual vi-
olence and introduced the key concern of sexual and gender relation-
ships that has subsequently informed Carter’s oeuvre as a whole.
Carter’s most important early works were The Magic Toyshop (1967)
and Heroes and Villains (1969). The Magic Toyshop explores the
masculine sexual fantasies embedded in fairy tales through its writ-
ing of a modern myth in which a young girl is subjected to sexual
domination by a patriarch figure. Heroes and Villains presents a fab-
ulation set in a postapocalyptic world divided between the Professors
and Soldiers (who live in urban ruins) and the Barbarians (who live
in mutated forests) and develops a binary structure that opposes En-
lightenment rationality and repression to desire and fantasy (with el-
ements of Freudian sexual dynamics and fairy tale also included in
the tale of Marianne’s sexual awakening in the “dark woods” outside
the cities). The opposition between rationality and desire is devel-
oped in one of Carter’s most important works, The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), which tells a story about the
threat posed by Dr. Hoffmann (a parody of the “mad scientist” drawn
from SF horror) as he mounts an assault on the forces of reason by
unleashing fantasy and desire in the “City.” The narrative involves
both a quest through worlds of fantasy and a literary picaresque
through a variety of styles such as Gothic, colonial fictions, magic re-
alism, and fairy tale. The narrative’s journey ultimately reveals that
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66 • CELATI, GIANNI

the oppositions between fantasy and reality and desire and rational-
ity, represented in the figures of Hoffman and the city’s Minister of
Determination, are meaningless when it is discovered that the former
is governed by scientific rationality and the latter by personal desire.
Carter also produced two collections of short stories in the 1970s,
Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979), elements of
which she adapted with Neil Jordan for the film The Company of
Wolves (1984). She also produced her most important postmodernist
fiction, The Passion of New Eve (1977), a novel that investigates the
ideological construction of femininity in contemporary culture by
combining motifs drawn from dystopian SF with a fantasy vision of
the United States. Carter’s final novels were Nights at the Circus
(1984), a fabulation about a winged circus performer called Fevvers
that ends with a journalist joining her in her world of fantasy, and the
exuberant Wise Children (1991), which tells the story of two music-
hall performers, the sisters Dora and Nora Chance. The latter novel
articulates a cultural and economic struggle based on notions of class
by opposing the high cultural form of the theater (represented by the
Shakespearean traditions of the wealthy Hazard family) with the pop-
ular cultural music hall of the illegitimate and impoverished Chance
sisters, finding lost pleasures in both of them even while it satirizes
the former by finding as much burlesque at work unconsciously
within it as is found self-consciously in the latter. Carter also pro-
duced works of nonfiction, including The Sadeian Woman, a study of
female suffering, and critical material in Expletives Deleted (1992).

CELATI, GIANNI (1937– ). Italian author who uses the forms of

minimalism as his primary mode of writing and who articulates
concerns with representation, particularly by reference to the rela-
tionships between words and reality and between language and vi-
sual signs. He is as concerned, therefore, with different forms of
representation, and their merits in articulating experience, as he is
with their ability to “show” or “tell” reality. His most famous work
is Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains, 1985), a succes-
sion of linked stories presented in an episodic form in which anony-
mous voices speak of their experiences, dreams, or anxieties. The
stories include the tale of a man who believes people are denying his
existence because he was once shot by a German, a woman who
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CHEVILLARD, ÉRIC • 67

supports her husband’s delusions, and a scholar who rewrites the

classics so that they have a happy ending. The fragments have no
linear relationship to each other and the text is created through a
process of accumulation where the narrative structure is based on
accretion, a formalist metaphor that suggests a link between the ge-
ography of the plains of the Po Valley and the lives of human soci-
ety. Quattro novelle sull’apparenza (Appearances, 1987) is a col-
lection of four novellas that deals more fully with reality and
appearance in its concern with the relationship between truth and
falsity and the ambiguous meanings generated by their interplay.
Celati has also published a travel book, Avventure in Africa (Adven-
tures in Africa, 1998), that has a fragmented and episodic form and
which presents a similar ambiguous sense of reality.

CEPOLLARO, BIAGIO (1959– ). Italian poet who was a leading

member of the post-avant-garde group Gruppo 93 and who has had
an important role in developing the contemporary Italian poetry
scene through his founding and direction of a number of literary re-
views. Cepollaro’s poetry collections include Le parole di Eliodora
(In Eliodora’s Words, 1984), and a trilogy written between 1985 and
1997 with the overall title of De requie et natura, comprising
Scribeide (1993), Luna persciente (Moon of Total Knowledge, 1993),
and Fabrica (2002). His poetry is characterized by a form of double-
coding in which archaic and modern Italian are combined alongside
colloquialisms, dialect forms, and allusive patterns of reference. In
addition, Cepollaro uses repetitions and sonorous rhythmical forms
to create a play of language that can be read either in a narrative and
linear fashion or as a complex intertextual arrangement that draws
on and foregrounds its own use of a range of linguistic references.
Language itself forms the focus of Cepollaro’s De requie et natura
trilogy, which deals with the manufactured landscapes of the city and
the diverse languages within them, while other works, such as “Re-
quiem in C,” meditate on poetic language through images of connec-
tion and disconnection, a dichotomy that informs the dual structures
of Cepollaro’s poetry as a whole.

CHEVILLARD, ÉRIC (1964– ). French novelist who is part of the

nouvelle génération de Minuit and whose works display absurdist
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68 • CHEVILLARD, ÉRIC

and fabulational tendencies. Chevillard produces playful pastiche

texts that self-consciously and humorously rework existing forms and
genres in order to explore the elusiveness of reality and the systems
and discourses used to define it. Chevillard published his first novel,
Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Makes Me Sick), in 1987 and has gone on
to produce 13 other works, including: Préhistoire (Prehistory, 1994),
L’œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster (Thomas Pilaster’s Posthu-
mous Work, 1999), and Les absences du capitaine Cook (Captain
Cook’s Absences, 2001). Palafox (1990) was the novel that brought
Chevillard to a wider audience. This novel is a fabulation written in a
self-consciously retro style about a hybrid protean creature who is
given the name “Palafox” after a choice that is both arbitrary and sys-
tematic leads his discoverers to a particular page in an encyclopedia.
A similar contradictory combination of logic and illogic also drives
the narrative as the characters try and fail to understand “Palafox.”
Because “Palafox” is a product of the possibilities of fictional lan-
guage, however, he develops into such a paradoxical creature that he
defies any categories or systems that attempt to define him.
This latter aspect, along with a search for structure, can be found
in Au plafond (On the Ceiling, 1997), which develops absurdist ideas
in its story of a man who wears a chair upside down on his head and
who decides, along with his friends, to live on the ceiling of his girl-
friend’s house where he believes life will make more sense. In addi-
tion to these absurdist strategies, Chevillard’s fictions also metafic-
tionally investigate the form of the novel. La nébuleuse du crabe
(The Crab Nebula, 1993) is a fragmentary novel of absurdities, con-
tradictions, impossible events, and multiple alternatives about a “man
without qualities” who lives in a self-consciously textual world. For
example, the protagonist, Crab (who reappears in Un fântome [A
Phantom], 1995), has a wax tongue and fingernails of frost in one
chapter, turns himself into a gastropod in another, dies several times,
and is given a life sentence for crimes committed before his birth (of
which he must have been guilty because the crime rate dropped dur-
ing the childhood he spent behind bars). During the course of the
novel, Chevillard also uses Crab to meditate on the way in which
writing creates reality, metafictionally commenting on his own text.
Du Hérisson (Concerning the Hedgehog, 2002) plays similar games
in its account of a writer who wishes to produce an autobiographical
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COE, JONATHAN • 69

novel, but who becomes so intrigued by a hedgehog that he sees on

his desk one day that he obsessively writes about the imagined mean-
ings of the hedgehog instead.

CHINESE-BOX LITERATURE. In its metafictional forms, post-

modernist literature makes great play of the Chinese Box as a struc-
tural device in order to embed texts within texts. The inclusion of in-
serted material or nested narratives can take the form of a narrator
picking up a story within the main narrator’s story, but is most often
practiced through the inclusion of fake texts (which may themselves
have further fake texts within them) as a significant part of a narra-
tive. The effect of this technique is to suggest that texts are the prod-
uct or record of other texts rather than a record of reality or a product
of experience. In such a technique, the fictionality of the text is em-
phasized, a situation most obvious in Italo Calvino’s Se una notte
d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveller) which is
substantially constructed out of inserted stories that masquerade as
the first chapters of other novels.

CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD. See ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF

SOLITUDE.

CITTÀ INVISIBILI, LE. See INVISIBLE CITIES.

COE, JONATHAN (1961– ). British novelist who, despite his admira-

tion for the writings of B.S. Johnson (of whom he has written a bi-
ography) and Alasdair Gray, produces a light accessible version of
postmodernism. Coe’s early novels tend toward traditional forms,
and it is with What a Carve Up! (1994), his most important novel,
that the more experimental aspects of his writing come to the fore.
What a Carve Up! is a satire on 1980s capitalist greed filtered
through the lives of a wealthy family who are a symbol of the eco-
nomic power and political ideology of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain
(with controlling interests in politics, banking and finance, the media,
armaments, agribusiness, and commercialized art). The novel is post-
modernist in the pastiche textuality of many of the references it
draws on, its use of inserted texts (for example, a diary of one of the
novel’s characters, with accompanying editorial annotations), and in
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70 • COETZEE, JOHN MAXWELL

its skewed narrative temporality which, in the first part moves

through a variety of narratorial positions. What a Carve Up! devel-
ops this in its mystery plot, which uses a 1960s film comedy of the
same title to generate many of the narrator’s feelings and to provide
a formal structuring principle in the second half when the story of the
murder of the wealthy Winshaw family in an isolated house drives
the narrative that concludes the novel.
Coe’s subsequent works have adopted similar devices, but with an
increasingly realist style in which the mixing of codes and use of in-
serts have become naturalized as part of the narrative. House of Sleep
(1997) presents its story through temporal narrative shifts and blurs
the distinction between dream and reality through this strategy. The
Rotters’ Club (2001) is a rites of passage nostalgia novel set in the
1970s, based around the politics and music of the period (with its ti-
tle taken from an album by the progressive rock group Hatfield and
the North), that is concluded in the sequel, The Closed Circle (2004).
The two novels trace changes in British society from the 1970s to the
present, with textual inserts (letters, diaries, articles, and text mes-
sages) being used as “reality effects” to present revelations or move
the narrative forward rather than as metafictional devices that reveal
the novels’ fictional status. The Rotters’ Club is at its most experi-
mental in the final chapter (which is all one sentence), but, like The
Closed Circle, is primarily a social satire, albeit one that assigns an
aesthetic function to political events, acts of terror, and moral issues,
using them to drive the narrative rather than to offer meaningful com-
ment on contemporary British society.

COETZEE, JOHN MAXWELL (J.M.) (1940– ). South African nov-

elist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 whose fiction
uses political and literary allegory and thereby oscillates between so-
cial and metafictional concerns. The former can be found in Coet-
zee’s reflections on colonialism within the context of South African
history and politics, while the latter are displayed in the expression of
postmodern ideas and textual self-consciousness. Often these two el-
ements are combined, as in his first novel Dusklands (1974) which
develops many of Coetzee’s major concerns in offering an explo-
ration of the psychology of colonialism through the juxtaposition of
an analysis of American involvement in Vietnam and a parodic travel
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COMBINATORY LITERATURE • 71

narrative set in the 18th-century Cape Colony. In the Heart of the

Country (aka From the Heart of the Country, 1977) more directly
uses postmodernist forms by telling the story of the daughter of a
sheep farmer within a metafictional rewriting of the South African
pastoral that reconfigures it as an exploration of consciousness in
which conflicting accounts of events are presented. Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980) and Coetzee’s best-known work, Life and Times
of Michael K (1983), are more political, the former presenting a
moral fable that investigates the complicities and horrors of imperi-
alism, while the latter focuses on survival and suffering during civil
war but develops textual concerns with the elusiveness of meaning
along with allegorical forms, in the manner of Franz Kafka, to ex-
plore issues of identity.
Foe (1986) is Coetzee’s most metafictional novel and reworks
Daniel Defoe’s Robinsoe Crusoe within the framework of postcolo-
nial discourses to both investigate the imperial impulse upon which
Defoe’s text is founded and to meditate on the silencing of the colo-
nized “Other” in the focus on the figure of Friday who has had his
tongue cut out and cannot tell his version of the story. Age of Iron
(1990) is a more realist narrative about civil unrest in Cape Town,
while The Master of Petersburg (1994) returns to literary concerns in
its focus on Fyodor Dostoevsky as he seems to experience the events
of his novel The Devils. After producing Boyhood: Scenes from
Provincial Life (1997), a fictionalized memoir dealing with his early
life which was later followed by Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life
II (2002), Coetzee wrote Disgrace (1999) which addresses life in
postapartheid South Africa. The novel moves away from Coetzee’s
earlier allegorical style by dealing with black violence in its story of
a white academic whose daughter is raped by three black men, but
also raises issues relating to white consciousness of past colonial op-
pressions in their decision not to prosecute. Elizabeth Costello (2003)
is a playful work about a lecturer which reuses versions of Coetzee’s
own lectures while Slow Man (2005) is a love story that also medi-
tates on authorship and fictionality.

COMBINATORY LITERATURE. A form of writing that uses the

principles of rearrangement or “variation on a theme” as primary de-
vices to generate either a text’s narrative structure or its linguistic
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72 • CONJUNCTIONS

patterns. While the notion of permutation is an overall premise for

combinatory literature, each text adopts a different informing princi-
ple as a structuring idea. For example, Georges Perec uses the
“Knight’s Tour” to organize the narrative logic in La vie mode d’em-
ploi (Life: A User’s Manual) while Italo Calvino organizes Se una
notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveller)
around the concept of the “lost-and-found-book” to create a narrative
out of fragments of fictional texts. Combinatory literature is much fa-
vored by OuLiPo writers who are as interested in the possible com-
binations that a text might produce (often based on mathematical for-
mulae or arrangements of numbers) as they are in the final product.
Raymond Queneau was particularly interested in the combina-
tory principle and wrote several theoretical essays setting out differ-
ent premises while his Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style, 1947),
which relates the same scene in 99 different styles, is an early exam-
ple of permutational writing that strongly influenced many later writ-
ers. Although combinatory literature sometimes foregrounds its per-
mutational strategy, it is often possible to read a combinatory text
without even knowing that there is a structural mechanism at work.
Such is the case with Jacques Roubaud’s Le grand incendie de Lon-
dres (The Great Fire of London), which tells the reader that there are
mathematical ideas that create the novel’s structure while keeping the
operation of the process concealed. The Great Fire of London also
uses another strategy of combinatory literature, linguistic permuta-
tion, by repeating and varying sentences, images, or ideas in differ-
ent contexts. Such rearrangements of language are also important in
the works of certain writers of the nouveau roman, such as Alain
Robbe-Grillet, whose novels often retell the same scene with minor
variations, and Claude Ollier, who presents linguistic variations of
certain descriptions, images, and motifs.

CONJUNCTIONS. American journal of contemporary writing edited by

the novelist Bradford Morrow, and published in New York, that was
first issued in a special inaugural double edition in 1981. Conjunctions
usually appears twice a year and has a substantial volume of writing
in each issue. The journal has a commitment to contemporary writing
as a whole, although in recent years it has tended to be themed around
particular issues or artistic movements, such as New Caribbean Writ-
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COOVER, ROBERT • 73

ing or genre fiction under the title “New Wave Fabulism.” Although,
therefore, not devoted to experimental or postmodernist writing, Con-
junctions has nevertheless published a large number of such writers in
the course of its history, including works by Walter Abish, William
T. Vollmann, John Hawkes, Robert Creeley, David Foster Wal-
lace, Ben Okri, and Angela Carter.

COOVER, ROBERT (1932– ). American novelist and short story writer

whose works primarily use metafictional techniques to parody fic-
tion’s ability to represent reality, often by revisiting the history of the
novel or by reusing old stories and genres to parody their conventions.
Coover’s earliest novels, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) and The
Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968),
are postmodern in their outlook rather than postmodernist in their aes-
thetics and both articulate the provisional and arbitrary character of re-
ality and truth within the frame of a linear narrative. It is only in the lat-
ter novel that metafiction comes into play in a story about a fantasy
baseball game that J. Henry Waugh creates using dice and charts and
whose mathematical system triumphs at the end of the novel. After
having attempted to interfere with its rules, Waugh realizes that his
game is more perfect as an expression of the systems of reality than re-
ality itself. With this understanding achieved, he disappears from the
narrative and the final chapter is told from the perspective of the paper
baseball players who, despite only having existence as names and sta-
tistics, become more “real” than the fictions of the “real” world that
Waugh lives in. At the end of the 1960s Coover’s fictions shifted di-
rection and became more experimental. Pricksongs and Descants of-
fers a range of different writing styles and includes: stories written in
terms of multiple perspectives, such as “The Magic Poker” and “The
Babysitter,” in which the narratives fork into different possibilities by
presenting multiple plots that simultaneously overlap and bifurcate
away from each other; the metafictions of “Seven Exemplary Fic-
tions”; and political fabulation in “Morris in Chains,” where Coover
first began to develop concerns with social and ideological issues.
Political concerns are more fully developed in Coover’s most im-
portant novel, The Public Burning (1977), which deals with the
1950s Rosenberg case and combines political satire with metafictional
and fabular devices in order to comment on the culture of fictions and
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74 • COOVER, ROBERT

ideological distortions that Coover identifies in contemporary Amer-

ica. With the exception of Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the
Chicago Bears (1989), which repeats the exercise of using Richard
Nixon as a fictional character, Coover’s fictions since The Public
Burning have either focused on the act of writing or offered parodies
of literary forms. Spanking the Maid (1981) is very similar to Alain
Robbe-Grillet’s early novels in its representation of the same scene
with minor variations and articulates a discourse that compares the
mastery of writing to the master-servant relationship. Gerald’s Party
(1986) revisits the themes of The Universal Baseball Association in its
story of a party where several murders occur, which the remaining
characters ignore or place within a fictional framework because of
their reluctance to allow reality to interfere with their plans. The short
story collection, A Night at the Movies; or, You Must Remember This
(1987), begins Coover’s interest in the interplay of reality and fiction.
The stories here either parody genre clichés or present fictionalized al-
ternatives to movie classics, most notably in “You Must Remember
This” which represents Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca consummating
their affair and then disappearing from cinematic history.
This strategy of reflecting on what might happen were reality to in-
trude on fiction is a key concern of Coover’s most recent work. Pin-
nocchio in Venice (1991) extends Collodi’s story by placing Pinnoc-
chio in contemporary reality and making him into a world-renowned
author and academic who finds that he is turning back into wood in
his old age. John’s Wife (1996) plays with the conventions of realism
by including self-consciously textual devices while making a com-
ment on gender ideologies when “John’s Wife” disappears during a
tryst with the town’s minister, a metaphor for the fact that she has no
existence other than in the desires that men write upon her. Briar
Rose (1996) is a metafictional rewriting of the story of Sleeping
Beauty, in which Sleeping Beauty questions her fictional role as a
suffering princess and dreams of sexual desire, while the rescuing
prince meditates on quest narratives as he struggles through the bri-
ars. Ghost Town (1998) offers a metafictional pastiche of the western
in using genre clichés as self-conscious textual devices and The Ad-
ventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut (2002) relates the story of a
porn star trapped in an already written narrative. Coover’s most re-
cent work, A Child Again (2005) is a collection of short stories that
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CORTÁZAR, JULIO • 75

offers alternative versions of fables, myths, and fantasies, as well as

extending them to consider what might happen if reality intervened,
as in stories that describe the inner life of the Invisible Man or tell of
the return of the children and rats to Hamelin.

CORTÁZAR, JULIO (1914–1984). Argentine novelist and short story

writer who left Argentina in 1951, in opposition to the government of
Juan Peron, settling in Paris where he lived until his death, becoming
a French citizen in 1981. Politically Cortázar was a left-wing radical
who supported the revolutionaries in Cuba, Salvador Allende in Chile
and the Sandanistas in Nicaragua. His writing until Libro de Manuel
(A Manual for Manuel, 1973), however, is not overtly political and
instead emphasizes aesthetic experimentation through the use of tex-
tual fantasy, anti-mimesis and the permutational forms of combina-
tory literature. Cortázar’s early fiction was generally in the short
story format, a mode of writing that he favored throughout his life
and for which he is perhaps best known. His early collections, Bes-
tiario (Bestiary, 1951), Final del juego (The End of the Game, 1956),
and Las armas secretas (The Secret Weapons, 1959), which are col-
lected together in English in The End of the Game and Other Stories
(1967), display the influences of surrealism and often have a fantas-
tic element, in “House Taken Over,” “Bestiary,” or “The Distances”
for example, with the latter displaying a tendency, also found in “Ax-
olotl” or “The Island at Noon” from Todos los fuegas el fuego (All
Fires the Fire, 1966), to explore transferal, projection, and loss of
identity in its story about a young woman who finds a doppelganger
in her dreams and with whom she exchanges identities in “reality.”
Other stories in these early works offer experimentation with textual
perspective and reality (“Blow-Up”), or present textual games, as in
“The Continuity of Parks,” which presents an internalized self-
referential logic in its story of a man reading a book about two lovers
planning to murder a husband who, the final paragraph reveals, is the
reader of the book. Such experiments can also be found in later sto-
ries by Cortázar, in “An Instruction Manual” and “Cronopias and
Famas” from Historias de cronopias y de famas (Cronopias and
Famas, 1962), as well as in Alguien que anda por ahí y otros relatos
(A Change of Light and Other Stories, 1977) and Queremos tanto a
Glenda (We Love Glenda So Much, 1981).
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76 • COUPLAND, DOUGLAS

Cortázar’s first novel, Los premios (The Winners, 1959), shares the
surrealist and fantasy forms of his early short stories and develops an
allegory involving a group of lottery winners aboard a cruise liner
who find that no one is navigating the ship. In his best-known novel,
Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), which has become one of the canonical
texts of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar develops a more radi-
cal form of experimentation that is embedded in the structural and
narrative arrangements of the text, telling the story of Horacio
Oliveira in Paris and Buenos Aires by offering the reader two possi-
ble routes through the novel, one a traditional linear form of reading
that concludes at the end of the Buenos Aires section while the other
interlaces chapters from a third section of “Expendable Chapters”
with those from the first two parts. After La vuelta al día en ochenta
mundos (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 1967), Cortázar wrote 62:
modelo para armar (62: A Model Kit, 1968), an anti-novel that has
its basis in ideas presented in Chapter 62 of Hopscotch. The novel has
a combinatory framework, which allows the sections to be read in
any order, and concerns a group of characters whose lives blur into
each other before their community disintegrates. The novel takes
place in an entirely fictional world and although the city where most
of the action occurs looks like “Paris,” it is also an imaginary city
where a figure invented by the characters (“my paredros”) enters the
text as a “real” fictional character at the end. Ultimo round (Last
Round, 1969) is a collage of poems, reflections, quotations, and es-
says that experiments with the nature of writing by creating a form of
écriture, and was followed by Cortázar’s most politically engaged
novel, A Manual for Manuel, which also uses a collage form, but in
order to present a didactic manual for both the character of Manuel
and for the reader.

COUPLAND, DOUGLAS (1961– ). Canadian novelist who effectively

founded Generation X writing and who has continued to use the
sound-bite style that has become its dominant mode of expression even
though he has shifted focus to deal with personal relationships in his
most recent work. Coupland’s novels generally focus on middle-class
figures who feel that they are marginalized by contemporary society
and who usually embrace their perceived victimhood in order to justify
their refusal to join mainstream culture. His novels are not overtly ex-
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COUPLAND, DOUGLAS • 77

perimental, generally adopting a pseudo-epigrammatic style in order to

generalize about contemporary North American culture, but there are
some typographic and formal variations within his works. His first
novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), estab-
lished many of the features that have characterized his work, and in-
clude: a focus on the withdrawal of the post-Boomer or Generation X
subculture from social involvement; a nonlinear narrative constructed
out of snapshots, vignettes, and epiphanies that dramatizes the timeless
and purposeless drift of his characters’ lives; a concern with the nuclear
threat; and an engagement with a culture of corporations, commodities,
and images that evokes both nostalgia and alienation. The novel also
includes marginalia such as cartoons, slogans, and explanations of
slacker speak, but its most innovative device is the use of inserted sto-
ries that the characters tell each other.
Shampoo Planet (1992) mines similar territory in its representa-
tion of cultural disaffection among the postslacker “global teen”
generation, while Microserfs (1995) uses the same background, but
shifts focus to consider cultural challenges to corporatism in its
story of a group of programmers who set up their own company. Of
Coupland’s works, Microserfs is the most experimental, with a nar-
ration that takes the form of an online journal, complete with typos,
emoticons, and random insertions of information or text (such as
sections that just contain the word “money” or programming lan-
guage, as well as lists of brand names or travel information) that
creates a nonlinear disjointed narrative. Polaroids From The Dead
(1996) also demonstrates some formal innovation as a hybrid text
that combines vignettes, essays, and observations, having a similar
format to the insert stories of Generation X. Coupland’s next two
novels present satires on contemporary culture with Girlfriend in a
Coma (1998) taking commodification as its concern and Miss
Wyoming (1999) commenting on the world of images created by
Hollywood. Coupland’s recent novels have tended to concentrate
on personal relationships and issue-based themes: All Families Are
Psychotic (2001) focuses on the abnormality of “normal” America
in its tale of a dysfunctional family; Hey Nostradamus! (2003) nar-
rates the story of the aftermath of a high school killing in Vancou-
ver through a focus on religion; while Eleanor Rigby (2004) deals
with loneliness and alienation.
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78 • CREELEY, ROBERT

CREELEY, ROBERT (1926–2005). American poet often associated

with the Black Mountain Poets and the projective verse that they ad-
vocated, but whose poetry developed other forms of innovative prac-
tice based on a variety of influences, including the works of Ezra
Pound and William Carlos Williams, Beat poetry, as well as patterns
of composition that he took from painting and music and which in-
cluded Abstract Expressionism, jazz, and the music of John Cage.
Creeley published his first collection of verse, Le Fou, in 1952 and
came to prominence with For Love: Poems 1950–1960 in 1962. In all
he produced over 60 books including: Words (1967), Pieces (1969),
In London (1972), Thirty Things (1974), Later (1979), Echoes
(1982), Dreams (1989), Windows (1990) as well as a novel, The Is-
land (1963), and theoretical and critical works. Creeley’s poetry is
characterized by a concern with form as an expression of content, an
aesthetics in tune with the projective and “open field” ideas of the
Black Mountain Poets, but he also emphasized the notion of the
“breath” which is articulated in his poetry by precisely placed,
though often jarring, line-breaks. Creeley also worked on the princi-
ple that the process of writing itself was the generator of meaning in
the poem, often stating that he didn’t know what a poem would be
about until he had written it.
His poetry is often therefore about the act of making rather than
representation and he tended to pare away allusion, conceptualiza-
tion, and metaphor in his poetry by focusing on contiguous relation-
ships between words in which image and metaphor are secondary or
nonexistent because it is the temporal flow of words and the rela-
tionships between them that composes the meanings in his work. One
of his most famous poems, “I Know A Man,” for example, is an ac-
count of a moment, an intention, and a consequence that articulates a
narrative in only a few lines. Creeley’s poems are generally short, and
focus on small events or emotions, with an emphasis on the particu-
lar rather than a general or totalizing perspective. In his early works,
such concerns tended to explore masculinity and subjectivity, while
in his later works they became part of an aesthetics of moments in
which a movement toward discrete fragments can be seen, albeit
within serial relationships where there are no inherent connections
between units, but where necessary links are created simply by the
arrangement of words. Such is the case in the final lines of “Pieces of
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CTHEORY • 79

Cake,” for example (“Hat, happy, a door—/ what more”), which also
displays Creeley’s concern with the “common audit of days,” a de-
scription of the chains of meaning created through the syntagmatic
relationships between moments and the words that express them.

THE CRYING OF LOT 49. Novel by Thomas Pynchon published in

1966. The Crying of Lot 49 is a compendium of postmodernist styles
and uses pastiche, parody, metafiction, and fabulation in telling
the story of Oedipa Maas’ search for the truth of a secret organization
called the Tristero (or Trystero). Although very short, the novel in-
cludes a range of narrative forms including the Quest, picaresque, a
Beat narrative, Jacobean tragedy (in the form of a Borges-style fabu-
lation), conspiracy, and various narratives of crime (such as a parody
of the Chandleresque detective novel, legal drama, and Mafia narra-
tives); and a variety of narrative strands and stories, such as Oedipa’s
quest itself, the story of the Peter Pinguid Society, Inamorati Anony-
mous, Nefastis’ story of Maxwell Clerk and Maxwell’s Demon, the
story of the American GIs in Lago di Pietà, Diocletian Blobb’s story
of the Trystero, and Thoth’s story of the Pony Express Raid. This
range of representations and subplots articulates the key concern of
the novel which is the very postmodern problem of distinguishing
fiction from reality. Different realities begin to spiral out from the
Tristero, which seems to be a source of variation and possibility not
normally found in a culture that has lost its reality because of its em-
brace of the spectacle of the commodity. The Tristero suggests a hid-
den reality beneath the surface, but it is unclear to Oedipa whether it
is a countercultural organization, a conspiracy orchestrated by offi-
cial society to control the American people, a fiction invented by a
figure called Pierce Inverarity, or a product of her own mind. The
novel, in reversal of the detective novel, ends without resolution—
refusing to offer a master narrative that will bring a unifying truth to
the novel’s multiple strands—by leaving Oedipa in a state of antici-
pation as she attends an auction to wait for “the crying of lot 49” that
will hopefully reveal the truth to her—but not to the reader.

CTHEORY. An internet journal, edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kro-

ker, that began publication in 1993 and which maps the intersections
between postmodernism, philosophy, technology, and culture. The
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80 • CYBERPUNK

journal arose out of the cyberpunk movement’s intersections with

postmodern culture and brings together interdisciplinary writings on
broadly cultural and theoretical discourses with an overall tendency
to cover global, digital, and informational discourses. The journal
publishes articles by both theorists and literary writers, although in
recent years it has tended toward academic concerns that focus on
postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and
Manuel de Landa.

CYBERPUNK. Cyberpunk literature is a type of science fiction that

originated in the 1980s with a focus on technology’s pervasion of so-
ciety, the media, consciousness, and the body. It has often been seen
as a form of postmodern realism because of its concern with post-
modern cultural concerns such as commodification, simulation, the
collapse of reality, the development of a global information society,
and the rise of corporate capitalism. The cyberpunk movement first
found expression in small science fiction and literary journals, before
becoming part of wider public knowledge with the publication of
William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984. Gibson’s novel was soon
followed by the publication of many other novels by American writ-
ers associated with cyberpunk, including books by Greg Bear, Pat
Cadigan, Richard Kadrey, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis
Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams, and Jack
Womack, as well as the important Mirroshades collection, edited by
Bruce Sterling, in 1986. While the 1980s was the height of the move-
ment, many writers (including Gibson) continued to publish cyber-
punk novels after this period and the 1990s saw the thematic and ge-
ographical expansion of cyberpunk as new writers began to produce
fiction within its overall remit while also stretching its concerns into
new areas. Most important of these are Neal Stephenson, Tim Pow-
ers, and Paul di Filippo in the United States, who also developed the
steampunk style; British and Australian writers such as Richard
Calder (who meshes science fiction with Gothic forms of writing),
Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, and Jeff Noon; and writers of “genome”
or nanotech fictions such as Kathleen Ann Goonan, Michael Flynn,
and Wil McCarthy.
Key concerns of cyberpunk focus on social, cultural, and political
areas in addition to technological concerns, but cyberpunk’s most
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DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS • 81

significant elements are human beings’ increasing reliance on tech-

nology and the ways in which technology has got closer to the human
body to the point where it is on the verge of entering it. Texts that deal
with the former aspect of cyberpunk tend to focus on the cultural and
social changes created by technology, such as: cyberspace and virtual
communities; anxieties over simulation and the loss of the “real”; the
death of the nation-state as a result of both the increasing power of
corporations and the development of informational networks; and
hacker and “street-punk” narratives which propose a libertarian and
individualistic subculture as an opposition to the new corporate pow-
ers in society. Works that have a concern with technology’s proxim-
ity to the human body and its entry into the mind tend to focus on is-
sues of consciousness and identity, Artificial Intelligences, the
creation of artificial lifeforms, and philosophical debates about the
nature of humanity. In this regard the “cyborg,” who is both human
and machine (either literally, in the implantation of prostheses in the
body, or metaphorically, in the connection of the mind to information
networks), is a key concept, giving rise to issues such as: whether ar-
tificial or human-machine life-forms can be considered to be human
or not (as well as related cultural anxieties over the threat of technol-
ogy to humanity); debates on future technology and the future shape
of humanity; and posthuman ideas with regard to the end of evolu-
tion and the development of a new branch in human genealogy.

–D–

DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS. A publishing house founded in Chicago

in 1984 by John O’Brien that takes its name from the Flann O’Brien
novel The Dalkey Archive and which is now based in Normal, Illi-
nois, where it has close ties with Illinois University Press. The
Dalkey Archive Press specializes in publishing experimental works
and does not see itself as primarily governed by commercial returns
but by its own contribution to a wider literary community through
keeping noncommercial books such as William H. Gass’ The Tunnel
and Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men in print. Initially an adjunct
to the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the Dalkey Archive has
championed a range of modernist and postmodernist writers from
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82 • DANIELEWSKI, MARK Z.

around the world, although American writers, exponents of the

French nouveau roman and, increasingly, East European writers form
particular niches. Writers published by the Dalkey Archive include
modernists such as Flann O’Brien, Gertrude Stein and Louis-Ferdi-
nand Céline, French writers such as Michel Butor, Claude Ollier,
and Jacques Roubaud, as well as a range of other postmodernist
writers including: Nicholas Mosley, Gilbert Sorrentino, Carlos
Fuentes, Ishmael Reed, Stanley Elkin, and Harry Mathews.

DANIELEWSKI, MARK Z. (1966– ). American novelist whose

House of Leaves (2000) has become a cult classic because of its at-
tempts to apply textual devices drawn from filmmaking to the act of
writing. House of Leaves is a novel about distortions of reality, using
multiple narrators, a nested manuscript, and a film record to tell the
story of a house whose interior is bigger than its exterior dimensions
and which creates new spaces within it, including a new hallway and
a mazelike series of rooms. The text maps its figurative landscape
through the use of different narrators and extensive footnotes (and
footnotes within footnotes) while also including a “maze” of inter-
textual references to literature and academic criticism. The novel
also experiments with the form of the text, using different fonts for
different characters and modifying the typographic layout of the book
to match the situations that the characters find themselves in; for ex-
ample, when the characters are in a labyrinth the text becomes very
dense in order to map their difficulties in navigating a way through.
Part of the novel, which appears in an Appendix, was also published
separately (with some additions) as The Whalestoe Letters (2000),
and presents a record of the correspondence sent to one of the char-
acters by his mother who is incarcerated in a psychiatric facility.
In 2006 Danielewski published Only Revolutions, which has a
punning self-conscious style that pastiches various writers including
James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and Samuel Beckett. The novel tells
the story of two ageless teenagers, Sam and Hailey, each of whom
narrates their version of a road trip across different time periods in
stories that start and finish at opposite ends of the book. Their narra-
tives overlap and mirror each other in an upside-down fashion within
an experimental typographical arrangement that also includes a
chronicle of world events in the margins.
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DARRIEUSSECQ, MARIE • 83

DARRIEUSSECQ, MARIE (1969– ). French novelist who uses exper-

imental techniques and plays with language and narrative in order to
investigate the experience and perception of reality. Her first novel
was Truismes (Truisms, trans. as Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Trans-
formation, 1996), a playful fabulation that takes place in an alternate
France and which has some allegorical elements. It is written in a
deadpan laconic style, as told by a faux-naïve narrator who metamor-
phoses into a pig, and its narrative mixes the everyday with fantasy,
before concluding with the narrator living with a werewolf and eating
home-delivered pizza. Problematic reality is also the concern of Nais-
sance des fantômes (Birth of the Phantoms, trans. as My Phantom
Husband, 1998), a story that is motivated by the disappearance of the
narrator’s husband. This event leads her to create a “phantom hus-
band” and the narrative to create fictions of reality as she descends
into madness. Le Mal de mer (Seasickness, trans. as Undercurrents in
the U.S.; Breathing Underwater in the UK, 1999) investigates the dif-
ficulties of capturing the forms and meanings of reality through an ex-
ploration of the apparent alienness of the natural world as perceived
by human systems of logic and cognition. Nature, symbolized by the
sea, is an unpredictable and inexplicable force (as opposed to human
action, which is symbolized by the narrative of a private detective lo-
cating a missing wife who betrays herself because of the predictabil-
ity of her behavior) with its forms initially being mirrored in the text’s
organization as it moves through a collage of different impressions,
shifting perspective abruptly from one unnamed character to another
in a style that is resonant of Nathalie Sarraute’s later novels.
Bref séjour chez les vivants (A Brief Stay with the Living, 2001) has
a similar form (albeit with more affinities to Virginia Woolf’s The
Waves) and presents, through alternating streams of consciousness,
the events and thoughts that enter the minds of a mother and her three
daughters (with one short interjection by the father) during the course
of a day. Through this narrative structure the novel creates a “dream
geography” of connection that is located within the cognitive
processes of the characters, even though geographically they live in
diverse places, and maps their attempts to understand the world
around them, their family relationships, and the death of a son/brother.
The novel has a cyclical structure that involves cognitive reiterations
of the past and ends with the apparent supernatural reappearance of
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84 • DAVIS, LYDIA

the brother and a textual reenactment of his death. Le Bébé (The Baby,
2002) is an autobiographical work written in the form of notebooks
that presents observations and meditations on the relationship be-
tween mother and baby. Darrieussecq’s most recent work, White
(2003) returns to concerns with ghosts and reality in its story of a
group of Antarctic researchers who have to deal with phantoms of
past relationships and the ghostly traces of previous explorers.

DAVIS, LYDIA (1947– ). American short story writer and author of

one novel who produces minimalist stories in a variety of styles. Re-
alism as a mode of expression dominates in her fiction, but experi-
mental patterns develop in Davis’ reconceptualization of the story-
form. Davis’ story collections include The Thirteenth Woman and
Other Stories (1976), Story and Other Stories (1983), Break It Down
(1986), an anthology of stories from earlier collections, Almost No
Memory (1997), and Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002). Her stories
are generally short sketches, vignettes, or fragments that express a
thought or an image, often without a discernible narrative, and some-
times only extending to a few lines. There are also pastiche pieces,
such as “Lord Royston’s Tour,” and metafictions, such as “The Cen-
ter of the Story” (both from Almost No Memory) while Davis also de-
velops self-referential or inward-looking narrative forms, as in
“Story,” which is driven into circular patterns by the language used
by its narrator. Davis’ one novel so far, The End of the Story (1995),
has a similar logic, and uses a first person narration to tell a story
about the end of an affair that only becomes a story in the process of
writing. The novel also has self-reflexive elements in Davis’ presen-
tation of a woman writing a story about an affair that is a story.

DEATH OF INDIVIDUALITY. A theory proposed by Fredric Jame-

son who has proposed the view that postmodern culture is inimical to
the notion of individuality. Jameson argues that there are two ways of
viewing the death of the individual in postmodern culture, depending
upon the literary and cultural texts being examined or the theoretical
position being offered. In the first version, the death of individuality
is seen as a real cultural process resulting from: corporatization,
which turns people into lifeless automatons obeying corporate rules;
consumerism and commodification, which not only offer a false free-
dom of choice as a compensation for the loss of real power, but also
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DEATH OF INDIVIDUALITY • 85

turn people into commodities and advertising hoardings for com-

modities; the “waning of affect,” where the overload of images in
postmodern culture desiccates the ability to make meaningful con-
nections to other people; and the loss of authenticity. This view ar-
gues that in the past, life was different and it was still possible to have
real individuality: people had more control over their lives, were able
to make meaningful decisions about their future or could live as self-
governing individuals by seeking their fortune or staking a claim to
land that would allow them to be autonomous, either as an American
pioneer or as an adventurer traveling out to the colonies. These pos-
sibilities are no longer available according to this perspective and all
that is left for people to do is to consume a facsimile of individuality
through adverts that only show individuality as a possibility in order
to sell products. Such a view is taken by many postmodernist writers,
but is especially evident in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as well
as being pervasive in contemporary American film.
The second version of the death of individuality is, according to
Jameson, a more radical view which says that individuality never ex-
isted in the first place, but was an ideological myth designed to get
people to obey the State even while thinking that they were choosing
to do so as individuals. In this view, there was no such person as the
frontiersman in control of his own destiny, nor was it possible to go
off and seek your own fortune without reference to social or economic
structures because systems of control were always already in place
wherever anyone went. Thus, in this version, the postmodern death of
the individual is more liberating because it involves the realization
that individuality is a myth. Such a view is more common in post-
modern and poststructuralist theory rather than in literature, but post-
modernist literature’s questioning of self-identity, in novels such as
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or in Language Poetry,
maps this perspective. What is noticeable about both accounts of the
death of individuality is that they are generally western, male and pre-
dominantly bourgeois in origin. This is particularly the case with the
first version which depends upon the belief that anybody, no matter
who they might have been, was able to achieve individuality in the
past, whereas the reality was that women, colonized races, and the in-
dustrial working class were far more constrained in their freedoms
than the predecessors of the western middle-class men who complain
about the loss of their power in the present. The death of individuality
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86 • DEATH OF ORIGINALITY

has been questioned therefore by feminist, postcolonialist, and Marx-

ist critics—although Jameson, as a Marxist, is aware of the historical
factors just noted and tends to prefer the second version.

DEATH OF ORIGINALITY. A concept developed by Fredric Jame-

son (that is very similar to John Barth’s notion of the literature of
exhaustion) that posits the idea that there are no new forms of ex-
pression available to contemporary artists, writers, architects, or di-
rectors of films. According to Jameson, modernism exhausted all the
experimental possibilities that art and literature were capable of pro-
ducing, with the result that there are no longer any new styles left to
be discovered. Effectively, the death of originality implies that every-
thing has already been done and that cultural producers can now only
rearrange old ideas, styles and images, imitate old texts, or, in the
case of popular culture, cover old records or remake old films. For
Jameson, this leads to the creation of pastiche artworks in which past
styles are revisited, reused, and recycled. Postmodernist texts become
empty masks that mimic the styles of modernism, ironize the con-
ventions of realism, or combine old genres. For example, a new lit-
erary genre such as cyberpunk has its basis in other genres, taking
its narratives from the detective novel, its urban landscape from film
noir, its maverick hero from the western or road movie, and its con-
cern with technology from science fiction. The death of originality in
Jameson’s formulation produces the hybridization of texts and genres
where forms, discourses, and genres are combined. This does not
mean that there is nothing “different” about postmodernist writing,
even where pastiche and rearrangement become the dominant princi-
ples, because a text can achieve a level of originality by combining
elements in a different manner to other texts. The films of David
Lynch and Quentin Tarantino have little within them that has not al-
ready been used by other film directors and yet their visions seem
distinctive and even “original.” The same can be said with regard to
literature in the case, for example, of cyberpunk, where William
Gibson’s Neuromancer ostensibly repeats styles taken from film
noir and the detective novel, mixed with issues that can be found in
the works of Samuel R. Delany and J.G. Ballard, but yet produces
a novel that is qualitatively different from anything that has gone be-
fore.
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DEATH OF THE GRAND NARRATIVES • 87

DEATH OF THE GRAND NARRATIVES. An idea proposed by

Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979), a work
primarily concerned with exploring the ways in which knowledge is
structured and transmitted. Lyotard argues that during the Enlighten-
ment period of modernity knowledge was arranged in grand narratives
that were ideologically driven toward a particular goal and which le-
gitimated themselves (and the knowledge they proved) as truth as a re-
sult of their own telos or founding principle (the narrative they cre-
ated). By this he means that knowledge is not the “pure” search for
truth that it is often believed to be, but that it is culturally and socially
driven by the desire to prove a particular ideological viewpoint and
that “evidence” only becomes legitimated as “true knowledge” when
it is in accord with (or interpreted in relation to) the grand narrative it-
self. In other words, a grand narrative is a circular system of belief that
presents itself, and is accepted, as a true understanding of reality even
if it distorts reality to fit its founding principle. Lyotard proposed that
the two dominant ideas (grand narratives) of the Enlightenment were:
the narrative of emancipation from slavery and serfdom through so-
cial reform and a concurrent transformation of knowledge itself (the
Marxist narrative); and the narrative of pure knowledge, separated
from religious belief, which was intended to reveal the totality of both
“Nature” and human forms of knowledge (the Hegelian narrative).
Other theorists have, however, provided other examples including: the
benevolent use of science and technology to liberate humanity from
work; the grand narrative of free market capitalism; and the triumph
of liberal democracy and its ideology.
Lyotard, however, argues that in postmodernism the Enlighten-
ment grand narratives become impossibly contradictory because
they begin to endorse beliefs and practices that are in opposition to
their founding principle. For example, the benevolence of science is
problematized by the development of nuclear weapons or surveil-
lance technology while the narrative of social emancipation is ques-
tioned by the dictatorial and oligarchical practices of the Soviet
states of Eastern Europe (even if these examples are distortions of
the narratives themselves). As a consequence, Lyotard argues two
things: firstly that grand narratives need to be subjected to interro-
gation and, secondly, that postmodern knowledge needs to develop
new ways of acquiring, structuring, and transmitting information in
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88 • DEATH OF THE NOVEL

order to avoid the contradictions of the grand narratives. The former

can be seen in contemporary society in the distrust of institutional
knowledge (the rise of conspiracy theory and its distrust of govern-
ments or the hostility to scientific ideas such as genetically modified
foods) while the latter can be seen in the development of alternative
forms of knowledge which Lyotard calls “small narratives” or paral-
ogy. These are forms of knowledge or belief that do not seek to or-
ganize themselves into a totality, but are open-ended and admit to
their provisional nature (because they do not argue that they are the
final answer). Examples of such “little narratives” would be the al-
ternative or revived forms of spiritual belief that have arisen in con-
temporary society (paganism, Wicca, New Age mysticism) that do
not have an orthodoxy that must be adhered to or the multiple, and
often, conflicting, ideas and “truths” made available by the world-
wide web, something that suggests that it is “fragmentation” that is
the ultimate basis of Lyotard’s postmodern paralogy.

DEATH OF THE NOVEL. An idea proposed by several writers and

literary movements in the 1960s and 1970s and which created heated
debate over the nature of prose literature as a form and as an institu-
tion. The “death of the novel” was announced by both the Tel Quel
group in France and by the surfictionists in the United States with
each group producing articles and books discussing why the tradi-
tional novel was no longer relevant to advanced capitalist and con-
sumerist societies. Key authors who contributed to these ideas in-
cluded Jean Ricardou, Philippe Sollers, and Raymond Federman,
with Ricardou expressing his views in Pour une théorie du nouveau
roman (For a Theory of the New Novel, 1971) and Federman editing
an important collection of essays entitled Surfiction: Fiction Now and
Tomorrow (1975). The main principle proposed by the “death of the
novel” is not that fiction itself has lost its function in contemporary
culture (and that no one should therefore produce writing in the nov-
elistic form any more), but that the form of novel as it has existed
since its origins in the 16th century is no longer adequate as a form
of representation. In particular, the notions of character and plot do
not express the complexities of contemporaneity because they are
governed by ideas of linearity and self-knowledge that are “fictions”
that bear no relation to reality for writers such as Ricardou, Sollers,
and Federman. Writers of the Tel Quel group were particularly hos-
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DEGUY, MICHEL • 89

tile to the notion of character, a position also shared by Nathalie Sar-

raute, while surfictionists such as Federman and Ronald Sukenick
were more concerned with how linear realist plots could be replaced
by alternative forms of narrative. The discussions of the “death of the
novel” expanded in the late 1970s to consider the function of litera-
ture itself and led to famous debates between the experimental writer
William H. Gass, on one side (The World within the Word, 1978),
and the novelist John Gardner (On Moral Fiction, 1978) and critic
Gerald Graff (Literature against Itself, 1979), on the other. Gass ar-
gued for the end of the traditional form of the novel, while Gardner
and Graff argued in favor of its continued moral and realist functions.

DEGUY, MICHEL (1930– ). French poet who has been director of

PO&SIE (a journal of poetry and poetics) since 1977, and who co-
founded the Collège International de Philosophie with Jacques
Derrida and others, serving as its president between 1989 and 1992.
Deguy produces writing that questions the form of poetry itself in
his combination and juxtaposition of verse, prose poems, and con-
siderations of poetic theory within the same volume in order to cre-
ate a dialogue between the different elements. This combination of
different forms means that Deguy’s writings resonate with the prin-
ciples of écriture, something that is compounded by the self-
consciousness with which his poems consider the complexities of
language in relation to its flows and movements and its connections
and disconnections. Quite often his poetry deals with the sense that
reality is provisional or nonexistent until it has been expressed as a
“proposition” within poetry, although he also suggests that poetry
itself can only ever form provisional statements about reality and
its own forms of expression.
In “Prose,” from Figuration (1969), and “Aide Mémoire,” from
Gisants (Recumbents, 1985), for example, he meditates on poetry as a
form that can write the “unsayable,” in the former through the presen-
tation of antitheses and in the latter by considering writing’s ability to
give form to existence. In “Aide Mémoire,” poetry is also configured
as an act of becoming, with writing being a process through which
something becomes made. This principle has informed Deguy’s work
from his earliest publications, Ouï dire (Hearsay, 1965) and Figuration
to his most recent, Aux heures d’affluence (At the Rush Hours, 1993),
L’impair (The Blunder, 2000), and Le spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen,
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90 • DEL GIUDICE, DANIELE

2001). In addition, his poetry has considered language as a cultural

medium, an approach similar to that taken by Charles Bernstein,
through which language makes meaning for the diverse phenomena of
reality by creating connections and correspondences, a process mapped
in Deguy’s poetry through its seamless movement across apparently
discrete elements. This can be seen in the notion expressed in “Du se-
cret” (from Gisants) of “l’abîme de la métaphore” (the abyss of
metaphor) that highlights the gap between phenomena even as the tex-
tual images connect them through their syntactic adjacency.

DEL GIUDICE, DANIELE (1943– ). Italian writer whose main con-

cerns are how perception can be articulated in language and fictional
forms. Del Giudice’s fiction adopts an approach that usually focuses on
the representational structures and systems of understanding that guide
or create experience. His novels also have a metafictional element,
most notably in Atlante occidentale (Western Atlas in the UK, 1985;
Lines of Light in the U.S.), which uses theories of the novel’s form to
experiment with modes of perception by representing the two main
characters as having radically different visions of the world. One,
Brahe, a scientist, sees the world in terms of a “conceptual topography,”
while the writer, Epstein, sees people creating their identities out of the
object world, with each trying to imagine themselves into the system of
perception used by the other. Del Giudice’s other important work, Lo
stadio di Wimbledon (Centre Court, 1983) deals with the search for ex-
actitude in navigating oneself through reality, but shows the main char-
acter, in what is ultimately a modernist conclusion, discovering that the
world cannot be set down in words in any hard and fast way and can
only be understood in its flows as it passes through the individual.

DELANY, SAMUEL RAY (1942– ). African-American writer of sci-

ence fiction and fantasy associated with the New Wave. His innova-
tion within these genres has involved a range of postmodernist ex-
periments, including metafiction, pastiche, and the hybridization of
form and genre. These textual strategies are allied to a postmodern
theoretical concern with the indeterminacy of reality and this combi-
nation produces dissonant texts with narratives that often leave the
reader uncertain of their meaning because of the ambiguities created
by their open-endedness. Delany’s texts also display a strong interest
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DELANY, SAMUEL RAY • 91

in the form and function of language, arising out of his awareness of

semiotic and poststructuralist theory, and he has developed these con-
cerns in a number of important critical writings on science fiction, in-
cluding The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), The American Shore (1978),
and Starboard Wine (1984). Delany’s early works are hybrids of sci-
ence fiction and fantasy and include The Jewels of Aptor (1962), The
Fall of the Towers trilogy (Out of the Dead City, 1963; The Towers of
Toron, 1964; and City of a Thousand Suns, 1965), and The Ballad of
Beta-2 (1965). Subsequent to these works, Delany began to fore-
ground concerns with form, language, and theoretical ideas in Babel-
17 (1966), which dealt with the creation and theorization of an alien
language; The Einstein Intersection (1967), in which the hybrid peo-
ple surviving an apocalypse try to reimagine and reenact the cultural
systems of life before the apocalypse, discovering it to be a language
that they can only partially understand; and Nova (1968), a pastiche
combination of space opera, Grail quest, myth, and magic.
Delany’s most important novels were produced in the 1970s. Dhal-
gren (1975), which has been hailed as an Epic of postmodernist sci-
ence fiction, is an open-ended and circular novel set in the strange city
of Bellona, which occupies a “science-fictional” realm within contem-
porary reality and may be the textual product of its main character, an
ambiguously sexualized poet-rebel figure who explores and writes
about the city in his diary. Triton (1976, aka Trouble on Triton) is a het-
erotopian novel about a character unable to deal with the freedom of the
society he finds on Triton because he feels the need for a “grand narra-
tive” of plurality to replace the strictures and conventions of mainstream
society that he has left behind. Cultural concerns are the main focus for
Delany’s subsequent novels, with the nature of cultural cohesion and
fragmentation structuring the narrative of Stars in My Pocket Like
Grains of Sand (1984), the first part of an unfinished two-volume novel,
and the Nevèrÿon series of fantasy novels (Tales of Nevèrÿon, 1979;
Neveryóna, 1983; Flight from Nevèrÿon, 1985; and Return to Nevèrÿon,
aka The Bridge of Lost Desire, 1987), which present a metafictional fab-
ulation that blurs contemporary reality with its fictional constructed
“other.” Delany has in recent years moved outside of science fiction,
with The Mad Man (1994), which Delany has described as a
“pornotopic fantasy,” and Hogg (1995), a novel about sexual exploita-
tion that was published by FC2 as part of the avant-pop movement.
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92 • DELEUZE, GILLES, AND GUATTARI, FÉLIX

DELEUZE, GILLES (1925–1995), AND GUATTARI, FÉLIX

(1930–1992). Although Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote
works of philosophy and psychoanalytic theory separately, the two
theorists are best known within the study of postmodernism for the
cowritten volumes, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Milles Plateaux (A
Thousand Plateaus, 1980), that together form the larger work Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia. Within this work, Deleuze and Guattari
map a materialist and anti-Freudian account of consciousness and so-
ciety as informed by both a left-wing history of capitalism and ideas
drawn from scientific discourses. Although they do not refer specifi-
cally to postmodernity, Deleuze and Guattari theorized a version of
advanced capitalism in contemporary culture that has been influential
on theories of postmodern society, particularly the concept of schiz-
ophrenia which, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the axiomatic form and
the logical product of the necessary contradiction of capitalism to
both fragment and unify, which they express in terms of “deterritori-
alization” and “reterritorialization.” Deterritorialization describes
capitalism’s urge toward movement and fragmentation (based in the
flows of capital) and produces a schizophrenic culture where mean-
ing is constantly disrupted because all systems are subjected to “de-
territorializing” and decoding imperatives.
Within this “social machine,” consciousness and identity are gen-
erated within a schizophrenic condition, a state of fullness and empti-
ness in which identity is empty of anything in itself, but filled by the
flows of meaning created by capitalism. “Reterritorialization” de-
scribes the tendency to recolonize, in which capitalism reclaims or
retotalizes through the creation of artificial or temporary structures
such as ideology or arrangements of capital (corporatization, for ex-
ample). Within this framework, which they analyze in terms of “de-
siring production,” Deleuze and Guattari write a totalizing account of
advanced capitalism that incorporates economics, social arrange-
ments, and forms of consciousness, focusing on forms of resistance
(creative energies) such as the “rhizome” and “nomadism” which
create kinds of desiring production that either form nodes or lumps in
the system that cannot easily be reincorporated by capitalism’s flows
(an example of which might be anti-global protestors who work
within loose-knit organizations and alliances), or lines of flight that
allow cultural and social freedoms within the system.
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DELILLO, DON • 93

DELILLO, DON (1936– ). American novelist whose novels chart the

flows and ruptures of postmodernity by reference to the cultural
psychosis and fragmentation generated by a culture of simulations.
DeLillo’s fiction is not overtly experimental in style, tending to
adopt a spare form of realism that replicates the languages of popu-
lar culture, the media, and everyday life, but narratively he has been
one of the most innovative of contemporary American writers. His
configuration of narrative is determined by a sense that where lan-
guage can articulate the cultural content of postmodernity (its fixa-
tion with image, commodities, sound bites, and other convenient or
clichéd linguistic fictions), narrative is able to map the forms, pat-
terns, movements, and experiences generated socially, cognitively,
and behaviorally through a variety of textual structures that include
narratives based on system (or the illusion of system, as in End
Zone), randomness (White Noise), fracturing and disconnection
(Great Jones Street), or flow (Americana), often varying narrative
arrangements within the same text. It is his varied use of narrative
and its operation as a cultural map that has made DeLillo highly in-
fluential on writers such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wal-
lace, and Stephen Wright.
One of the main concerns of DeLillo’s fiction is the culture of im-
ages that postmodernity has generated. His first novel, Americana
(1971), charts David Bell’s attempts to sustain his identity by fleeing
the explosion of images he experiences in his job at a New York tel-
evision station, a flight however that locates him within the flow of
images he wishes to evade and which finds its counternarrative in
Great Jones Street (1973), in which the response to the chaos of cul-
ture is a retreat into personal isolation. Players (1977) maps the
schizophrenia experienced in postmodern culture in its portrayal of
Lyle Wynant’s cognitive fragmentation within a culture of images
and violence, while Running Dog (1978) seeks an answer to the frag-
mentation of culture in Glen Selvy’s linear flight across America as
he tries not only to escape his employers’ control but also to avoid the
chaos of an image culture that is typified by the conflicts over a
pornographic film that apparently involves Hitler. White Noise
(1985) also focuses on America’s hyperreal culture, expressing it
within a narrative of randomness that appears to have a logic or a sys-
tem of its own as the novel maps the contradictions of postmodernity
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94 • DELILLO, DON

at a cognitive and individual level, in which postmodernity is pre-

sented as both chaotic and apparently ordered.
The novel also displays DeLillo’s concerns with the attempt and
failure to create patterns that will organize cultural fragmentation
and is one of several “systems” novels (a term originated by Tom
LeClair) that he has written, most of which are about the creation of
the facsimile of a system in the form of a narrative (that is both tex-
tual and cultural or cognitive) that turns out to be a fiction. End Zone
(1972) uses the metaphor of college football to express the loss of
identity within the apparently autotelic cultural systems that the
novel suggests are self-consuming or apocalyptic rather than con-
structive. The Names (1982), one of DeLillo’s most underrated nov-
els, concerns language and the creation of systems of meaning, but
it is in his maximalist novel, Ratner’s Star (1976), that DeLillo
most fully investigates systems as fictions of meaning by using
mathematical principles as a structuring device for each of the chap-
ters in the narrative. The novel concerns the child prodigy Billy
Twillig as he tries to understand a message beamed to Earth from
space, but which is discovered to have been the product of an earlier
civilization on this planet. The novel moves to a point where Billy
and a group of scientists seem to have solved the riddles of the uni-
verse, until an unexpected eclipse confounds their calculations, at
which point the narrative maps the failure of “system” by becoming
a disconnected series of episodes.
Ratner’s Star suggests that truth is unknowable, an idea that
DeLillo developed in Libra (1988), the novel that made his name,
which also returns to concerns with violence and image culture in its
investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The novel ar-
ticulates the investigation as a series of “fictions” that suggest a con-
spiracy narrative as an explanation of events, but also reveals that
none of these can adequately describe reality because history seems
merely to be an unusual concatenation of random occurrences that
only looks like a meaningful narrative if an underlying structure is as-
sumed before the analysis of the phenomena takes place. Mao II
(1991) continues concerns with violence (terrorism) and images
(celebrity), while also meditating on the flows and fragmentations
that seem to be expressed in the concept of the “crowd,” which be-
comes a metaphor for the inexplicable movements of society as a
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DICK, PHILIP KINDRED • 95

whole. Underworld (1997) is DeLillo’s Epic “history” novel and of-

fers a panoramic study of postwar America through the examination
of America’s fictions, systems, and cultural and social tensions. The
novel is his most critically acclaimed work because of the sheer
weight of detail it accumulates, through which it suggests that history
is not linear or ordered but an accretion that may not have an under-
lying narrative. DeLillo’s most recent works have been smaller in
scale and include The Body Artist (2001), which deals with time and
continues concerns with narratives as cultural configurations, and
Cosmopolis (2003), which presents a narrative of a car journey that
is disordered by random interruptions and digressions.

DICK, PHILIP KINDRED (1928–1982). American science fiction

writer whose novels frequently either use metafictional devices or
deal with postmodern issues relating to the indeterminacy of reality
and truth. Dick also articulates issues in relation to postmodern cul-
ture and identity, particularly in the fluctuations in his writing be-
tween metaphors of paranoia, where reality is concealed behind a
world of appearances, and metaphors of schizophrenia, where there
are multiple realities, all of them worlds of appearance, with no sin-
gle dominant reality to provide a paradigm by which to compare truth
and falsity. The “paranoid” perspective can be found in several nov-
els, for example, The Penultimate Truth (1967), a postapocalyptic
novel in which the apocalypse did not happen, the truth of which is
concealed from an underclass living underground who manufacture
products for an elite who live on the surface, and The Simulacra
(1964), where society is split into two classes: an elite who know that
the President of the United States is an android and an underclass who
don’t. The Simulacra also, however, dramatizes cultural phenomena
that relate to postmodern commodification and the pervasion of im-
ages through society. It represents a culture where the simulacrum
and the commodity affect identity by channeling desires away from
social, sexual, and familial relationships and into the world of images
and celebrity. While “reality” is still knowable it is increasingly being
displaced by cultural fantasies that threaten its determinacy.
Even while offering this paranoid perspective, Dick also generates
a less certain, “schizophrenic,” view of reality. The Man in the High
Castle (1962), for example, with its setting in an alternate reality
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96 • DOCTOROW, EDGAR LAWRENCE

where the Axis won World War II, suggests that reality is provisional
even while it privileges the “reality” of history. The “schizophrenic”
view of reality can be seen more fully in The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch (1965), as well as in many subsequent novels such
as: Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Ubik (1969), Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said (1974), and A Scanner Darkly (1977). This latter
novel is typical of Dick’s problematization of “reality” in its story of
an undercover agent surveilling his own drug-dealing activities who
loses understanding of the real reason why he is doing it as he be-
comes ever more involved in the alternate reality the drug provides.
Dick’s concern with “real” or “authentic” experience also extends to
issues of identity. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
and We Can Build You (1972), as well as in short stories such as “We
Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” his fictions focus on whether
individuality is possible in an industrial or postindustrial society. By
using manufactured life-forms (such as androids) or implanted expe-
riences as metaphors, Dick suggests that, in a society based on the
technological reproduction of images, identity is increasingly the
product of the ideologies that are already in circulation rather than a
product of an individual inner self. Identity becomes externalized,
created by the simulations or “fakes” that are perceived, a situation
that leads to the death of individuality.

DOCTOROW, EDGAR LAWRENCE (E.L.) (1931– ). American

novelist whose fiction questions whether or not history is recoverable
through representation. Doctorow has written a number of historical
novels that ostensibly have the form of historiographic metafiction,
in which the “reality” of history is questioned, but his fiction can be
regarded primarily as a literary archaeology of the past that de-
mythologizes history as it has been written in order to make its real-
ity more accessible. Doctorow’s first novel was Welcome to Hard
Times (1960), a more traditional representation of the past set in Ne-
braska at the turn of the 20th century, but in The Book of Daniel
(1971), he developed a more fantastic framework for his alternative
history by fictionalizing the Rosenberg “Atom Spies” case of the
1950s in the story of the Isaacsons and their son, Daniel, who looks
back on events from the Vietnam era. The novel also develops an in-
tertextual historical dimension by citing history books and referenc-
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DONOSO, JOSÉ • 97

ing figures such as Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, and Joe Mc-
Carthy. Ragtime (1974) is Doctorow’s most important exploration of
the fictions of history and investigates institutional racism and the so-
cial and economic operations of power in the 1920s by mingling his-
torical figures (such as Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington, and
J.P. Morgan) with fictional characters in order to problematize offi-
cial versions of history. Other books by Doctorow include two nov-
els set in the Great Depression, Loon Lake (1979) and World’s Fair
(1985), Billy Bathgate (1989), which explores myth making and his-
tory in the criminal underworld by telling the story of the eponymous
hero’s involvement with the real-life gangster Dutch Schultz, City of
God (2000), a Millennium novel set in New York, and The March: A
Novel (2005), which is set during the American Civil War.

DONOSO, JOSÉ (1924–1996). Chilean novelist whose fiction became

associated with the Latin American Boom in the 1970s after the
publication of El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of
Night, 1970). Donoso lived outside his native country (in the United
States and Spain) for much of the 1960s and 1970s before returning
to Chile in 1980 to become one of the Augusto Pinochet regime’s
harshest critics. His fiction generally combines textual experiments
that configure complex and layered relationships between reality, fan-
tasy, myth, and fiction (in which the metaphor of the “mask” becomes
significant as a way of concealing and displaying textual “realities”)
with a pessimistic social perspective that often focuses on notions of
decline, as in his first novel, Coronación (Coronation, 1957), a natu-
ralistic work that offers juxtaposed visions of a decadent aristocracy
and the brutal lives lived by those on the margins of society.
After Este domingo (This Sunday, 1965) and El lugar sin límites
(Hell Has No Limits, 1966), about a decaying community, Donoso
made his name with The Obscene Bird of Night, a novel about a failed
writer called Humberto who acts as a secretary to an aristocrat. His
account of his life is presented as if it were fact, but includes contra-
dictory versions of events, the assumption of multiple identities (or
textual masks), and reference to magical and mythic forms, all of
which cast doubt on the fictional reality that he narrates. The notion
of masks and ambiguous identity also becomes important in Donoso’s
other major work, Casa de campo (A House in the Country, 1978),
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98 • DOUBLE-CODING

a very literary novel about writing that self-consciously pastiches the

form of the classic novel and which foregrounds its own artifice by
using role-playing to explore both social relationships and the ways
in which language becomes a masquerade. El jardín de al lado (The
Garden Next Door, 1981) is more conventionally metafictional, tak-
ing the form of a novel-within-a-novel in a plot that seems to be
about a writer failing to write a novel, but which turns out to be the
narrative of a novel being written by his wife. In addition to these
works, Donoso also produced La desesperanza (Curfew, 1986), a col-
lection of novellas called Tres novelitas burguesas (Sacred Families,
1973) and stories in El Charleston: cuentos (Charleston and Other
Stories, 1977).

DOUBLE-CODING. In his account of contemporary architecture,

Charles Jencks argues that the dominant form of postmodernism is
“double-coding.” Initially he used the term to analyze postmodernist
architecture’s appeal to both elite and popular audiences before com-
ing to see it as a plural style that had replaced the “univalence” (sim-
plicity of form) of modernist architecture. Double-coding comes to
refer to features that can exist either discretely or as a totality, such as
the ironic juxtaposition of different styles, the combination of elite
and popular forms, and the integration of new and old. In this respect,
double-coding can be seen to encapsulate several aspects of post-
modernism: pastiche, the collapse of high and low, and nostalgia.
Jencks primarily discusses double-coding by reference to architec-
ture, but its principles can be seen in the hybridity of form found in
postmodernist literature’s reconfiguration of genre and in the mixing
of codes that occurs in individual literary texts. In the former case, cy-
berpunk’s combination of SF concerns with noir detective fiction
can be seen to be hybridization based on the bringing together of new
and old, while the latter formulation can be seen in the double-coding
of language in the Language Poetry of Charles Bernstein.

DUNCAN, ROBERT (1919–1988). American poet who is often asso-

ciated with the Black Mountain Poets because of his embrace of the
open-ended principles propounded by Charles Olson in the essay
“Projective Verse,” but whose work developed experimental forms
outside of this poetic practice. Duncan was an important figure in the
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DUNCAN, ROBERT • 99

development of the emerging U.S. arts movement in the years imme-

diately after World War II, contributing to the development of the
New York literary scene when he launched the Experimental Review
and to the West Coast scene when he became part of the San Fran-
cisco Renaissance. In 1947 he met Charles Olson and became associ-
ated with the Black Mountain Poets in the 1950s when he began to de-
velop theories on the serial form of poetry as a compositional field
based on the poetics propounded by Olson. Duncan’s important works
include: The Opening of the Field (1960), which contains his best-
known work “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” Roots
and Branches (1964), Of the War: Passages 22–27 (1966), Bending
the Bow (1968), Tribunals: Passages 31–35 (1970), Ground Work:
Before the War (1984), and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). Dun-
can’s poetry has often been seen in terms of the working out of the
ideas expressed in “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” in
which he explores the imaginations made possible by language and
form as a “field” in describing the meadow as “a scene made-up by
the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place, / that is mine.”
Duncan embraced the notion of openness propounded in Olson’s
“Projective Verse” and made this an important principle in his poetry.
He was particularly concerned with the development of the poetic
process as an unbounded form that stretched potentially to infinity,
and the notion of limitlessness informs the serial structure of his work.
Duncan took several ideas as the model for his poetry including “open
field” poetics and Heraclitus’ philosophy of change while, in “To-
wards an Open Universe” (Fictive Certainties), he explored the physi-
cist Erwin Schrödinger’s concepts of atoms in order to develop the no-
tion of disequilibrium as a natural state. In Bending the Bow, Duncan
develops these ideas to consider the concepts of the jigsaw, mobile, or
kaleidoscope as important generative and descriptive images for his
work in the ways in which “polysemous” arrangements create a form
in which each component exists as an independent fragment but also
contributes to the poetry as part of an ongoing process of definition
and redefinition. The major achievement of this poetics was Passages,
an open-ended serial poem which appears scattered across several col-
lections between Of the War and Ground Work II. The poem enacts the
principles of processual composition and deals with a range of issues
including myth, history, religion, and eroticism, as well as offering
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100 • DURAS, MARGUERITE

experimental self-referential forms (as in Passages 13: “The Fire” or

Passages 15: “Spelling”) that comment on the ongoing work’s con-
struction as a moving form. The poem also uses a variety of diction,
very often archaic or self-consciously Epic in style even while it ba-
thetically undercuts such seriousness on occasions, and uses repeti-
tions to both connect and develop the transformations it offers.

DURAS, MARGUERITE (1914–1996). French novelist, dramatist,

and screenwriter who grew up in the French colonies in Indochina
before moving to France when she was 17. (Her given surname was
Donnadieu, but she adopted the name of the French village where her
father’s family originated.) Duras began writing during World War II,
publishing her first novel, Les Impudents (The Shameless) in 1943.
This was followed by two other novels written in conventional form:
La Vie tranquille (The Quiet Life, 1944) and Un Barrage contre le
Pacifique (The Sea Wall, 1950). Subsequent to these works, Duras’
writing became more avant-garde while also developing postmod-
ern concerns with grand narratives and the crisis of contemporary
subjectivity. Alongside these aspects can be found a critique of mas-
culine power structures through which Duras explores specifically
feminine forms of subjectivity and language. Le Marin de Gibraltar
(The Sailor from Gibraltar, 1952) marks Duras’ first change in style
with a narrative that is constructed primarily through dialogue, a
form also used in Des journées entières dans les arbres (Whole Days
in the Trees, 1954) and Le Square (The Square, 1955). This latter
novel, along with Moderato Cantabile (1958), Dix heures et demie du
soir en été (10:30 on a Summer Night, 1960), and L’Après-midi de
Monsieur Andesmas (The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas, 1962),
developed strategies similar to those of the nouveau roman by pre-
senting simple stories about fractured relationships within a focus on
consciousness and dialogue.
Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 1964)
marks another change in direction for Duras, not only in the open-
endedness of its narrative but also in the ways in which it addresses
cultural concerns by focusing on feminine trauma and the working
through of attempts to find a subjectivity. Le Vice-consul (The Vice
Consul, 1966) continues these concerns by offering a critique of colo-
nialism within a doubled narration in which motives for actions be-
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ECHENOZ, JEAN • 101

come ambiguous, a concern that is also found in L’Amante anglaise

(L’Amante anglaise, 1967) where the narrative focuses on an interro-
gation involving a woman called Claire whose testimony becomes
both a way of exploring subjectivity and a way of problematizing tex-
tual truths because the more she speaks, the more uncertain are the
events she describes. In 1959 Duras had written the screenplay for
the Alain Resnais’ film, Hiroshima mon amour, and after L’Amour
(Love, 1971) she concentrated on writing screenplays until the 1980s
when the publication of L’Amant (The Lover, 1984), her best-known
novel, signaled a shift toward more confessional narrative forms in a
semiautobiographical account of sexual awakening set in Indochina,
a trend continued in La Douleur (1985) which presents several nar-
ratives set during World War II.

–E–

ECHENOZ, JEAN (1947– ). French writer whose works utilize pas-

tiche in their combination of different genres, many of which are
taken from popular culture rather than from literature. Echenoz’s
style is lightly humorous and parodic, often with a deadpan quality
that produces a satirical distancing effect. His works are not highly
experimental and have some similarities with the work of Jonathan
Coe in their presentation of accessible forms of postmodernism.
Echenoz’s first novel, Le méridien de Greenwich (Greenwich Merid-
ian) was published in 1979, and since then he has gone on to become
an important figure in French fiction. His novels are generally quite
short and are usually comprised of vignettes that build into a narra-
tive, although the plot itself is usually secondary to the accumulation
of the chapters themselves. This means that his novels often have a
slightly fractured or disorienting quality, something that is com-
pounded by the elements of fantasy in his work. Cherokee (1983), for
example, is a detective novel set in an off-kilter world which devel-
ops increasingly strange occurrences and characters, while L’équipée
malaise (Double Jeopardy, 1986) has a complex fractured plot set in
a comic-book world and portrays fantasy events (gunrunning, an up-
rising in Malaysia, cannibals under the streets of Paris, and mutiny on
the high seas) in a deadpan style that makes them appear everyday.
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102 • ECO, UMBERTO

Lac (Lake in the UK; Chopin’s Move in the U.S., 1989) is a highly
fictionalized espionage novel that mixes the everyday with self-
consciously ironized fantasy elements. The novel’s dry tone and use
of reported speech give the impression that it is an official report de-
livered in the form of a shaggy-dog story, providing irrelevant de-
tails of mundane events or making objects seem out of place in the
fantasy world that the novel conjures up. There are other exotic ele-
ments that give the novel its fictionalized qualities and these include
spies who are artists or entomologists, the fastening of tiny micro-
phones to flies to record conversations, and the use of names for the
characters that could only be found in a pulp espionage thriller. The
result is that the characters self-consciously act as if they were in a
spy film rather than living in the everyday world. Echenoz’s other
novels share many of these features. Les grandes blondes (Big
Blondes, 1995) is a spoof thriller with a film noir atmosphere and el-
ements of the fantastic. It also has a narrative that is formed from a
series of loosely connected vignettes tracing the course of a team of
private investigators as they follow a retired singer around the globe.
Je m’en vais (I’m Gone, 1999), which won the Goncourt Prize, is
similar in form to the Dan Yack novels of Blaise Cendrars and makes
ironic use of popular genres such as the adventure story and the de-
tective novel within the milieu of the contemporary art world.

ECO, UMBERTO (1932– ). Italian novelist and academic who was a

member of Gruppo 63 in the 1960s, but who, as Professor of Semi-
otics at the University of Bologna, was best known for his scholarly
writings until the publication of his first novel in 1980. His criticism
include works on reception theory (L’Opera aperto [The Open
Work], 1967) and semiotics (Lector in fabula [The Role of the
Reader], 1979), as well as essays on postmodernity and contempo-
rary popular culture that have been collected in Travels in Hyperre-
ality (aka Faith in Fakes, 1986) and Apocalypse Postponed (1994).
Eco’s novels are very literary fictions, full of intertextual allusions,
and he has been strongly influenced by the work of Jorge Luis
Borges, after whom he names a character (the blind Jorge of Bur-
gos) in The Name of the Rose. His novels are strongly driven by plot
and are generated by their use of a particular genre, such as the who-
dunit, conspiracy thriller, or historical novel. Although not radically
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ECO, UMBERTO • 103

metafictional, Eco’s novels have a particular concern with the

telling of stories not only as an act in itself but also as an act that
gives shape to reality. As a consequence, his works are full of med-
itations on how narrative and fiction create meaningful systems for
reality. These are often more meaningful than reality itself because
they are presented as having an aesthetic principle that is superior to
anything that the world can provide.
Eco’s first novel, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose,
1980), is a found text and purports to be a medieval murder mystery
written by a monk who served as an apprentice to Father William of
Baskerville—a Sherlock Holmes’ figure who uses principles of ra-
tionality in his detection. The novel mixes history with fiction and
plays with the determinacy of “reality” before validating it when
William successfully solves the case. Il pendolo di Foucault (Fou-
cault’s Pendulum, 1988) develops these concerns with reality by
telling the story of a conspiracy (referred to as “The Plan”) invented
by a group of editors at a publishing house out of already existing
conspiracy theories that they find in the esoteric and occult manu-
scripts they supervise, and which involves pastiche intertextual ref-
erence to numerous other writers of fiction. “The Plan” increasingly
takes over their lives and develops its own reality when it is adopted
as an all-encompassing system by other figures in the novel. Al-
though a satire on the “fictions” created by conspiracy theory, with
their totalizing master narratives, the novel also uses its metafictional
strategies to comment on the ways in which fictions take on a life of
their own and come to dominate reality. L’isola del giorno prima
(The Island of the Day Before, 1994), set in the 17th century, is a
more light-hearted work, telling the story of a man shipwrecked on
another ship just off an island across the date line, who explores the
wonders of the ship while reviewing his life. The novel concerns it-
self with scientific principles that the Enlightenment and modernity
were about to make redundant, using a set-piece structure similar to
that found in Raymond Roussel’s work.
Baudolino (2000) returns to the medieval world of The Name of
the Rose, telling the story of its eponymous hero against the backdrop
of the Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.
The novel shifts between first- and third-person narrations, blurring
its fictional reality, as it relates the stories that Baudolino makes into
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104 • ÉCRITURE

reality through the act of telling. The novel is particularly concerned

with fakes and fabrications, particularly the creation of invented
books and counterfeit relics, and includes a mystery subplot about the
killing of Frederick Barbarossa and the theft of the “Holy Grail” (a
fake that has been taken as real). These elements foreground the
text’s concern with the way in which fictions become part of reality
and determine people’s beliefs and actions, something also developed
in the novel’s concern with the way in which reality is created by the
structures of narrative. At the beginning, Baudolino seeks out a his-
torian (the historical Niketas Choniates) who he believes will give
meaning and order to his shapeless stories, an act that finally brings
“truth,” albeit through an interpretation that may be just another
story. The final irony of the novel occurs when Niketas decides to re-
press Baudolino’s story from his history of the attack on Constan-
tinople which Eco suggests is the real “lie” because it shows how his-
tory only tells stories that tally with its own discourses of what is
believable. The concern with narrative’s ability to shape events and
create meaning is also developed in La misteriosa fiamma della
regina Loana (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2004), a novel
about a man who loses his memory and who seeks to reconstruct his
past by creating a narrative out of old newspapers, records, a diary,
and comic books (which are included in the text).

ÉCRITURE. A form of writing theorized and adopted by the Tel Quel

group. Écriture is language without boundaries, a form of writing
that attempts to produce texts that avoid all forms of linguistic and
discursive categories. These include the narrative conventions and
style of writing associated with genre (such as, for example, the re-
quirements of certain types of plot and event or genre-specific lexi-
cons) or literary forms and movements such as realism, Expression-
ism, and surrealism. The aim of écriture was to strip away the
preexisting formal conventions that the Tel Quel group believed were
imbued with the political and social values of dominant ideology and
to produce “pure” writing that was not inscribed ideologically. Thus,
although texts would also therefore strip away political, social, and
cultural content, the Tel Quel group argued that textual resistance to
the languages of power was a radical political act in itself, even if no
political messages were being presented. The type of writing pro-
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ELKIN, STANLEY • 105

duced by écriture tends toward ultra-modernist formal language in

texts that hermetically focus on their own processes of construction
in the play of signifiers within them.

ELKIN, STANLEY (1930–1995). American writer who used conven-

tional forms of fiction, most notably character-based narratives, in
order to express a vision of America that highlighted the strangeness
and excesses of everyday life. His works have been classified as
midfiction because they use parodic forms of textuality and develop
referential elements in their concerns with morality and their satiri-
cal perspective on contemporary society. Elkin is notable for the
gusto of his writing style which inventively combines a range of dis-
courses filtered through idiomatic and comic forms of language to
express the dissonances of the culture he maps. His first novel,
Boswell (1964), tells the story of a professional wrestler who at-
taches himself to celebrities in order to escape everyday life and is
written partly in the form of a confession and partly as a diary. A Bad
Man (1967) more clearly plays with form in telling the story of Feld-
man, a criminal who is told to restore himself to self-righteousness
by the Warden of the prison where he is held. The novel works as an
intertextual parody by combining the narratives of Franz Kafka
with Hollywood prison melodrama but also offers comment on au-
thority in its representation of the Warden in a variety of oppressive
roles including a messianic revenger, a McCarthy figure and a
Torquemada-like inquisitor. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) tells the
story of a radio presenter who attempts to impose order on the chaos
of America, represented by the voices on the phone-ins he hosts (and
by the digressions and subplots of the narrative), but who loses his
identity in the face of its plurality.
The Dick Gibson Show developed a more satiric strain in Elkin’s
writing, a feature more evident in The Franchiser (1976), which
also continued his concern with the cultural space of the United
States. In this instance, Elkin’s focus is on the ways in which the
“real” America of its people has been displaced by simulation in the
“cargo of crap” created by commercial franchises, a process the nar-
rative enacts by utilizing the language of salesmen and advertising.
The Living End (1979) is a cosmic fantasy about the afterlife that in-
cludes a long monologue spoken by God, but has concerns with
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106 • ELLIS, BRET EASTON

contemporary society in its representation of Heaven as a theme-

park. George Mills (1982) is generally considered to be Elkin’s most
important novel and presents a narrative that alternates fabulation
with satire on contemporary society as it catalogs the history of all
the “George Millses” there have ever been, every single one of
whom has been a blue-collar servant to more important people, and
who have ultimately had to accept the ordinariness of their lives.
The Magic Kingdom (1985) returns to satire in its tale of a group of
children with life-threatening ailments who are taken to Disney
World and articulates the dreams of society that have been created
for commercial reasons by revealing their simulated qualities.
Elkin’s final works, The Rabbi of Lud (1987), The MacGuffin
(1991), and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995) are more character driven, al-
though they share similarities with his earlier work, most notably
The MacGuffin which is reminiscent of The Dick Gibson Show in its
presentation of a character who constructs a conspiracy in order to
give order to his life. Elkin also published collections of short sto-
ries and novellas in Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1965),
Searches & Seizures (1973), and Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1993).

ELLIS, BRET EASTON (1964– ). American novelist who is mainly

associated with the blank fiction of the 1980s but who began to use
more recognizable postmodernist metafictional strategies with the
publication of his most important work, American Psycho, in 1991.
Ellis’ first two novels, Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of At-
traction (1987), are typical of the 1980s “blank generation” fiction
with the former novel gaining cult status as its most famous example.
The two novels focus on the hedonistic lifestyles of two groups of
privileged young people and present narratives of excess that involve
endless empty consumption by affectless characters who have lost
touch with social reality. Less Than Zero is a fairly conventional bil-
dungsroman, but The Rules of Attraction develops a more complex
formal style in its split narratorial structure. Ellis’ third novel, Amer-
ican Psycho, is an important postmodernist novel that uses metafic-
tional forms while also satirizing postmodern culture. It became no-
torious because it was interpreted as a misogynistic story about a
serial killer, but its satire on contemporary culture, as well as its use
of an unreliable first person narration and self-reflexive tropes, prob-
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ELLROY, JAMES • 107

lematize this reading by suggesting that the events are either perverse
fantasies, in which the satire is directed at masculine desire, or a cri-
tique of a commodified society that has lost touch with reality.
Ellis also utilizes metafictional devices in The Informers (1994), a
patchwork of interconnected stories set in Los Angeles that uses mul-
tiple narrators and perspectives to problematize its fictional reality
while also continuing to highlight the loss of value created by a post-
modern commodity culture obsessed with signs and simulations.
Glamorama (1999) returns to the parody of contemporary culture
found in American Psycho by fusing the same concern with com-
modity fetishism with a satire on celebrity, articulating textual fan-
tasy in the latter half to foreground the empty fictions created by
postmodern culture. Ellis’ most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), is
more overtly metafictional, taking the form of a fictional autobiogra-
phy in which “Bret Easton Ellis” is the main character, while also de-
veloping intertextual allusions along with fabulated and supernatu-
ral elements in order to draw attention to its own fictionality.

ELLROY, JAMES (1948– ). American author who has radically rein-

vented the genre of detective fiction by exaggerating its conventions
and extending its reach to consciously consider social and cultural
concerns. In so doing, Ellroy has helped to develop postnoir writing,
a postmodernist revision of the classic noir forms that can be found
in the novels of James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Ham-
mett, and Cornell Woolrich. Ellroy’s early novels, such as the Lloyd
Hopkins’ trilogy (Blood on the Moon, 1984; Because the Night, 1984;
and Suicide Hill, 1986) are quite conventional versions of the detec-
tive novel, but in the “L.A. Quartet” Ellroy began to develop a post-
noir style of writing. These novels explore immorality, corruption,
and perverse desire in postwar Los Angeles, beginning in the 1940s
in The Black Dahlia (1987), which offers a fictionalized investigation
into the notorious unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, and conclud-
ing in the late 1950s with White Jazz (1992). The Black Dahlia is the
most conventionally hard-boiled of the “L.A. Quartet,” retaining a
narrative focus around the detective figures while also presenting a
web of corruption that extends across Los Angeles. The novel, how-
ever, shows the forces of the law to be morally compromised, a rep-
resentation that is exacerbated in The Big Nowhere (1988) which
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108 • ERICKSON, STEVE

concerns the murder inquiry into the fictional Wolverine murders and
begins to develop a darker tone in its implication that corruption and
perverse desires pervade Los Angeles.
L.A. Confidential (1990) is the most accomplished of the “L.A.
Quartet” and offers a fuller demythologization of the Los Angeles
Dream than the novels that preceded it by presenting corrupt business
deals, a thinly veiled portrayal of the Disney company, and attempts
by members of the police force to take control of the gangs in Los
Angeles in order to present a culture where hierarchies of value have
collapsed. L.A. Confidential also introduced a new style of writing,
the inadvertent result of Ellroy having to edit a manuscript that was
too long for the publisher’s specifications. In order to achieve the re-
quired length, Ellroy clipped out prepositions, adjectives, and ad-
verbs, thus giving his writing a pared down and frenetic style that
jumps focus very abruptly. Ellroy has persisted with this style ever
since and its disorienting effects seem to perfectly match the frac-
tured and unbalanced culture he represents. Ellroy’s fiction has de-
veloped a wider context since the “L.A. Quartet,” but he maintains a
focus on the relationship between fact and fiction in order to offer a
postmodernist version of historiography in which he writes alterna-
tive fictional histories that problematize official ideological versions
of the past. All his novels use historical figures (or thinly veiled ver-
sions of them), a device used in the “Underworld USA” series which
deals with American history in the 1960s. Where the “L.A. Quartet”
had real-life gangsters as characters, the “Underworld USA” series
has Howard Hughes, Robert Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover making
significant contributions, with Ellroy using them to debunk the myths
of the 1960s. At the time of writing, American Tabloid (1995) and
The Cold Six Thousand (2001) had already appeared in the series
with a third in the offing.

ERICKSON, STEVE (1950– ). American writer whose novels fore-

ground narrative disjuncture and spatial dislocation, displaying ex-
perimental forms that are similar to those of Alain Robbe-Grillet in
Project for a Revolution in New York and landscapes resonant of the
uncanny worlds of J.G. Ballard. Erickson’s novels utilize jump cuts
that change focus to create incongruous events and skewed perspec-
tives by shifting an episode to another location with the same char-
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ERICKSON, STEVE • 109

acters in a new situation. This occurs most notably in Arc d’X (1993)
which transfers characters from Paris to an abstract city that is seem-
ingly outside time and space. The effect of such strategies is to cre-
ate narratives of cognitive dissonance where the familiar becomes
strange and the strange familiar. Erickson also configures fantastic
landscapes that have a magic realist quality to them, but which also
veer into science-fictional narratives of the New Wave SF variety,
particularly those set in imagined postapocalyptic or alternative
worlds. Rubicon Beach (1986), Amnesiascope (1996), and Our Ec-
static Days (2005) all take place in a futuristic Los Angeles that is
also a defamiliarized version of contemporary Los Angeles, although
the latter novel has a magical element in its fantasy landscape, which
has a lake turning the city into an archipelago of islands and build-
ings that have become so decadent that they rot and die.
The use of such irreal landscapes produces a world of cultural es-
trangement that Erickson uses to comment on contemporary cul-
ture’s psychological and social dissociation. Rubicon Beach, for ex-
ample, shifts between dream and reality with one becoming the
other without any relocation of the frame of the narration, an effect
that articulates a sense of displacement even while continuing the
seamless flow of the narrative. Erickson’s first novel, Days between
Stations (1985), articulates a similar sense of dislocation. It tells the
story of a romance in a postapocalyptic environment, constructing
unsettling story and text worlds through its rearrangement of textual
forms to create a dissonant postmodernist novel that defamiliarizes
everyday experiences, expectations, and perspectives. The wind-
blown sands of the novel’s desert act as a metaphor for this sense of
shifting realities, but also suggest that geographical landscape itself
is a construction of human imagination. The constructedness of the
reality in which human beings live also transfers to Erickson’s treat-
ment of time, very often represented in the form of history. In Am-
nesiascope, a novel set in an eroticized and hysteric near-future Los
Angeles, conventional notions of time have broken down to the ex-
tent that characters have to traverse different time zones as they
move around the city. In Tours of the Black Clock (1989) history is
rewritten when a pornographer inadvertently taps into Adolf Hitler’s
desires and, by supplying him with pornographic texts that fulfill or
arouse these desires, helps change the decisions he makes, through
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110 • EVERGREEN REVIEW

which Erickson draws attention to the fictions of both history and

contemporary culture.

EVERGREEN REVIEW. American literary journal founded in 1957

by Barney Rosset of Grove Press and published quarterly, for the
main part, until it suspended publication in 1973. From its inception,
Evergreen Review aimed to publish the newest trends in fiction, po-
etry, drama, and ideas, its first issue including an essay by Jean-Paul
Sartre and a short story by Samuel Beckett, while its second issue
was devoted to the appearance of Beat writing, which it announced
as the creation of the “San Francisco Scene.” Throughout the re-
mainder of the 1950s Evergreen Review continued to champion Beat
literature while also introducing continental writing and ideas to
America, including existentialist and absurdist writers as well as au-
thors of the French nouveau roman. During the 1960s, the journal in-
creasingly adopted countercultural social and political attitudes while
developing the range of its literary offerings. Many writers later to be
designated postmodernist were published in Evergreen Review dur-
ing this period, such as William S. Burroughs, Robert Coover,
Richard Brautigan, John Ashbery, and J.G. Ballard, as it main-
tained its commitment to publishing experimental writing until the
suspension of publication in 1973.

–F–

FABULATION. A type of storytelling that utilizes the fantastic and al-

legorical elements of the fable format, but in which the fantasy aspect
is given precedence and displaces the mirroring of reality that is usu-
ally expected from allegory. A fabulation presents itself as a mirror
that hints at allegorical reference, but ultimately only produces a re-
flection of itself; its allegory providing instead a self-contained inter-
nally motivated fiction that has no moral and no meaning outside of
the text itself. It was Robert Scholes, in the 1960s, who popularized
fabulation as a term to describe a tendency in postwar fiction that
used fiction-making techniques themselves to create imaginary and
fictional worlds. Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges are im-
portant figures in the creation of this form of writing (although Leo
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FABULATION • 111

Perutz also influenced its development) in their projection of fic-

tional realities that have little or no correspondence to existing cul-
tural parameters, but which offer a convincing imagined reality that
is internally consist within the fiction and language of the text itself.
An example of such a story is Borges’ “The Babylon Lottery” which
tells of a “fiction” that develops a logic of its own. The story is about
a lottery played for money which begins to have both rewards and
punishments that are then separated from money and attached to ac-
tions. When this occurs, the exercise of free will disappears because
all actions are determined by the lottery. The story is an imagined
universe, but has an allegorical fabular quality that comments on the
ways in which reality itself has become a fiction.
This is a significant feature of fabulation because it suggests that
what is taken for reality is actually only a text or a “story”: the
world itself is fictional and fabulations simply reveal the world’s
fictionality by creating fictions that mimic those of “reality.” Cul-
ture and society are systems of meanings that have no true basis in
reality, but they become the ways by which societies not only un-
derstand reality (albeit a “reality” that is invented by the system it-
self) but also create “fictional” systems to live by: the “labyrinths”
or webs that entrap people in their own constructions. Fabulation
proposes that meaning is not inherent within reality or society.
Meaning only exists in the structures society creates, but these do
not describe reality because they are inventions. Nevertheless, even
as inventions, they determine everyday behavior and belief systems
(or ideology) so that even when people realize they are fictions they
still rely upon them because they cannot face the alternative: the ab-
solute lack of meaning in everyday life. Fabulation, therefore, can
be seen to comment on the “fictions” (myths, grand narratives, or
structures of ideology) that society uses to organize its power struc-
tures, patterns of everyday behavior, and value systems. Although
much fabulation is content to comment on the absurdity of such a
situation (in the writings of Borges, John Barth’s LETTERS, Um-
berto Eco’s Il pendolo di Foucault [Foucault’s Pendulum], or the
short stories of Robert Coover), fabulation can have a political di-
mension. Here, it is used to criticize the exercise of power by the
State or by corporations as if it were a “natural” occurrence, rather
than an invented system that serves the interests of the wealthy and
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112 • FEDERMAN, RAYMOND

powerful and perpetuates their control of society. Such a use of fab-

ulation can be seen, for example, in Carlos Fuentes’ Cristóbal
Nonato (Christopher Unborn), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of
Lot 49, and Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos.

FEDERMAN, RAYMOND (1928– ). American writer of Jewish an-

cestry who was born in France and whose family perished in the Ger-
man concentration camps during World War II; Federman only sur-
vived because his mother hid him in a closet. He migrated to the
United States in 1947, studying at Columbia University (and produc-
ing a book on Samuel Beckett as a result of his graduate studies), be-
fore beginning his writing career in the 1960s. Federman’s fiction is
highly experimental, but draws on memories of his family and the
atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews, with his texts fre-
quently dealing with the silences and repressions that these have en-
gendered (both personally and culturally) either through the use of
erasure as a textual device (in which words are crossed through) or in
the use of typographic innovations that draw attention to the blank
spaces on the page. As a writer of surfiction (regarding which, Fed-
erman edited the essay collection Surfiction: Now and Tomorrow in
1975) and a member of Fiction Collective, Federman uses other tex-
tual experiments that are more self-reflexive, beginning with his first
novel, Double or Nothing (1971). This work uses the conventional
narcissistic technique of having a writer writing a novel in order to
meditate on the process of writing by presenting a debate between
four voices (a narrator, a fictional author, the protagonist, and the au-
thor himself), but does so through a radical form of typography in
which different structures are used throughout the work.
Federman’s next two novels, one written in French, Amer Eldo-
rado (1974), the other in English, Take It or Leave It (1976), are ex-
perimental autobiographical fictions in the form of journeys that con-
sider the notion of selfhood through the examination of the process
of writing. Their focus is on the words being used, rather than the
story itself, through which they create a pastiche language of bor-
rowings and rephrasings which becomes the main concern of the nar-
ratives. Federman’s next two novels, The Voice in the Closet (1979)
and The Twofold Vibration (1982), are his most important. The for-
mer uses symmetrical blocks of prose (in English and French) to
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FICTION COLLECTIVE • 113

dramatize the “shape” of the voice in the closet, the “boxed-in” lan-
guage Federman uses as he draws on his own memories and multiple
other voices (including the words of Maurice Roche) to confront the
deaths of his family. The latter novel deals with the lies of fiction in
its attempts and failures to represent the Holocaust, using a pastiche
collage form and a science-fictional premise to understand the fic-
tional and historical writings and rewritings that muddy the event it-
self. To Whom It May Concern (1990) also develops this concern and
presents a series of letters by a writer setting out his idea for a book
about two children who survived the Holocaust. Federman’s other
novels develop more playful qualities, but still focus on the act of
telling a story, as is the case with Smiles on Washington Square
(1985), which imagines its own imagination of what a love story
might look like, and Aunt Rachel’s Fur (2001), a novel about the re-
turn of “Reymond Namredef” to France where it is the fictions of au-
tobiography that form the main focus. Federman’s most recent work
is My Body in Nine Parts (2005) which literally offers an account of
various parts of Federman’s body.

FICTION COLLECTIVE. American cooperative publishing venture,

currently organized under the name Fiction Collective 2, that was
founded in 1973 in order to advance the publication of experimental
fiction not normally considered by mainstream publishers. The group
was founded as a result of disenchantment with mainstream publish-
ing’s emphasis on marketable product, and the commodification of
literature that this entailed, leaving nontraditional literature with very
few opportunities to find an audience. The Fiction Collective was
committed to the publication of innovative fiction organized solely
around the authors who published for it, who included Raymond Fe-
derman, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, and Ronald Sukenick, with
all authors belonging to the editorial board and performing the tech-
nical and economic functions of publishing. The collective was reor-
ganized as FC2 in 1989 when it incorporated a board of directors and
developed the Black Ice imprint, adding a number of new writers in
the process, including Mark Amerika, Samuel R. Delany, Mark
Leyner and Cris Mazza. During its existence, the Fiction Collective
has published a range of different experimental fiction, although it has
been dominated by particular aesthetic approaches at different stages:
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114 • FICTIONAL AUTHORS

surfiction in the 1970s and avant-pop in the 1990s. It has, however,

never committed itself to one particular vision because its commit-
ment to the expansion of its author-based organization invites new in-
novations and new authors irrespective of their aesthetic approach.

FICTIONAL AUTHORS. A common strategy of postmodernist

metafiction (where the Chinese-Box formula of texts-within-texts is
utilized) is to include fictional authors within the novel or story. Al-
though this technique has been used before (examples can be found
in the works of such disparate authors as François Rabelais, H.P.
Lovecraft and Arthur Conan-Doyle, for example), the substitute or al-
ternative writer whose works are included or discussed within a given
novel has been used extensively by postmodernist literature to prob-
lematize the unity of the text, either to suggest that all texts are tis-
sues of already written texts or to emphasize that fiction is fiction by
putting reality at a further remove. Examples of writers who have
used fictional authors are: Jorge Luis Borges (Pierre Menard, Her-
bert Quain), Flann O’Brien (De Selby), John Barth (“John Barth”),
A.S. Byatt (Christabel LaMotte), Italo Calvino (Tazio Bazakbal and
Silas Flannery among many who appear in If on a winter’s night a
traveller), Thomas Pynchon (Richard Wharfinger), Gilbert Sor-
rentino (Antony Lamont, who is also a character in the book-within-
a-book of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds), Ronald Sukenick
(Roland Sycamore), and Kurt Vonnegut (Kilgore Trout).

FICTIONALITY. A term that describes the way in which postmod-

ernist metafictional texts display the artificial conventions of the fic-
tional form (such as plot and character) and question fiction’s ability
to provide verisimilitude or convincing illusions of reality because of
its reliance on such artifices. Fictionality refers, in particular, to the
creation of fabulations or self-conscious “text worlds” in which the
logic of the fictional world displaces that of external reality so that it
is the conventions and values of the textual world that determine
characters’ actions and thoughts. Fictionality, therefore, often has an
absurdist element in which the textual logic decides that characters
will, for example, live on the ceiling (as in Éric Chevillard’s Au pla-
fond [On the Ceiling]) or base their lives on the outcomes of a lottery
(Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Babylon Lottery”). The focus on fiction-
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FICTIONS • 115

ality can be very exaggerated, as in metafictional texts that solely

draw attention to the fiction-making process by narcissistically re-
turning to the textual devices that they are using (for example,
Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew or William H. Gass’ Willie
Masters’ Lonesome Wife) in order to highlight their status as a lin-
guistic and narrative construction. Other texts may adopt less obvi-
ous forms of fictionality by using their fictional premise as a struc-
turing principle or as a mechanism to generate the plot while leaving
their constructedness implicit rather than overt. The latter formation
can be found in absurdist, fabulational, or fantasy incarnations of
postmodernism, such as the novels of the nouvelle génération de
Minuit, midfictions by authors such as Stanley Elkin or Martin
Amis, or magic realist novels such as Gabriel García Márquez’s
Cien años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).

FICTIONS. Anthology of short stories by the Argentine writer Jorge

Luis Borges, published in 1956 as Ficciones, that incorporated
pieces mainly written in the 1930s and 1940s, and which established
Borges’ worldwide reputation when it was widely translated in the
1960s. The English version appeared in 1962 and had a profound ef-
fect on experimental writers in the United States, where its fiction-
making strategies helped introduce a generation of authors to
metafictional styles of writing and influenced the development of
American postmodernist literature. Borges’ fabulations, which are
characterized by self-conscious fictionality, create a world in
which books, language, and fictions are the main source for under-
standing reality. This is not the reality of the world of phenomena,
however, but a reality of signs, stories, and ideas. Borges’ world is
a textual landscape in which fictions become the guiding principle
in the projection of imaginary worlds or mythologized realities.
“Death and the Compass,” for example, takes place in an irreal city
that is based on Buenos Aires, but which is so unfamiliar that it
looks like no city in existence. Similarly, “The Library of Babel”
imagines an endless universe that is a library, but pays no attention
to its origins nor to everyday matters such as where the inhabitants
find their food. This is because Borges is not interested in reflecting
reality, but in creating artifices that might have an allegorical mean-
ing, as in “The Babylon Lottery” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
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116 • FISHER, ALLEN

(which meditate on the ways in which constructed systems become

part of social reality) but which very often, as in “The Approach to
Al-Mu’tasim” or “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” are sim-
ply about the fiction-making process itself.

FISHER, ALLEN (1944– ). British poet and painter who has produced
a series of overlapping poetry cycles (or “clusters”) using different
poetic forms and structures, as well as different media, and which he
began with Place in 1971. Place (1971–1980) involved a develop-
ment of open field poetics that emphasized process and production
through a focus on South London but also extended to other contexts
that included Fisher’s work as a painter. The cycle culminated in
Place Book One (1976) and Unpolished Mirrors (1980) and dealt
with the multiple relationships between the city and the self by pre-
senting London as an “ecumenopolis” with “many centres” (Becom-
ing, 1978). Cluster 2, Blood Bone Brain (1971–1981) focused on per-
formance and installation, microfiches of which appeared in Blood
Bone Brain (1982). The Art of Flight (1975–1989), was concerned
with systems and the materiality of language, beginning with The Art
of Flight (1975), which derived its structure from Johann Sebastian
Bach’s “The Art of Fugue,” and Stepping Out (1985), which empha-
sized dislocation and the physical substance of language.
The final cluster, Gravity as a Consequence of Shape (1982– ) is
the longest and most complex of the four and deals with the poetics
of space-time. The sequence of publications in this cluster is: Brixton
Fractals (1985), Breadboard (1994), Civic Crime (1994), Disposses-
sion and Cure (1994), Fizz (1994), Now’s the time (1995), Ring Shout
(2000), Sojourn (2000), Watusi (2001), Woodpecker (2001), and Vole-
spin (2001). The sequence deals with “a history of ideas for future
culture” and focuses on the disruption and creation of paradigms
through the generation of later poems out of maps provided by ear-
lier poems. The sequence also presents explorations of perception
and consciousness while also engaging with scientific ideas drawn
from chaos theory, quantum physics, and animal morphology, with a
particular focus on forms of complexity in systems.

FOWLES, JOHN (1926–2005). British novelist who set himself in

opposition to the parochial realism of “the Movement” that was
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FOWLES, JOHN • 117

dominant in English literature immediately after World War II by

developing experimental strategies even while he retained a sense
of the utility of traditional forms of storytelling and the humanist
concerns of realism. Fowles can be regarded as a nonpostmodern
postmodernist writer in that his articulation of devices associated
with postmodernism, such as metafiction, self-reflexive games and
self-consciousness, are matched by existentialist concerns and no-
tions of individuality and creativity that are associated with the ide-
ology of Romanticism. Fowles’ sense of his difference from his
contemporaries was established in his first novel, The Collector
(1963), whose situation and narrative involved a parody of “the an-
gry young man” figure with which “the Movement” was associated.
After The Aristos (1964), a series of observations and thoughts in
which he set out his philosophy on freedom and individuality,
Fowles published The Magus (1965; rev. 1977), a novel he had been
writing since 1953, which develops the ideas of The Aristos within
a fictional fantasy framework.
The Magus was followed by Fowles’ most successful novel, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which develops more experi-
mental forms of narrative construction. The novel is a historio-
graphic metafiction set in Victorian England and tells a story
about social convention focusing on appearance and reality that
leads to two endings in which the hero is presented making two
choices, neither of which is privileged. The novel also plays with
form through its metafictional strategy of using an intrusive author
who admits that the “realist” fiction he is writing is an act of imag-
ination, with the result that its double ending becomes a way for
Fowles to announce his liberation from the conventions of realism.
After The Ebony Tower, a collection of stories published in 1974,
Daniel Martin (1977) presented a more traditional narrative about a
screenwriter, albeit taking place within a structure of shifting nar-
rative perspectives. Mantissa (1982) is a more playful fiction that
deals with writing in a parodic way in a narrative about Miles Green
and the muse, Erato, that also engages in self-reflexive games in-
volving the act of creation. Fowles’ final novel was A Maggot
(1985), a historical novel set in 1736 that deals with notions of self-
hood using pastiche, self-reflexive explorations of realist conven-
tions, and elements of fantasy.
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118 • FUENTES, CARLOS

FUENTES, CARLOS (1928– ). Mexican novelist and critic born in

Panama City who was one of the key figures of the Latin American
Boom in the 1960s and who served as Mexico’s ambassador to
France in the 1970s. Fuentes is a politically engaged writer who uses
textual innovations to reflect referentially on politics and culture. In
his youth he was a member of the Communist Party and although his
views are now less radical he still maintains a left-wing position.
Fuentes’ work focuses on a range of issues, including the successes
and failures of the Mexican Revolution (shifting from a feeling of op-
timism to a critique of its cultural and political institutionalization),
concerns with history, and questions of Mexican identity. His most
important concern develops from the latter and entails the investiga-
tion of cultural and political relationships, initially focusing on Latin
America and Europe, but shifting in recent times to a concern with
Mexico’s place in global culture and its specific relationship with the
United States. These issues are explored through the aesthetic and
cultural discourses of his texts, often using fantasy, fractured narra-
tive forms similar to those of the nouveau roman, and multiple nar-
rative possibilities to map both utopian and dystopian alternatives in
order to defamiliarize the operations of power and the ideological
construction of identity and culture. Beside his novels, Fuentes has
written on these issues in a number of critical and cultural works, in-
cluding La nueva novella hispanoamericana (The New Spanish
American Novel, 1969), an important discussion of “Boom” litera-
ture and its cultural contexts, Myself with Others (1988), and La ge-
ografia de la novella (The Geography of the Novel, 1993).
In his early writing career, Fuentes cofounded the review Revista
Mexicana de Literatura with Octavio Paz in 1954 and published his
first novel, La region más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear) in
1958, an urban fiction about Mexico City that bears similarities to
John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. in its use of panoramic montages and its
concerns with nationhood and identity. Fuentes established his liter-
ary reputation with La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of
Artemio Cruz, 1962) which rolls through first-, second-, and third-
person narrations to offer alternate perceptions of reality in telling the
story of Artemio Cruz as he looks back on his life, his abandonment
of revolutionary politics, and his embrace of capitalism. Through its
different narratorial positions the novel addresses Mexican history,
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FUENTES, CARLOS • 119

different identity positions, and the failure of the Mexican Revolu-

tion’s idealist principles. In Aura (1962), Fuentes continued to exper-
iment with narratorial positions, through the use of the second
person, and in Zona sacrada (Holy Place, 1967) and Cambio de piel
(A Change of Skin, 1967) he developed his concerns with national
identity. In 1975 Fuentes completed his major novel, Terra Nostra
(1975), which adopts shifting time frames and narrative lines, articu-
lating a range of experimental devices (including intertextuality,
metafictional devices, fantasy, and a polyphonic narrative structure)
to consider Mexican and Latin American culture in relation to Euro-
pean and world history. The novel stands not only as one of the ma-
jor novels of Latin America, but also as one of the major works of
late-20th-century world literature.
After La cabeza de la hidra (The Hydra Head, 1978), a novel of
international intrigue, and Una familia lejana (Distant Relations,
1980), a gothic-fantasy novel, Fuentes wrote El gringo viejo (The Old
Gringo, 1985), one of his best-known and most conventional works,
about a three-sided relationship involving Ambrose Bierce. In 1987
he produced yet another major work in Cristóbal Nonato (Christo-
pher Unborn), a novel that is narrated from the point of view of
Christopher as he waits in the womb to be born on the 500th an-
niversary of Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. The novel ex-
plores the history of Latin America and its relationship with the
United States to comment on the way in which the latter’s corporate,
commodity, and image culture continues a history of dominance
based on a sense of its ideological superiority. The novel’s discon-
nected form and its multiple voices and narrative lines, maps the cul-
ture of fragmentation and chaos that has been created by European
and American interventions in Latin America, but which in American
ideology is presented as a “natural” condition that legitimates its
treatment of, and continued intervention in, the region. The novel,
however, also notes cultural continuities between Europe and Latin
America as positive elements, using, for example, the apparently
metafictional device of tracing Christopher’s genealogy back through
fictional characters to declare its own literary influences. Fuentes has
continued to explore the relationship between Mexico and the United
States, most notably in Frontera de cristal (The Crystal Frontier,
1995), a collection of stories that explores the economic, cultural, and
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120 • GADDIS, WILLIAM

metaphoric flows and boundaries between the two countries, while

his most recent novel, La Silla del Águila (The Eagle’s Throne,
2003), is a satirical fantasy that is more focused on Mexican politics.

–G–

GADDIS, WILLIAM (1922–1998). American novelist who, despite

only writing four novels, produced two of the most important works
of fiction in late 20th-century American literature, in The Recogni-
tions (1955), his first novel, and JR (1975), his second. Gaddis’ texts
primarily take the form of dialogue between characters who are only
identified when another character addresses them. The novels flow
from one episode to another with occasional connecting sections,
creating narratives out of textual movement where the relationship
between chronological and narrative time becomes confused. These
elements become more pronounced in his later work, with The
Recognitions offering more in the way of a narratorial presence be-
cause this work is concerned with finding a place outside the total-
izing economic and cultural forces at work in late capitalist America
whereas the later novels adopt a view closer to Marxist analyses of
society to imply that nothing can avoid being recuperated by the
movements of capital. Gaddis’ work can be regarded as an interface
between modernist and postmodernist literature in that he rarely
draws attention to the fictionality of the text, but the configuration
of narrative in his later works referentially maps contemporary cul-
ture and locates him more within postmodernist concerns as opposed
to the attempt to establish a modernist form of critical distance in
The Recognitions.
The Recognitions is a maximalist encyclopedic novel that deals
with the way in which Art is subsumed into a capitalist system of
commodities to create a culture of counterfeits where notions of
value outside of economics become problematic. The narrative con-
cerns Wyatt Gwyon whose ability to copy Flemish painters of the
15th and 16th centuries is exploited by Basil Valentine and Recktall
Brown. Around this main narrative line, however, other characters
cohere and diverge, taking the novel through several countries even
while it maintains a focus on a world of fakery that is typified by
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GADDIS, WILLIAM • 121

the characters of Stanley, who wants to compose music like Bach,

Otto, who copies down conversations to include in his plays, and
Frank Sinisterra, a forger who thinks of himself as an artist. The
novel uses the metaphor of a palimpsest in which a forged Titian is
scraped away to reveal an original but worthless painting under-
neath, but under which is a real Titian, to articulate ideas about
what is real and what is false. The novel creates endless mirrors in
which fakes reflect each other to imply that reality has been lost be-
cause of the obsession with faking authenticity, not only aestheti-
cally and culturally, but also emotionally and with regard to iden-
tity. Both philosophically and structurally, The Recognitions locates
itself within modernist concerns, yearning after the “real” in order
to find an anchor to both avoid capitalist commodification and to be
able to reinstate hierarchies of aesthetic value, while also providing
objective narrations to distance itself from the counterfeit culture
mapped in the dialogue sections.
It was not until 1975 that Gaddis produced his second novel, JR,
which is less confident in the ability to find anything of value that
might be considered to be “real,” because the totalizing flows of cap-
italism, which are mapped in the novel’s virtually uninterrupted flow
of dialogue, recuperates the “real” into its system of simulations. As
a consequence, the “real” only exists as a counterfeit, a situation
mapped in the creation of a corporate empire by the 11-year old JR
out of worthless or “counterfeit” companies. Gaddis’ last two novels
also deal with the way in which money as the only value has per-
vaded America. Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) is a short work about the
selling of religion that takes place within one house and uses the
same form as JR by offering dialogue as its main narrative compo-
nent, but which uses overheard conversations and phone calls to sug-
gest not only that the wheeler-dealer of the novel, Paul Booth, is on
the periphery of the economic system but also that it is a valueless
system with no center. A Frolic of His Own (1994) is a longer novel
concerning America’s culture of litigation that varies its form by in-
cluding a play and transcripts or judgments from court hearings, but
retains its satiric emphasis on capitalism. In his last years, Gaddis
produced Agapē Agape (2002), a posthumously published mono-
logue in the style of Thomas Bernhard that meditates on art, pla-
giarism, and reproduction.
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122 • GALEANO, EDUARDO

GALEANO, EDUARDO (1940– ). A radical Uruguayan writer who

fled Uruguay in 1973 after he was imprisoned by the military dicta-
torship, living in exile in Argentina and then Spain until his return to
Montevideo in 1985. In El libro de los abrazos (The Book of Em-
braces, 1989) Galeano describes himself as a believer in “Magical
Marxism,” which is “one half reason, one half passion, and a third
half mystery” and his books often share the same paradoxical and ex-
cessive qualities. He has written some traditional journalism and his-
torical texts, including Las venas abiertas de América Latina (The
Open Veins of Latin America, 1971), an account of the colonial and
economic exploitation of Latin America from the 15th century to the
present day, and El fútbol a sol y sombra (Soccer in Sun and Shadow,
1995), an account of the history of football. The dominant style of
Galeano’s writing is typified by his most important text, the epic
Memoria del fuego trilogy (Memory of Fire), which defies catego-
rization with regard to genre. Memory of Fire is made up of Los
nacimientos (Genesis, 1982), Las caras y las mascaras (Faces and
Masks, 1984), and El siglo del viento (Century of the Wind, 1986) and
presents a chronology of the Americas (with a main focus on South
America), from the pre-Columbian era to the end of the 20th century
in a text that is a cross between fiction and history. The trilogy, how-
ever, does not simply narrate important events, but offers a mosaic of
episodes and stories that include short biographies of important peo-
ple, single events in peoples’ lives that sum up the “magical reality”
of Latin America, mystical occurrences, beliefs, imagined conversa-
tions, and short fictionalized accounts of anonymous people that have
an “Everyman” quality to them.
In The Book of Embraces Galeano describes his writings as an at-
tempt to represent both the “magical and hideous” realities of Amer-
ica. While Memory of Fire achieves this through its vast scope, The
Book of Embraces does so through the creation of a text that is part
autobiography and part meditation on the wonders and injustices of
South America. The book is written in short sections containing
memories, impressions, fictionalized and real events, descriptions,
and fantasies. As a collage of fragments it has no overall structure,
but various themes run throughout the text, including particular con-
cerns with the politics of terror and resistance in Latin American dic-
tatorships, the entwining of the mundane and the fantastical, as well
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GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL • 123

as meditations on the function of both the real and imagination not

only in art and literature, but in the everyday lives and dreams of peo-
ple, cities, and nations. Galeano suggests a relationship between art
and the world in which art and literature create reality through influ-
encing or shaping people’s actions and thoughts, implying that art
cannot be abstracted from the culture that created it or from the cul-
ture that it creates. Many sections deal with these concerns, but one
in particular, “Children’s Own Art,” can be taken as paradigmatic in
its narration of the story of a storyteller telling a tale of a blue rabbit
who travels to the moon before returning to Earth to eat, defecate,
and sleep, during which he dreams of a blue rabbit who travels to the
moon. This section incorporates interrelations between the everyday
and the fantastic, while also considering the effect of storytelling on
wider cultural consciousness.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL (1928– ). Colombian novelist who

was one of the key figures in the development of the Latin Ameri-
can Boom of the 1960s and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1982. His best-known novel is Cien años de soledad
(One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), which is not only one of the
canonical texts of the Boom, but also one of the most important nov-
els of the 20th century. García Márquez’s fiction is often classified as
magic realist, but his left-wing politics has also generated a social
and historical dimension within his work that leads to an exploration
of the political discourses and social structures of Latin America. His
writing has tended to oscillate between social realism and more fan-
tastic forms, sometimes within the same text, and both his early and
late works have utilized more conventional forms of storytelling. Of
the Boom writers, he is thus more innovative than Mario Vargas
Llosa, but less experimental than writers such as Carlos Fuentes and
Julio Cortázar. His first published work was La hojarasca (Leafs-
torm, 1955), which is set in the fictional town of Macondo where
many of García Márquez’s works are set. The novel is focused
around a wake, with events narrated from different perspectives, but
the frame of the work is still rooted in naturalistic forms of represen-
tation. The same is the case with El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
(No One Writes to the Colonel, 1961) and La mala hora (In Evil
Hour, 1962), with the former focusing on the historical period of the
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124 • GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL

civil war of the 1940s and 1950s and the corruption and repression it
engendered, and the latter presenting a narrative dealing with repres-
sion as a means to maintain civic order.
In 1967 García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude,
the novel that established his international reputation and popularized
magic realism in the United States and Europe. The novel, however,
is a complex configuration of textual forms that also uses fictional
self-consciousness, allegory, and more conventional realist tech-
niques in its generational story of the Buendía family. In using dif-
ferent tropes to reflect on each other, the novel offers an allegorical
history of Macondo that demythologizes fictions that have attached
to Latin America’s ideological representation not only by focusing di-
rectly on political and economic repression, but also by defamiliariz-
ing the magic realist fictions of Latin America as a mythic, primal,
and authentic place where fantastic events “naturally” occur. El otoño
del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) retains a mythic
focus in its story of the absurdities of dictatorship, but also locates its
fictional dictator within the histories of authoritarianism in Latin
America. Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death
Foretold, 1981) presents the story of a vendetta in which the murder
is announced on the first page before working through a re-creation
of the event within a distorted chronology.
García Márquez’s next novel, El amor en los tiempos del cólera
(Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985), has proven to be his most pop-
ular novel outside Latin America and presents in a realist frame a
more personal narrative of a rejected suitor’s enduring love for a
woman which is finally requited in their old age. El general en su
laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth, 1989) is a more important
work and presents a fictional account of the final days of Simón Bolí-
var as he journeys to the Caribbean coast of Colombia and comes to
terms with both the lack of recognition for his exploits as the libera-
tor of South America and his loss of authority in becoming an ordi-
nary citizen rather than a living hero. Del amor y otros demonios (Of
Love and Other Demons, 1994) also offers a historical perspective by
telling a story set in the colonial period, while Memoria de mis putas
tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2004) returns to the
more personal form of Love in the Time of Cholera. In addition to
these works, García Márquez has produced a number of novella and
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GASS, WILLIAM HOWARD • 125

short story collections. He also began writing his memoirs after he

was diagnosed with cancer in 1999, the first volume of which, Vivir
para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale) was published in 2002.

GASS, WILLIAM HOWARD (1924– ). American novelist often as-

sociated with the surfiction movement because of his views on the
redundancy of traditional forms of fiction. Although he began writ-
ing in the 1960s, Gass has produced only a small number of fictional
texts because, after the publication of On Being Blue: A Philosophi-
cal Inquiry in 1975, he spent the next 20 years working on his major
work, The Tunnel, which was finally published in 1995. During this
period, however, he did write a great deal of critical work, develop-
ing and extending ideas about literature and philosophy that were
first expressed in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970; rev. 1979), in
essays that have been collected in The World within the Word (1978),
Habitations of the Word (1984), and Finding a Form (1996). As the
titles of his critical writings suggest, the focus of Gass’ theory and
practice of fiction concerns the play of language and fiction-making
strategies in which the word becomes the world. His metafictional
writings blur between late-modernist and postmodernist aesthetics
and he often uses a stream of consciousness style which, because of
its interiority, directs attention to the construction of thoughts and re-
ality by words. Gass’ aesthetic can be seen, for example, in his first
novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), a stream of consciousness novel set
in a timeless rural American past that is detached from any contem-
porary social and political concerns.
The short story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Coun-
try (1968), is still Gass’ best-known work and includes the much an-
thologized “The Pedersen Kid,” which moves from a form of real-
ism to a focus on memories and phantasms, and the famous title
story, in which Gass first foregrounds his aesthetics of linguistic
self-reflexivity. The title story focuses on a fractured self who lives
in the town of “B.,” a reference to W.B. Yeats’ “Byzantium” and a
consciously literary device denoting the abbreviation of proper
nouns in 18th-century fictions that articulates the linguistic reality of
both the story and the narrator, whose consciousness gradually
merges with the town he occupies. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
(1968) is also constructed in terms of language rather than in terms
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126 • GENERATION X LITERATURE

of referentiality. Despite the use of the stream of consciousness

form, the text is constantly interrupted by the “author” or by changes
in typography (including film scripts, advertisements, and newspa-
pers) so that it directs attention to its own status as fiction or writ-
ing. On Being Blue is a hybrid text that is both meditation and fic-
tion, presenting a discussion of language and consciousness
focusing around the concept and linguistic basis of the color “blue.”
The Tunnel (1995) is a sustained consideration of the relationship
between the word and the world, focusing on the Nazi murder of the
Jews as told in an autobiographical first-person narration. The narra-
tor, Kohler, is a historian who has just finished a work called “Guilt
and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany” but who, instead of writing an
introduction to his work, finds himself writing a confessional mem-
oir that becomes The Tunnel. The novel deals with the relationship
between fiction and history and, in particular, whether words can be
used to create texts or sentences when they seem to be empty of
meaning. The novel includes a number of postmodernist or metafic-
tional devices, using typographical experimentation, intertextual
reference to other writers, a complex associative narrative, and self-
conscious textual devices that highlight the fictionality of the text.
The narrator also begins to interweave his “Introduction” with his
historical work, a metaphor that expresses the blurring of self, world
and word, while also foregrounding the question of where truth is to
be found, in history or in autobiography; both of which have written
forms that are not reality itself.

GENERATION X LITERATURE. A form of writing that developed

in the United States in the 1990s which describes the postmodern cul-
tural experience of the post-Boomer (or “Buster”) generation who
were born after about 1960. Generation X refers to a subcultural
grouping also known as the “X” Generation, “slackers,” and “13th
Gen,” whose attitudes developed at the same time that they were ar-
ticulated in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X (1991) and
films such as Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1989) and Jefery Levy’s
S.F.W. (aka So Fucking What, 1994). Separating the cultural articula-
tion of Generation X from its literary and cinematic expressions can
be problematic because it can be argued that it comes into existence,
in a very postmodern way, primarily as a result of its representation.
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GIBSON, WILLIAM • 127

As both a cultural and literary movement, Generation X is character-

ized by a radical cynicism to mainstream society and money, but is
most notable for its anti-corporate and anti-consumerist attitudes.
This outlook leads to a withdrawal from society (for example, the
dreams of escape in many of Coupland’s novels) and the expression
of nonconformist beliefs (such as conspiracy theory and alternate re-
ligions) that challenge society’s grand narratives. Generation X, how-
ever, is also recuperated by postmodern culture through its location
within an inescapable culture of commodification and simulation.
In writing, Generation X literature develops out of the blank fic-
tion of the 1980s and expresses similar nihilist sentiments, even in its
hopes for escape from society, which are often knowingly presented
as fantasies. In Generation X, for example, the characters’ fantasy
world of “Texlahoma” replicates a retro version of postmodern fran-
chise society. Apocalyptic fears and desires (in the fantasy of erasing
existing society) are also common to Generation X writing and can
be found in a number of Coupland’s novels as well as in Chuck
Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). A feeling of marginalization from
mainstream society perhaps best characterizes Generation X writing,
however, and this is expressed in a focus on people who are rejected
by society or who embrace nonnormative and excessive activities and
desires (which Generation X literature suggests are also typical of,
but repressed by, mainstream America). In addition to Coupland and
Palahniuk, Generation X writers include Bruce Craven, Pagan
Kennedy, and Darcy Steinke, while Kathy Acker can be seen as a
forerunner and Michel Houellebecq as a French expression of simi-
lar nihilistic attitudes.

GIBSON, WILLIAM (1948– ). American writer who has lived in

Canada since 1968 and who began writing science fiction in 1977.
Gibson is usually regarded as the most important figure within cy-
berpunk writing, not only because of the importance of his 1984
novel Neuromancer, but also because his fiction articulates key con-
cerns of the movement in its expression of a near-future information
society where the human-machine interface has become the basis of
social and economic relations. While not experimental in form, Gib-
son’s novels display postmodernist features in their postmodern
concerns with reality and meaning, while textually they use pastiche
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128 • GIBSON, WILLIAM

forms in bringing together different genres, most notably the combi-

nation of science fiction with other forms such as the multiplot nar-
rative that can be found in the 19th-century novel and in detective fic-
tion. The use of the portmanteau narrative, in which apparently
discrete subplots are finally integrated, also allows Gibson to enact
the paradoxical fragmentation and synthesis of contemporary culture,
represented most obviously in cyberspace’s global community of in-
dividuals, but also in the megacities he envisions (where the diverse
groups and communities of an atomistic society cluster together) and
in the signs and symbols of cultural meaning systems whose appar-
ent disconnection is revealed to have an underlying pattern. Gibson
is probably best known for his representations of “cyberspace” and
human-machine interfaces, but his novels also deal with other cyber-
cultural concerns including: the creation of autonomous virtual life,
the search for authenticity in an inauthentic corporatized and com-
modified culture, related quests for transcendence, and the creation of
popular cultural and subcultural communities or identities outside
mainstream society.
After producing some early stories, including “Johnny Mnemonic,”
that were later collected in Burning Chrome (1986), Gibson published
Neuromancer, a novel that set out many of his concerns and which
used a pastiche form in its combination of SF and hard-boiled noir
crime fiction. The novel also introduced the cultural landscape of real
and virtual relations, commodities, corporations, enclaves of authen-
ticity, and megacities that was to become the setting for subsequent
novels in his first trilogy: Count Zero (1985) and Mona Lisa Overdrive
(1988). These novels, like Neuromancer, deal with “paradigm shifts”
that change social and cultural relations, as well as sharing characters
and narrative forms, as they develop concerns with both reality and
simulation and the identities created by the technologization of hu-
manity in the form of the cyborg. After The Difference Engine (1990),
a steampunk novel set in Victorian England, cowritten with Bruce
Sterling, Gibson produced a second trilogy that shifted focus to con-
cerns with technology’s impact on communities and culture. The first
of these novels, Virtual Light (1993), presents an opposition between
an artificial corporate world and an alternative enclave of authenticity
focused around the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in which
nanotechnology offers the possibility of transferring the virtual from
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GOYTISOLO, JUAN • 129

cyberspace into reality. Idoru (1996) has a similar focus in its story of
a personality construct, Rei, who becomes “real,” playing with notions
of identity by opposing her “reality” to the corporately manufactured
identity of a “real” rock-star, while also considering further the cre-
ation of community in the location of an enclave of authenticity in vir-
tual space. All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) develops issues from Idoru,
focusing around the potential paradigm shift represented by one of the
character’s ability to see nodal points in history. Gibson’s most recent
novel, Pattern Recognition (2004), shifts its setting from the near fu-
ture to the present to consider the new patterns of meaning created by
the cultural language and meaning systems of the internet.

GOYTISOLO, JUAN (1931– ). Spanish novelist who uses postmod-

ernist forms to defamiliarize and demythologize Spanish culture and
literature in which his left politics and embrace of Arab culture, along
with a privileging of homosexuality, offer alternatives to the official
ideologies, histories, and values of Spain. In 1956 Goytisolo went
into self-imposed exile from General Francisco Franco’s Spain, liv-
ing in Morocco and Paris. In his writing he has developed experi-
mental styles using stream of consciousness, pastiche, an intertex-
tual dialogue with Spanish literature (and the values it espouses), and
a flowing discourse without cultural and literary markers that all but
eliminates punctuation. After early novels that were written in a more
traditional vein, including, Juegos de manos (The Young Assassins,
1954), Duelo en paraíso (Children of Chaos, 1955), and Fiestas
(1958), Goytisolo embarked on a trilogy of works that remains his
most important achievement. In Señas de identidad (Marks of Iden-
tity, 1966), Reinvindicación del conde don Julián (Count Julian,
1970), and Juan sin tierra (Juan the Landless, 1975), Goytisolo of-
fers accounts of alienation developing out of autobiographical and
historical concerns and moves through phases of experimentation to
offer a critique of Spanish culture and ideology. This can be seen in
Count Julian both in the narrator’s use of books by the “Greats” of
Spanish literature merely to kill insects and in the form of écriture
developed by Goytisolo (which he uses in later works) that feeds in-
tertextually off the Spanish literary tradition but within a distinctive
transgeneric style in which parodies are incorporated within a flow of
consciousness and language. Juan the Landless extends such
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130 • LE GRAND INCENDIE DE LONDRES

concerns in its rejection of Spain, its polyphony of voices and its

stretching of time and space.
Makbara (1980) shares the same style but incorporates more self-
reflexive elements in its concerns with the act of writing, while
Paisajes después de la batalla (Landscapes after the Battle, 1982)
deals with language and politics in a shifting and fragmented narra-
tive that plays games with fictional reliability in its many short chap-
ters. Las virtudes del pájaro solitano (The Virtues of the Solitary Bird,
1988) and La cuarantena (Quarantine, 1991) extend Goytisolo’s in-
tertextual strategies, the former by mixing the writings of St. John of
the Cross with those of the Sufi Ibn Al Farid to present cultural hy-
bridity as an opposition to the cultural “purity” of Spain and the lat-
ter through creating a chaotic mix of references from European and
Islamic culture. La saga de los Marx (The Marx Family Saga, 1993)
is Goytisolo’s most important novel since the early trilogy and uses
fantasy and authorial intrusions within his usual style of disjunctive
temporality and syntax. The novel relocates Karl Marx and his fam-
ily from the 19th century to the present, and includes sections in
which socialist realist stereotypes harangue Marx from inside their
paintings, in order to comment on the perversion of Marxism in the
Soviet Union, while also however using Marx to criticize the rise of
corporate capitalism in the West. Political concerns also come to the
fore in El sitio de los sitios (State of Siege, 1995), a novel about Sara-
jevo during the wars in Bosnia that uses defamiliarizing techniques
to comment on Western indifference to the conflict. Goytisolo’s most
recent novels have moved more toward cultural critiques of Spanish
and European values by using metafictional devices such as literary
games with authorship and storytelling in Las semanas del jardín
(The Garden of Secrets, 1997) and intertextuality and literary bor-
rowings of characters in Carajicomedia (A Cock-eyed Comedy,
2000), which also uses discourses of homosexuality to challenge ide-
ological and religious strictures.

LE GRAND INCENDIE DE LONDRES. See THE GREAT FIRE OF

LONDON.

GRANGAUD, MICHELLE (1941– ). French poet born in Algiers

who has been a member of OuLiPo since 1995. Grangaud’s earlier
poems were examples of combinatory literature based on anagram-
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GRASS, GÜNTER • 131

matic and palindromic verse forms, as in Mémento-Fragments: ana-

grammes (Memorandum-Fragments: Anagrams, 1987) and Formes
de l’annagramme (Forms of the Anagram, 1985), in which lines of
poems contain palindromes or different anagrams based on the same
letters. Her work has developed outside of such literary constraints
over the years and in her most important collection so far, État-civil
(Civil Status, 1998), she uses catalogs, episodic interlinked collec-
tions of images, and linguistic analysis. Her work has also developed
a self-reflexive concern with the use of poetic language in poems
such as “Mon portrait en zèbre” (“Portrait of myself as a zebra”) and
“Les mots remplissent tout l’univers” (“Words fill the whole uni-
verse”), from État-civil, by considering the way language creates not
only an understanding of reality but also its very shape because of the
way it expresses reality in binary oppositions and semiotic differ-
ences. Her most recent works have been the prose assemblages, Cal-
endrier des poètes (Calendar of Poets, 2001) and Calendrier des fêtes
nationales (Calendar of National Holidays, 2003), which are collages
of events, facts, and anecdotes (significant or insignificant), listed ac-
cording to date, including the information (in the former work) that
in one year on April 24th Roland Barthes ran through the rain to catch
the Number 58.

GRASS, GÜNTER (1927– ). German novelist born in the “Free City

of Danzig” (now Polish Gdansk) of German and Kashubian-Polish
parents who has produced some of postwar Germany’s most impor-
tant works, an achievement recognized when he was awarded the No-
bel Prize for Literature in 1999. In 2006 Grass admitted that as a 17-
year-old in 1945, he served in the Waffen SS, a disclosure that caused
controversy in Germany because his fiction has explored and criti-
cized the legacy of the Nazis, but which also led to many writers de-
fending the integrity of his critique of Nazi and postwar Germany.
Grass’ fiction is particularly concerned with configurations of history
that defamiliarize official versions of the past, but within a context
that displays an awareness of the ways in which history as a discourse
has generated the present. Although Grass’ works have a realist di-
mension he also articulates postmodernist textual strategies in order
to explore alternative versions of history. These include fantasy, bur-
lesque, mythology, overlapping narratives and experiments with nar-
rative time, as well as more conventional postmodernist forms such
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132 • GRASS, GÜNTER

as historiographic metafiction. His first novel, Die Blechtrommel

(The Tin Drum, 1959), is still his most famous and forms the first vol-
ume in what has come to be known as “The Danzig Trilogy.” The
novel tells the story of Oskar Matzerath (a child who decides to stop
growing at the age of three) through whose focalizing perspective the
rise of Nazism and the establishment of the Third Reich are filtered.
This fantasy framework, running within a narrative of overlapping
events and multiple adventures, leads to a distance from the adult
world moving around Oskar and generates a distorted point of view
that transforms the text’s fictional reality from a realist to a grotesque
and defamiliarizing mapping of events that implies that the move-
ments of history follow a logic of insanity.
The other novels in the trilogy are Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse,
1961), which deals with militarism from a postwar retrospective po-
sition, and Hundejahre (Dog Years, 1963), which explores Danzig
from prewar to postwar eras using three different narrators to satirize
the German economic miracle and to expose the forgetting of history
that has allowed Nazis to gain influential positions within postwar so-
ciety. These novels led to a fuller concern with contemporary Ger-
many which is displayed in Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (The
Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 1966), a play that focuses on post-
war East Germany while also attacking Bertolt Brecht for refusing to
support the 1953 East Berlin Workers Uprising. In the 1960s Grass
became involved in Social Democrat politics and, after Örtlich
betäubt (Local Anaesthetic, 1969), a novel dealing with the Vietnam
protest movement, he published Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke
(From the Diary of a Snail, 1972), which interweaves a fictionalized
diary of his political experiences with a story about a snail collector
in order to meditate on cultural stasis. This was followed by Der Butt
(The Flounder, 1977), a comic novel set in the Pomeranian marshes
that uses fairy tale and myth (including a talking flounder) to config-
ure an epic narrative ostensibly about cooking that moves from pre-
history through various time periods to consider a history of civiliza-
tion in which the sterility and destructiveness of masculine histories
of power are deconstructed in favor of feminine achievements.
Das Treffen in Telgte (The Meeting at Telgte, 1979) also has a his-
torical basis, but places it within contemporary concerns by linking a
meeting between poets during the Thirty Years War to postwar German
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GRAVITY’S RAINBOW • 133

cultural and literary settings. After Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen

sterben aus (Headbirths or the Germans Are Dying Out, 1982), a novel
about overpopulation that deals with environmental concerns, Grass
wrote Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986), a comic novel about apocalypse
whose black humor and fantasy elements focus on the replacement of
human culture by rats through interwoven narrative strands, one of
which reintroduces Oskar from The Tin Drum as an old man. In the
1990s, Grass’ novels began to deal with the fall of Communism in
Eastern Europe, initially in Unkenrufe (Call of the Toad, 1992), which
concerns the resurgence of capitalism and the market-driven impera-
tive that leads businessmen to exploit death and cultural reconciliation,
and then in Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995), which uses the
backdrop of the 19th century to reflect on German unification and the
privatization of former East German companies. In 1999 he published
Mein Jahrhundert (My Century), a collection of 100 stories narrated by
a polyphony of voices that chronicles 20th-century German history,
which was followed by Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), which deals
with questions of German guilt in telling the story of the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine in 1945.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. Encyclopedic novel by Thomas Pynchon,

published in 1973, that is often regarded as the Ulysses of postmod-
ernist literature. Gravity’s Rainbow is a historical novel, set at the end
of World War II, which uses the V-2 attacks on London as the impe-
tus for a narrative that focuses on the permeation of society by State
and corporate ideology and on the development of postwar economic
and political systems. The novel tells the story of Tyrone Slothrop, an
American soldier stationed in London who can apparently detect the
detonation sites of the V-2s in advance of their arrival, and begins
with the attempts by the army authorities and their intelligence agen-
cies to predict the V-2 landing patterns by co-opting Slothrop into
what he increasingly feels is a conspiratorial system. In the early
stages of the narrative, the novel focuses on the instrumentalist and
rationalized systems of modernity and their transformation of human
beings into mere functions within the machine system of society. Al-
though the narrative continues to retain a focus on Slothrop and his
search to find a top-secret version of the V-2 (until he disappears
from the novel toward the end), multiple subplots spiral out from the
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134 • GRAY, ALASDAIR

main narrative to suggest variety and possibility that instrumentalist

systems cannot imagine or contain. Within this framework the novel
articulates a double structure that has two narrative principles em-
bedded within each other, one of which is the novel’s ostensible
“master narrative”: the conspiracy plot that focuses on Slothrop and
the web of connections that link him and other characters into a to-
talizing system of State and corporate control.
The other axis of the novel is based on narrative variation and op-
erates as a fragmented episodic assemblage made up of multiple gen-
res, literary styles, and subplots that represents the multiple possibil-
ities that no master narrative (textual, cultural, or political) can
control. These include: subplots in which minor characters begin to
develop “lives” outside of the main narrative; increasingly random or
abrupt shifts in focus as disconnected episodes simply happen or new
subplots are created (the most famous of which is the story of Byron
the Bulb); the proliferation of genre forms (including romance, pica-
resque, melodrama, science fiction, jeremiad, spoof spy thriller, west-
ern, fairy tale, and detective fiction among many others); and a pas-
tiche diversity of forms and styles such as slapstick, cartoons, slang,
comic-book language, and pornography intermixed with high litera-
ture and intertextual allusion. Gravity’s Rainbow provides a com-
plex and fragmented postmodernist novel that directs attention to its
own fictionality, but which also directly focuses on cultural con-
cerns. These range across the creation of a postwar global power sys-
tem that directly compares old forms of colonialism with new global
power structures, the masculinist discourses of technology and war
and their objectification of men and women as “things” to be ex-
ploited or destroyed, the interface between modernity and post-
modernity, the paradox of a contemporary culture in which everyday
life becomes more controlled and yet apparently more pluralistic, and
the ways in which the invisible Truman Security State becomes visi-
ble in Richard Nixon’s proto-Security State (or its simulacrum)
where it finds an opposition in the form of countercultural narratives.

GRAY, ALASDAIR (1934– ). Scottish novelist, short story writer, and

painter whose innovative fiction helped to develop experimental ap-
proaches to fiction in contemporary literature in the United Kingdom
and whose work has been credited with generating a renaissance in
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GRAY, ALASDAIR • 135

Scottish literature. Gray’s work cannot be easily categorized because

he uses a range of styles in which realism, fabulation, parody, satire,
meditations, and metafiction rub up against each other within the
same text, with the only constant feature being the incorporation of his
own illustrations. His recent anthology, The Book of Prefaces (2000),
typifies this eclecticism with its typographic experiments, drawings,
and marginalia vying for attention with the collected prefaces them-
selves, but the same variety can be found in Gray’s collections of short
stories, which include: Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall
and True (1993), Mavis Belfrage (1996), and The Ends of Our Teth-
ers: 13 Sorry Stories (2003). Gray made his name with his first novel,
Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), a maximalist work combining
fabulation, metafiction, realism, and autobiographical forms of writ-
ing that is still generally regarded as his most important achievement.
The novel is partly set in Glasgow and partly in the imaginary world
of Unthank and has a disordered narrative in which the “books” are
presented out of sequence, beginning with Book Three, which is fol-
lowed by the Prologue and then by Books One, Two, and Four. The
novel also plays self-reflexive games by including textual echoes of
itself along with an “Index of Plagiarisms,” which draws attention to
its construction as a text, and an interview, in the “Epilogue,” between
Lanark and the Author, who is referred to as a “conjuror” to suggest
that his act of imagination has created a fictional reality out of thin air.
Gray’s second novel, 1982 Janine (1984), continues his experi-
mentations with form but within a more realistic framework. The
novel uses an interior monologue in which the main character,
McLeish, creates a pornographic fantasy while he has a nervous
breakdown, which leads to a split narrative generated by typo-
graphic variations that represent his different interior voices in three
columns of different typeface. Gray’s next two novels, The Fall of
Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties (1985) and McGrotty and Lud-
milla (1989), were both originally written as plays before being de-
veloped into fictions. The former presents the story of a Scotsman in
London within the confines of conventional realism while the latter
uses a comedic fantasy configuration. Both deal with issues of Scot-
tish national identity, which Gray analyzed more fully in the nonfic-
tional work, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992). Poor Things
(1992) involves a return to more experimental forms and involves a
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136 • THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON

rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within the discourses of

rationality and Romanticism. The novel is a historiographic
metafiction set in 19th-century Glasgow and uses a range of inter-
texts, embedded narratives, and dissimulations about its origins as a
document to present a self-consciously fictional work that also,
however, comments on contemporary politics and on the relation-
ship between reason and passion. In addition to his story collections,
Gray’s other works include Something Leather (1990) and A History
Maker (1994), a science fiction novel set in the 23rd century that
uses its form to present reflections on the present.

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. A cycle of books by Jacques

Roubaud, of which five out of the intended six volumes have so far
been completed. The first volume, Le grand incendie de Londres
(1989), gives its name to the cycle as a whole and to the project that
Roubaud states within the texts is as much a dream and a set of
changing axioms or principles as it is a textual product. The first vol-
ume is an autobiographical work focusing on Roubaud’s life after the
death of his wife, but also sets out the concerns of the project as a
whole. These include the notion of memory prose, textual con-
straints, the relationship of narrative present to real events, the prin-
ciple of “intertanglement” (in which plotlines and sections act as con-
nective nodes), and the creation of numerous “insertions.” It is the
“bifurcations” and “interpolations” which make up the “insertions”
that are most important for the novel’s form (and develop principles
later adopted in hyperfiction) because they generate both an inter-
nally reflexive metafictional structure and a nonlinear narrative for
the work, while also allowing the reader to choose a path through the
novel. The metafictional aspects are also obvious in the main part of
the work, in the concerns with Roubaud’s attempts to write The Great
Fire of London, and revolve around the relationship of the cycle of
books to the overall “Project.” Roubaud constantly refers to the pro-
cessive aspects of his writing, in particular the destruction of the fi-
nal text of “The Great Fire of London,” an act that will leave only the
“Project” (the process of writing) behind; although, because The
Great Fire of London is about the process of writing itself, it is diffi-
cult to tell how it differs from the “Project.” Later works (or
“branches,” as Roubaud refers to them) have continued these formal
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HABERMAS, JÜRGEN • 137

structures of literary constraints and narrative complexity by mixing

styles and images within self-reflexive textual parameters and by
playing with narrative temporality. The remaining volumes that have
been completed are La Boucle (The Loop, 1993), Mathématiques:
récit (Mathematics: Story, 1997), Poésie: récit (Poetry: Story, 2000),
and La Bibliothèque de Warburg (The Warburg Library, 2002).

GRUPPO 63. An Italian avant-garde movement founded in Palermo in

1963 by a group of 30 intellectuals which became part of the wider
neoavanguardia movement in Italy in the 1960s. The nucleus of the
group was formed by the poets Edoardo Sanguineti, Elio Pagliarani,
Alfredo Giuliani, Antonio Porta, and Nanni Balestrini, but its best-
known members were Umberto Eco and Giorgio Manganelli.
Gruppo 63 was founded in order to counter the tendency toward re-
alism in postwar Italian literature and to create alternative experi-
mental forms of writing. In its focus on the self-reflexive creation of
meaning in the play of signifiers within texts, Gruppo 63’s hermetic
literature shares similarities with the work of the Tel Quel group in
France and surfiction in the United States, but the group developed
a wider array of textual strategies. Some members of Gruppo 63 were
also more interested in the role of the mass media in contemporary
culture and adopted a more political outlook for their works. Gruppo
63 was often criticized by conservatives in Italy for its politics and
for its privileging of irrationality. It disbanded in 1969, but its mem-
bers continued to produce experimental work, with some writers
(Eco, Manganelli, and Sanguineti) also becoming important mem-
bers of the Italian literary landscape.

GUATTARI, FÉLIX. See DELEUZE, GILLES, AND GUATTARI,

FÉLIX.

–H–

HABERMAS, JÜRGEN (1929– ). German social theorist and philoso-

pher of the Frankfurt School whose major work is found in the two
volumes that comprise The Theory of Communicative Action (1981),
in which he sets out a theory of social action focused around the
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138 • HANDKE, PETER

relationship between the “system” (the centralizing principles and in-

stitutions that create organization within society) and the “lifeworld”
(the world of culture and everyday life). Habermas also engaged in
important theorizations of modernity in relation to postmodernity
and discussions of the legitimation of knowledge in response to Jean-
François Lyotard’s implicit criticisms of his political perspective. In
“Modernity—An Incomplete Project” (1980) and The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (1985) Habermas set out his opposition to
postmodern theory’s embrace of dissensus and anti-rationalism in fa-
vor of a unified totalizing approach that he saw as an important prod-
uct of the critical traditions inherent within both modernity and the
Enlightenment. This approach focused on creating a consensual bal-
ance between system and lifeworld, where the “moral-practical”
sphere of culture was equally informed by the “scientific-cognitive”
principles of the system and the centrifugal “aesthetic-expressive”
tendencies of the lifeworld. In the course of his debates with Lyotard,
Habermas also engaged with ideas of legitimation—the process by
which “truth” is established and knowledge is distinguished from in-
formation. While Lyotard’s position was based on the narrative cre-
ation of truth through paralogy and language games, Habermas in-
sisted on the importance of consensus as a way of creating an agreed
objective reality. Lyotard’s view is problematic for Habermas because
of its relativistic approach to knowledge, an approach that creates a
diversity of truths among different communities or segments of pop-
ulation with none having the status of guaranteed reality.

HANDKE, PETER (1942– ). Austrian novelist and playwright who

came to literary prominence in the 1960s with his views on the “de-
scriptive impotence” and redundant referentiality of postwar writing
in German. His early works display an avant-garde experimentation
with textual form in both fiction and drama. His first novel, Die Hor-
nissen (The Hornets, 1966), focuses on language as the only reality
of the text through its construction as a set of fragments for a novel
contained within memory, a self-reflexive device that challenges the
referentiality of the novel, while Der Hausierer (The Peddler, 1967)
playfully outlines a plot for a detective fiction which it later adopts as
its own metafiction. Handke’s drama of this period also plays with
form, in Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1966), for
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HANDKE, PETER • 139

example, which self-consciously comments on its own lack of repre-

sentational features by focusing on the stage as a theatrical space and
by having the cast insult the audience and then praise them for their
“performance,” and in Kaspar (1968), which involves a character
who learns language during the play before coming to the realization
that he is a theatrical construction. Handke’s best-known early work,
Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the
Penalty Kick, 1970), marked a new direction in his writing by focus-
ing on the social alienation of the individual as a result of the barri-
ers created by the endless chains of deferred meaning in language in
its mediation of reality.
After Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow beyond Dreams, 1972),
which dealt with the suicide of his mother, an event that had a pro-
found influence on his work, Handke’s writing gradually became
more conventional in form, with novels such as Der kurze Brief zum
langen Abschied (Short Letter, Long Farewell, 1974), Die Stunde der
wahren Empfindung (A Moment of True Feeling, 1975), and Die
linkshändige Frau (The Left-handed Woman, 1976) focusing on char-
acters who experience disconnection but who also generate a curious
form of epiphanic existence, a configuration of consciousness also
found in a later work such as Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers (The
Afternoon of a Writer, 1987). Subsequent to this period, beginning
with Langsame Heimkehr (Slow Homecoming, 1979), Handke’s
work begins to concern itself with the discovery of form and mean-
ing in the world, most notably in Die Wiederholung (Repetition,
1986), which deals with the search for identity in the signs displayed
by the world while also meditating on language and notions of be-
longing. Later novels also include works that focus on fantasy, such
as Die Abwesenheit (Absence, 1987) which takes place in an unspec-
ified time and place, Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht (My Year in the
No-Man’s Bay, 1994), and In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus
meinem stillen Haus (On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, 1997),
which narrates a journey that increasingly moves away from reality.
Handke’s most experimental late work is the drama Die Stunde, da
wir nichts voneinander wußten (The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each
Other, 1992), a work that challenges traditional notions of theater by
showing characters crossing a city square on the stage but which has
no dialogue or speech whatever.
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140 • HARVEY, DAVID

HARVEY, DAVID (1935– ). British academic whose work has devel-

oped economic and social contexts for the study of postmodernism.
Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) provides an account
of the origins of postmodernity as a historical condition, tracing its
development from Enlightenment modernity, through industrializa-
tion and Fordism to the decentralized production of contemporary so-
ciety. Harvey argues that postmodernity developed as a result of eco-
nomic restructurings after the recession of 1973 and produced what
he refers to as “flexible accumulation,” a process that entails the shift
from centralized to flexible and globalized forms of production and
consumption. Flexible accumulation affects all areas of contempo-
rary life, according to Harvey, and produces a decentralized and frag-
mented experience of time and space that not only affects cultural
and social formations, but consciousness and everyday life. As a ge-
ographer, Harvey has also written extensively on the city in relation
to capitalist economic and social structures and, along with Edward
Soja and Mike Davis, has helped to create postmodern urban studies,
which integrates cultural geography with the study of economic and
social factors.

HASSAN, IHAB (1925– ). American scholar born in Egypt, who pop-

ularized the study of postmodernism as a literary form in the 1970s
and who, until Fredric Jameson published his accounts of postmod-
ernism as a cultural logic in the mid-1980s, was the most noted the-
orist of histories of modernism and postmodernism. His most impor-
tant works on postmodernism are: The Dismemberment of Orpheus
(1971), Paracriticisms (1975), The Right Promethean Fire (1980),
and The Postmodern Turn (1987). Hassan’s focus is primarily liter-
ary, discussing 20th-century experimental literatures in terms of their
different approaches to “silence.” Hassan uses metaphysical (and of-
ten mystical) terminology to consider how texts use silence either to
create knowledge and fullness out of stillness or to configure nihilis-
tic texts that only echo with their own language forms. This latter
kind of text describes postmodernist literature for Hassan with its
minimalist and self-reflexive strategies, but such a generalized the-
ory can also include versions of modernism so that, when Hassan of-
fers a binary taxonomy of modernism and postmodernism (in “The
Culture of Postmodernism”), modernist writers (Franz Kafka, for ex-
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HAWKES, JOHN • 141

ample) appear on the side of postmodernism. Such a classification

creates difficulties in Hassan’s views on postmodern culture for
which he adopts a literary and high cultural approach based on the
premise that postmodern ideas (deconstruction, abstraction, and tex-
tuality) dominate both literary and cultural production. Apart from
the doubtful premise that the processes found in experimental writing
and postmodern philosophy can be used to explain the entirety of cul-
tural activity, Hassan’s account is further challenged by the ahistori-
cal approach to which this leads, whereby his literary history of mod-
ernism and postmodernism (through which he seeks to establish
continuities between the two) flattens out into an imprecise and un-
historical conflation of the two “periods.”

HAWKES, JOHN (1925–1998). American novelist whose early works

combine experimental late-modernist forms, in their subordination of
plot to structural aesthetics (such as recurring motifs and iterated ac-
tion), while developing postmodern concerns in their epistemologi-
cal uncertainty and parody of popular cultural genres. Hawkes’ novels
dispense with conventional forms of plot and character through his
use of complex formal arrangements that present disconnected or
skewed narratives within the framework of aesthetic structures that
provide thematic continuity. Within this contradictory formal scheme,
Hawkes creates fictional worlds of violence, devastation, and squalor,
alongside moral and cognitive emptiness, through which he maps the
absurdist or postmodernist “waste land.” This is most obvious in his
first novel, The Cannibal (1949), an allegorical fabulation set in Ger-
many that pays little attention to verisimilitude through its juxtaposi-
tion of two defamiliarized time frames (1914 and 1945), which it uses
to explore the delusions that create war and the disillusionment that
results from it. The Beetle Leg (1951) parodies the form of the west-
ern in order to question the ideologies on which American values are
founded by contrasting the building of a dam with the desolation of
the desert around it to suggest both the emptiness of notions of
progress and the disorder it brings with it.
After two short novels set in Italy, both published in 1954, one his-
torical (The Owl) and one contemporary (The Goose on the Grave),
Hawkes produced his most important work, The Lime Twig (1961), a
novel that reproduces the fictional world of Graham Greene’s
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142 • HEJINIAN, LYN

Brighton Rock. The novel displays metafictional tendencies in its

use of framing devices to comment on its “plot” (the opinions of a
journalist) and its articulation of pulp conventions, although the lat-
ter also function to map the way in which “reality” destroys people’s
dreams by mapping the misalignment between one character’s ex-
pectations of adventure (created by popular fictions) and the “reality”
he finds in the world of crime, which ultimately leads to the death of
his wife. After The Lime Twig, Hawkes’ style shifted toward realist
conventions of character, sexual desire, and notions of psychological
depth. Postmodernist concerns can still, however, be seen in Travesty
(1976), with its compressed narrative frame, Whistlejacket (1988), a
story about a photographer which deals with image and reality, as
well as in the adsurdism of Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse
(1993), which is narrated by a horse, and in the story of the frog that
lives in the narrator’s stomach in The Frog (1996).

HEJINIAN, LYN (1941– ). American Language Poet whose left-

wing politics inform her work (through her view that fracturing lin-
guistic structures can create a new form of society), but who also
focuses attention on the modes of language through self-reflexive
explorations of poetic form, semantics, and diction. Her poetry has
also been influenced by the aesthetics of Gertrude Stein and the phi-
losophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and displays a meditative inquir-
ing mode of expression. Her most important works are My Life
(1980) and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991), but other works
include: A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking (1976), Writing
as an Aid to Memory (1978), The Cell (1992), The Cold of Poetry
(1994), and Border Comedy (2001). Hejinian’s work focuses on the
self-referential forms of language and many considerations of such
processes can be found in her writing, such as “The time comes
when each individual poem reveals not only its own internal con-
nections but also spreads them out externally,” a self-conscious
statement from Oxota that comments on itself by commenting on
conventions seen to be common to other works.
This self-referentiality is also complemented by her poetry’s trans-
gression of discursive forms. Hejinian often presents novels in the
form of poetry (such as Oxota which, however, can also be interpreted
in terms of its blurring of distinctions between poetry and prose) and
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HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION • 143

poetry in the form of prose, while also offering articulations and par-
odies of a range of genres such as the memoir, the novel, and the es-
say. These configurations of textuality are informed by her emphasis
on the concept of the “border,” the principles of which are theorized
in The Language of Inquiry (2000) in which she states that the border
is “a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dis-
possession.” The concept of the “border” is important because it cre-
ates contingent meanings that are not the result of preexisting struc-
tures and represents the way in which meaning only comes into
existence through the relationships that exist within language.

HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION. A term conceived by

Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), and since
adopted by many other critics, to refer to postmodernist fiction that
has both historical and metafictional forms. Historiographic
metafictions are not, however, historical novels in the traditional
sense, where the aims are to represent historical events and periods
in a “true-to-life” manner and to evoke in the reader a feeling that
they are reading about historical “reality.” Historiographic metafic-
tions present themselves as self-consciously textual and thereby
demonstrate an awareness of the fictiveness of the events and pe-
riod that they represent. According to Hutcheon, historiographic
metafiction therefore, “problematizes the possibility of historical
knowledge” not only in its awareness of its own fictionality but also
in its presentation of history itself as a set of fictions. The past be-
comes unrecoverable because novels and other texts can only ac-
quire their knowledge of history from texts that report events, not
from the events themselves. Similarly, they can only re-represent
their textual acquisitions as another text, removing them even fur-
ther from “reality.” For Hutcheon, this means that historiographic
metafiction has a demythologizing function because it draws atten-
tion to the fact that contemporary knowledge of the past is a prod-
uct of fiction. In this context, history simply becomes another story
rather than a truthful and accurate record of the past. Examples of
historiographic metafiction include Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor,
E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The
Name of the Rose), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and
Graham Swift’s Waterland.
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144 • HOBAN, RUSSELL

HOBAN, RUSSELL (1925– ). American novelist who lives in the

United Kingdom and who began his writing career as the author of
children’s books, including the now-classic A Mouse and His Child
(1968), which can also be read as a piece of adult writing because of
its metaphysical concerns and use of literary parody. Hoban’s first
novel specifically for an adult audience was The Lion of Boaz-Jachin
and Jachin-Boaz (1973), and since then, in addition to works for chil-
dren, he has published a further 11 novels. The concerns of Hoban’s
fictions vary according to context, and include absurdist, magic re-
alist, or science fiction settings, although his writings have become
more realist in recent times in novels such as Angelica’s Grotto
(1999), The Bat Tattoo (2002), and Her Name Was Lola (2003). There
is still usually something that is fantastical or consciously fictional
even in his most realist novels, however, such as an imaginary dwarf
who incites the main character to remember a youthful love in Her
Name Was Lola, the appearance of Death as an aristocratic opera
lover in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer (1998), or a character with an in-
ner voice called Oannes in Angelica’s Grotto. Hoban’s more post-
modernist novels are a product of his earlier writing career, beginning
with The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, a fabulation set in
an imagined and unnamed Middle Eastern country near the Black Sea
during a time when lions have disappeared. The novel tells the story
of Jachin-Boaz (the son of Boaz-Jachin) who, in his quest to find
some lions, imagines them back into existence, an event that fore-
grounds the power of imagination to return and threaten “reality”
when the lions begin to stalk Boaz-Jachin.
It is in Hoban’s second novel, Kleinzeit (1974), however, that the
postmodernist forms of his writing become more evident. The novel
offers an experimental metafiction about the nature of language
within the confines of a recognizable, if skewed, absurdist narrative,
while also displaying existentialist elements in its concern with the
discovery of meaning. The novel presents reality as indeterminate in
its meanings because although there is a suggestion that the world has
its own language waiting to be discovered and expressed, it also per-
sonifies concepts or objects as speaking characters to highlight the
fictionality of the text and to imply that the world itself is a fiction.
The concern with the language of the universe and the search for its
meaning becomes a central concern of Hoban’s fiction after
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HOPSCOTCH • 145

Kleinzeit, as does the Orpheus myth that forms its structure; the lat-
ter of which can also be found in The Medusa Frequency (1987). Rid-
dley Walker (1980), Hoban’s best-known and most acclaimed novel,
deals with attempts to decipher the indecipherable, but does so in re-
lation to human knowledge (albeit in mythopoeic metaphors about
the natural universe). The insolubility of mysteries or the inability to
communicate them form important elements of Pilgermann (1983), a
novel set during the First Crusade that begins with Pilgermann nar-
rating his own death and watching events as part of the “waves and
particles” of the universe. This doesn’t involve any kind of transcen-
dence, however, because although Pilgermann is able to transmit his
message he is unable to change history in the way that he wants.
Pilgermann is also scattered with allusions to Elijah, as is Fremder
(1996), a science fiction novel dealing with the discovery of the
phased existence of reality. Elijah is a figure who presages the arrival
of God’s covenant but who does not actually deliver it and he comes
to represent in Hoban’s novels not the immanence of meaning, but
both its infinite deferral and the possibility that it might mean noth-
ing even if it is revealed. Thus, in both Pilgermann and Fremder, the
universe speaks, but it only makes sense occasionally and only pro-
vides transcendence for a very few because those who transcend are
unable to transmit any messages back to other people. Such a concept
increasingly works through into Hoban’s novels, although over time
his characters’ incomprehension has come to deal less with meta-
physical issues than with functional aspects of desire, as in a late
novel like Angelica’s Grotto where the main character, Klein (whose
linguistic disorder suggests he is a revised version of Kleinzeit) be-
comes interested in the mysteries of an internet pornography site (an
Orphic underworld) and no amount of aesthetic rationalization or
mythification can create anything sublime about it or bring any
meaningful message back into reality.

HOPSCOTCH. Innovative and influential novel by the Argentine

writer Julio Cortázar which was published in Spanish in 1963 as
Rayuela. Hopscotch has often been credited with initiating the Latin
American Boom because of its mixing of European and Latin Amer-
ican influences. The novel has three sections, the first two set in Paris
and Buenos Aires respectively, with a third made up of “expendable
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146 • HOPSCOTCH

chapters” that fill in details, continue narratives from the earlier sec-
tions, add supplementary material in the form of quotations from
other texts, or offer sections relating to the fictional author Morelli
(who may be a fictional version of Jorge Luis Borges). In an intro-
ductory note Cortázar states that the novel can be read in a traditional
linear format from beginning to end or according to a schema he lays
out in which chapters from the last section are interwoven with those
from the first two sections, with the exception of Chapter 55 which is
replaced by a chain of “expendable” chapters. This produces an ap-
parently open-ended text that allows alternative modes of reading in
both linear and nonlinear formats. These alternative configurations
suggest that narrative structure is an arbitrary arrangement and that
the meaning of the text is dependent on the varying juxtapositions
and connections created by the two patterns, albeit within a predeter-
mined framework generated by Cortázar as a way of illustrating the
motifs of unity and disorder that run through the novel. The tradi-
tional reading has a temporal logic but offers discontinuity because
there is no causal relationship between sections, while the alternative
schema allows chapters from each section to be threaded together as
a continuous whole, but its “expendable chapters” are still often dis-
ruptive fragments.
Within this structure the novel presents a plot relating to Horacio
Oliveira’s life in Paris and Buenos Aires. The Paris section presents
Oliveira’s relationship with his lover, La Maga, through a Joycean
exploration of aesthetics which develops a concern with life as a “fic-
tion” (with characters often referring to events as products of poetic
or fictional realities, such as Oliveira comparing Berthe Trépat’s pi-
ano recital to “a chapter from Céline”) and which uses textual exper-
iments that focus on the representation of consciousness, including a
chapter that alternates lines from a book that La Maga was reading
with Oliveira’s thoughts. The novel also includes a rather essentialist
portrayal of La Maga as a symbol of feminine authenticity which the
novel develops in the Buenos Aires section in its flirtation with the
idea of Latin America as a place of authentic or unmotivated action
that is disrupted when Oliveira returns home to search for La Maga
(who has disappeared after the death of her son), bringing his “Euro-
pean” self-consciousness with him to disturb the lives of Traveler and
his wife, Talita. This structure is questioned, however, by Oliveira’s
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HOUELLEBECQ, MICHEL • 147

imagination of Talita as La Maga’s double, introducing notions of the

“simulacrum” and recursive reality into the text which are enacted in
the final section of “expendable chapters.” Here the focus is on a
more overtly fictional reality that involves “reenactment” as a formal
method (involving, for example, intertextual quotation) and as part
of a series of discussions about Morelli’s literary self-consciousness
dealing with the loss of authenticity in language and literature and its
replacement by an aesthetic of repetition.

HOUELLEBECQ, MICHEL (1958– ). French novelist born in Réu-

nion whose works map debates about humanism, rationality, and in-
dividuality, dealing with social alienation in a contemporary culture
of empty pleasures, aimlessness, and apparent randomness. (His
given surname was Thomas, but he later adopted the family name of
his paternal grandmother, who raised him.) His first novel, Extension
du domaine de la lutte (Whatever, 1994), presents the story of the
mental decline of a computer engineer who veers between bitterness,
affectlessness, and despair. The novel has often been compared to Al-
bert Camus’ L’Étranger, although it more resembles American blank
fiction in its representation of a society of disconnection and personal
alienation. It also includes comments on the act of writing, as well as
inserted stories by the narrator in which, for example, a poodle ana-
lyzes contemporary sexual relations, but such strategies are less
metafictional than parodic. Les Particules élémentaires (Atomised
in the UK; The Elementary Particles in the U.S., 1998) develops a
more philosophical and scientific approach to cultural movements,
presenting a narrative told substantially in the form of storytelling di-
alogues that deal with moral and sexual decline. Through an explo-
ration of science, rationality, and concepts of humanism, the novel
focuses on the lack of fulfillment created by sexual liberations in the
present, placing these historically within a framing device, revealed
in the Epilogue, that locates the narration of events in a posthuman
future. Lanzarote (2000) comments on the development of alternative
postmodern spiritualities in the form of a New Age cult called the
Azraelians, while also dealing with the empty pleasures created by
contemporary hedonistic lifestyles, a concern developed in Plate-
forme (Platform, 2001), which aroused controversy for its criticisms
of Islam. La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island, 2005)
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148 • HOWE, SUSAN

has a more experimental framework and uses the forms of cyber-

punk and postmodernist science fiction (in concerns with the
downloading of consciousnesses and genetic modification) to extend
a narrative about a stand-up comedian and his future clones. The
novel tells a future history from a number of different perspectives,
taking in sexual obsession, New Age religion, and moral decline, in
looking back from a postapocalyptic future.

HOWE, SUSAN (1937– ). American language poet whose works focus

on the interiority of language and issues of history, albeit within a
structure that questions narrative forms of connection in favor of am-
biguous and uncertain knowledges. Howe’s important collections of
poetry include: The Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978),
Pythagorean Silence (1982), The Defenestration of Prague (1983),
The Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987), A Bibliography of the
King’s Book, or, Eikon Basilike (1989), Singularities (1990), and
Pierce-Arrow (1999). Her poetry deals with the presence of language
itself, shifting focus away from representational or referential forms of
language to a focus on its units: the morphemes, phonemes, and
graphemes of words. Such an emphasis can be seen in lines from The
Secret History of the Dividing Line, “O / where ere / he He A / ere I
were / wher / father father,” which in their fragmentation direct atten-
tion to the sounds and shapes of the words themselves, while also chal-
lenging the narrative connectivity associated with conventional poetic
forms. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1990) has referred to this layered cre-
ation of meanings in Howe’s poetry as a “matted palimpsest,” in which
different linguistic and formal systems are written within the same tex-
tual space, whether this is in her poetry’s intertextual reference, its
fracturing of signifier-signified relationships, its self-consciousness of
the form itself (or of poetic discourses), or its considerations of history.
Her poetry becomes protean and asks readers to construct meaning in
their engagement with it, a configuration that results in shifting mean-
ings that change according to the contexts of interpretation. Although
this creates a constant focus on the present moment of language in her
work, history and tradition nevertheless play important roles in
Howe’s poetry, not as objective fact, but as constructions and memo-
ries that have textual form, but which are also fractured and made am-
biguous through their expression in discourse.
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HYPERFICTION • 149

HUTCHEON, LINDA (1947– ). Academic who has written exten-

sively on postmodernist literature and who has developed concepts
that have been adopted more widely in the study of postmodern cul-
ture and media. Her publications on postmodernism and related areas
include: Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1984), A
Theory of Parody (1985), A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), and
The Politics of Postmodernism (1989). Hutcheon is most noted for
her conceptualization of historiographic metafiction, which refers
to postmodernist novels that both reflect on their fictionality and
meditate on history as both a fiction and a reality that has meaning
for contemporary society, and for her development of a postmodern
theory of parody, in which she challenges Fredric Jameson’s theory
of pastiche by arguing that parody need not be empty repetition, but
can have a cultural and political meaning by critiquing postmodern
culture from inside rather than trying to seek an impossible objectiv-
ity from outside. Hutcheon has developed these theories to consider
how postmodernist novels engage with or refract reality by self-
reflexively considering how forms of representation create meanings
that have a real effect on behavior and ideology culturally and polit-
ically, rather than simply floating narcissistically through systems of
representations without reference to anything but themselves as texts
and the empty signs that circulate within them.

HYPERFICTION. Also known as “hypertext fiction,” hyperfiction is

a form of nonlinear writing that makes use of digital technology’s
ability to create parallel and nested information streams to generate
stories that have multiple strands, overlapping narratives, structural
intersections, and diverging plotlines. Hyperfiction is generally asso-
ciated with the internet whose linking facilities assist the creation of
multicentered narratives, but many hyperfictions also exist in CD-
ROM format. Hyperfiction is often regarded as the future for experi-
mental fiction, an idea expounded by Robert Coover in “The End of
Books” (1992), because its digital format creates split and parallel
narrative lines that allow textual possibilities less easily created in
book form. The multistrand narratives made possible by hyperlinks
and alternative screens suggest it is a postmodernist form of literature
because it creates multiple possible textual realities within the same
text that the reader can shape and reshape according to the different
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150 • HYPERREALITY

paths he or she chooses to take through the text. This latter aspect has
often led to the view that hyperfiction is the first fully interactive
form of literature (because readers construct the text by their
choices), although its interactivity is limited to the words and narra-
tive lines made available by the text itself.
Prior to the development of hyperfiction, a number of writers ex-
perimented with bifurcating and multiple narratives, including Coover
in the “cubist” fictions of Pricksongs and Descants, Jacques
Roubaud in Le grand incendie de Londres (The Great Fire of Lon-
don), and Milorad Pavić in Hazarski recnik (Dictionary of the Khaz-
ars). Hyperfiction can be regarded as an extension of the permuta-
tional forms of combinatory literature and it often uses self-reflexive
forms to meditate on its own medium (as in Mark Amerika’s “Gram-
maton,” which concerns the development of a fictional computer code
and includes pathways leading to virtual city-spaces) or deals with the
relationship between reality and imagined texts. Important writers of
hyperfiction include: Stuart Moulthrop, whose “Victory Garden”
(1995) develops a story about the Gulf War that connects real and
imagined fragments in order to create possible narratives of both truth
and fiction; Michael Joyce, in “Afternoon: A Story” (1995), which
deals with knowledge and memory, and “Twelve Blue” (1996), which
has 12 entry points into the fiction with a side panel in graph form to
allow readers to map where they are in relation to the other strands;
and Kate Pullinger, in “intimateAlice” (2005) and in the collaborative
“The Breathing Wall” (2005), with Stefan Schemat and Babel.

HYPERREALITY. In Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, hy-

perreality is the cultural condition that results when the simulacrum
has replaced reality. Hyperreality is a culture of images and facsimi-
les, not a culture of “real” things. This does not mean that physical ob-
jects themselves have disappeared, but that a culture of simulations no
longer invests meaning and value in the “thing” itself, nor in any use
that the thing has. Instead, rather than having any intrinsic value in it-
self, meaning and value exist in the images that attach to the “thing”
and make it a node around which external meanings form. Hyperreal-
ity, therefore, refers to a disjunction in the relationship between ap-
pearance and “reality,” where the former transforms itself into the lat-
ter and where the “extrinsic” replaces the “intrinsic.” The process that
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HYPERREALITY • 151

creates hyperreality is the triumph of the “sign commodity,” which

is the end result of the Marxist theory of economic value. The sign
commodity refers to the way in which a commodity has value not in
terms of its use or its labor costs, but in relation to the value of the im-
age that attaches to the product: its “sign value.” For example, the cost
of a pair of Nike trainers is neither linked to how comfortable and
durable they are nor to the costs of production. Instead, it is deter-
mined by the cultural value (the desirability) of the Nike “Swoosh.”
Effectively, the object only needs to exist in order to act as a node
around which signs can gather, because it is the brand, image, or sign
of “Nike” that is being purchased. The same is true for other com-
modities in postmodernity with the result that there is a shift from
utilitarian and economic determinants of value to the triumph of cul-
tural value, where it is signs and images that create the value of a
commodity, not the object itself.
Hyperreality thus describes the way in which images circulate as
the determinants of meaning and value in culture because they have
displaced “real” systems of meaning (even if these still exist) such as
power, economic relations, social reality (politics, ideology, beliefs,
the family), and labor. In these circumstances, for the real to be ac-
cepted it must make itself look like a simulation—in which case it is
no longer “real,” but a hyperreal facsimile of itself. The paradigm of
hyperreality for many theorists of postmodernity is “theming” and
the way in which its facsimiles have displaced the “real” thing. Thus,
it is argued that people would rather visit the themed “New York,
New York” casino in Las Vegas, for example, than the real city of
New York—not as a substitute for the “real” thing, but because they
prefer the fake to the real. Whether this is true is subject to conjec-
ture, but Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner have offered an alterna-
tive view which explores the experience of simulation by distin-
guishing between two types of hyperreality: “strong” and “weak.”
Strong hyperreality refers to simulations where people cannot tell the
difference between the simulation and the real, which is the death of
the real in its proper sense, where copies look just as “real” as real-
ity. Weak hyperreality, however, refers to facsimiles where people are
able to tell the difference between reality and simulation, but they
prefer the simulation to the real because it is more comforting, fulfils
a need, or because it is perceived to give more pleasure than reality.
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152 • I NOVISSIMI

–I–

I NOVISSIMI. Collection of writings edited by Alfredo Giuliani, and

published in 1961, that brought together work by writers associated
with the Italian neoavanguardia. I novissimi (The Newest Ones) con-
tained poetry and essays on poetics propounding a new experimental
approach for postwar Italian literature, bringing together many au-
thors who would later go on to found Gruppo 63, including Nanni
Balestrini, Elio Pagliarani, Antonio Porta, and Edoardo Sanguineti.

IF ON A WINTERS NIGHT A TRAVELLER. Novel by Italo Calvino,

published in Italy as Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore in 1979,
that not only displays the self-consciousness associated with post-
modernism, but also articulates poststructuralist literary critical ideas
relating to the “object” of the text and the author-text-reader rela-
tionship. Despite the complexity of its narrative, structure, and ideas,
If on a winter’s night a traveller has become one of best-known post-
modernist novels. The novel’s structure alternates opening chapters
of “found novels” (whose remaining chapters are missing, lost, or
stolen) with a narrative involving the main character’s quest to try to
find, first of all, the remainder of the “found text” of If on a winter’s
night a traveller and subsequently the remaining chapters of the other
“found texts.” It is this latter narrative that opens the novel with
Calvino, in the guise of a textual “Author,” addressing a hypothetical
Reader who subsequently becomes the main character in the novel
and who becomes involved in a romantic relationship with the “Other
Reader” (Ludmilla) in the course of his search.
The two strands of the novel play off each other while dealing
with different postmodernist and critical issues. The narrative cre-
ated by the embedded fictions has short sections that are effectively
self-contained short stories written by a range of fictional authors
from different countries (including “Italo Calvino” and Silas Flan-
nery, who becomes part of the “Reader” narrative). These sections
have pastiche and metafictional forms and involve the mixing of
genres and narrative styles, including a nouveau roman with a mys-
tery narrative, a magic realist novel with a revenge element, a mé-
nage à trois in a postmodern world of mirrors, and a final chapter
where a man erases the world. At the end of each chapter the narra-
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INTERTEXTUALITY • 153

tive hints at further plot events while also coming to a resolution, a

paradoxical situation that suggests that plot is both necessary to the
novel, but also a redundant illusion, something the novel as a whole
plays with by taking the Reader and the Other Reader through an in-
creasingly outrageous plot that mirrors some of the found-chapters.
The “Reader” narrative also deals with literary critical and semiotic
issues around the idea of the text in relation to its production, recep-
tion, interpretation, censorship, and textual existence. The novel ul-
timately therefore becomes a paean to the power of fiction and tex-
tuality to create any possibilities (in both what they represent and
what they can mean) with the “text” becoming the hero rather than
the “Reader” or the “Author,” Italo Calvino.

INTERTEXTUALITY. A term developed by poststructuralist theorists

to describe the process by which all texts can be seen to have “traces”
of other texts embedded within them. The French theorist Roland
Barthes proposes the view that all literary texts quote from or refer to
other written texts and that it is ultimately language itself that pro-
duces textuality. For Barthes, intertextuality is a necessary product of
using language because, with the exception of neologisms created by
a writer, all language has already been used. Indeed, if this were not
the case, a text would not be comprehensible because it would have
created an entirely new language that would have no relationship to
existing forms of language and, therefore, could not be translated or
decoded. Even where a text uses new forms of language by altering
forms of grammar and syntax or by generating neologisms (in novels
such as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Russell Hoban’s Riddley
Walker, or Harry Mathews’ The Sinking of Odradek Stadium) the
text is readable because the language used signifies in relation to pre-
viously existing words and linguistic structures.
While poststructuralist theories regard intertextuality as a dominant
feature of all texts, the concept has been adapted by other critics to de-
scribe a “weaker” form of intertextuality that is closer to the postmod-
ernist textual device of pastiche. Where, for poststructuralist critics,
texts unconsciously and necessarily utilize previous forms of lan-
guage, in the softer pastiche versions, intertextuality expresses a con-
scious reference to other texts or genres as a result of the postmod-
ernist sense that originality has been exhausted and that all possible
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154 • INVISIBLE CITIES

styles of writing have already been created. As such, repetition, pas-

tiche, hommage, or parody of already written texts are the only forms
of writing that are available to postmodernist writers. The conse-
quence of this is that postmodernist texts are full of appropriations or
parodies, particularly in relation to the reuse of genre. For example,
the use of the western can be found in William Burroughs’ The Place
of Dead Roads, science fiction in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rain-
bow and Christine Brooke-Rose’s Xorander, while the detective for-
mula, which is perhaps the paradigmatic postmodernist genre because
it deals with the quest for “truth,” can be found in Umberto Eco’s Il
nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), Richard Brautigan’s
Dreaming of Babylon, or Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (alongside
the suspense thriller, the historical novel, and the conspiracy format)
and in reverse form (the anti-detective novel) in Pynchon’s The Cry-
ing of Lot 49, where the detective figure starts in a condition of knowl-
edge and concludes knowing nothing.

INVISIBLE CITIES. Novel by Italo Calvino, written in Italian as Le

città invisibili and published in 1972, that develops short stories
about the cities of the Mongol Empire that Marco Polo claims to have
visited and which he relates to Kublai Khan. Each chapter offers sev-
eral accounts of different cities with short sections framing the de-
scriptions in which the protagonists reflect on the meanings of what
Marco Polo has narrated. The novel is both a fabulation of impossi-
ble wonders, in the city sections, and a self-conscious consideration
of textual processes, in the framing sections. The city sections are
short pieces describing a city which present an evocation of the over-
all ambience, pattern, or concept that seems to best sum it up. Some
of the sections are interlinked, such as a chapter that deals predomi-
nantly with “lost” cities that either never came into existence or have
become something else (including Maurillia, a city whose truth is
only seen in the postcards of its past existence; Fedora, where a mu-
seum houses globes containing visions of its possible incarnations;
and Zenobia, a palimpsest city that has grown through successive su-
perimpositions over an indecipherable plan), while other sections
mirror each other across the text (such as descriptions of a city that
plans itself according to a map of the stars and which reflects another
that is always under construction in which the scaffolding around the
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IONESCO, EUGÈNE • 155

prospective buildings becomes the city itself). The framing discus-

sions between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo examine the stories
through a range of hermeneutic approaches such as: whether the
cities are real; whether the narrator and the listener (or author and
reader) are real and, if they are, what their relationship is; and
whether there is any system or plan that can explain the diversity of
the cities. This latter concern leads to Marco Polo’s suggestion that
there could be a model for the cities, but it would have to be a city of
exceptions in order to encompass such variety and would therefore be
yet another imagined city.

IONESCO, EUGÈNE (1909–1994). French playwright born in Roma-

nia, elected to the Académie française in 1970, whose writings have
been most identified with what is referred to as the “Theater of the
Absurd.” His dramas are also consonant with pataphysical ideas re-
garding nonsense and the conception of ideas beyond those possible
in existing thought, concerns that grew out of Ionesco’s association
with Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian. Ionesco’s first play, La
Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Prima Donna, aka The Bald Soprano,
1950) is the closest in alignment with pataphysical forms and his
most postmodernist work. The Bald Prima Donna came about as a
result of Ionesco’s attempt to learn English and his recognition that
the grammar book he was using involved obvious statements about
reality that were both revelatory and absolutely nonsensical, with
both meaning and nonmeaning developing as a result of the framing
of reality by language. The play itself consists of a series of mean-
ingless conversations, often using non sequiturs, that degenerates
into nonsense. The Bald Prima Donna is partly about the way in
which the naming of reality in language leads not to the creation and
systematization of meaning, but to meaningless and empty forms
which refer to their own structure rather than to the reality that they
apparently designate. There is also an implication in the play that not
only is language nonsensical but so too is reality, with a further sug-
gestion that any meaning that does attach to reality is a fiction pro-
duced only by a willed faith in language’s codes because the alterna-
tive is too appalling to contemplate.
Subsequently, Ionesco’s plays primarily developed principles in ac-
cordance with absurdism, most obviously in La Leçon (The Lesson,
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156 • IONESCO, EUGÈNE

1951), a study of power relations, Amédée, ou Comment s’en débar-

rasser (Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It, 1954), about a couple who
live with a corpse, or Tueur sans gages (The Killer, 1958), in which
Bérengar (an everyman figure who reappears in Rhinocéros and Le
Roi se meurt) hunts for a killer who murders simply to disrupt the or-
der of a neighborhood. These plays are concerned with how the irra-
tional or abnormal have become normalized and focus attention on
the incomprehensibility not only of people’s actions, but also the fic-
tions of reality that govern their acceptance of everyday reality. This
latter aspect is articulated in Ionesco’s best-known play, Rhinocéros
(Rhinoceros, 1959), in which Bérengar finds that all the people
around him are turning into rhinoceroses until he is the only human
being left at the end of the play. Rhinoceros is an allegory on con-
formism that has particular concerns with fascism and its psychology
of willing obedience, but can also be seen as a demythologization of
any ideology that offers an easy explanation of complex social rela-
tions by creating simplistic binary oppositions, especially if this in-
volves the externalization of problems that actually exist within the
system through the naming of an “enemy.” The play thereby suggests
that the absurdity of human society is the willingness to accept “fic-
tions” as reality and to allow dehumanization of oneself and others
simply to protect an idea that offers an explanation of reality, no mat-
ter how repugnant it might be.
Ionesco’s drama also has concerns with the forms and conventions
of theater and self-referentially examines the codes upon which
staged representation is based. Ionesco referred to his early dramas as
“anti-pièces” (anti-plays) and within these works parodied the con-
cept of theater as a place where meaningful representations of reality
occur by drawing attention to the fictions created by its conventions
and forms. Through such self-reflexivity he presents the theater not
as a place of naturalistic action, but as an unrealistic space of imag-
ined events and conversations with no structure or referential basis
but the play’s own rhythms and patterns. For example, Victimes du
Devoir (Victims of Duty, 1953) includes narcissistic discussions of it-
self in relation to drama as a form, while Les Chaises (The Chairs,
1952) has invisible guests who are represented by the empty chairs
that gradually fill the stage and a speech by an orator who is a deaf
mute. Willing suspension of disbelief becomes difficult when the au-
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IRONIC MIMESIS • 157

dience is expected to imagine a stage filled by people with the empty

chairs as metonymic substitutes for their presence and, although the
play can be read as an allegory on vanity, it is also important for the
way in which it reveals the artifice of theatrical convention. Most of
Ionesco’s important works had been written by 1962, by which time
he had turned more toward parody and classicism, as in Le Roi se
meurt (Exit the King, 1962), and he wrote little after Macbett (1972),
by which time he had turned to painting as a form of expression.

IRONIC MIMESIS. Discussions of the differences between mod-

ernism and postmodernism have often revolved around the question
of whether postmodernism persists with the anti-mimetic forms cre-
ated by modernism or rejects them and, if so, what kind of mimetic
practice does it favor. Theorists of the Tel Quel group (Philippe
Sollers and Jean Ricardou) and academic critics who adopt similar
poststructuralist theories of literature argue that ultimately all texts
are anti-mimetic (even those which claim to represent reality) be-
cause meaning is created through differences within the system of
language and not through a word’s reference to a signified or an ex-
ternal reality. There is a tendency within poststructuralist criticism,
however, to argue that radically anti-mimetic texts that metafiction-
ally foreground their basis in language (texts that produce a form of
écriture) are doing something distinctively different from previous
forms of literature, including modernism. These fictions (by writers
such as Sollers, Ricardou, William H. Gass, and Raymond Feder-
man) may extend modernist aesthetics, but they also adopt an ap-
proach that articulates the postmodern theories associated with post-
structuralism, and make their texts resistant to any interpretation that
assigns meaning in an external reference by channeling meaning only
within the self-contained “reality” of the text.
Other critics (Umberto Eco and Linda Hutcheon, for example)
argue that postmodernist texts create some kind of mimetic rela-
tionship with external reality. These accounts place anti-mimetic lit-
erature in the category of late-modernism and reject the idea that a
text has to espouse postmodern ideas in order for it to be postmod-
ernist, because in these versions postmodernism is a set of aesthetic
practices (such as pastiche, the retro-mode, and self-reflexive
irony), not a theoretical viewpoint. Such criticism adopts a position
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158 • JABÈS, EDMOND

that emphasizes ironic mimesis as the form of referentiality adopted

by postmodernist literature. Ironic mimesis still involves doubts
about the reality of “reality” (because it is either a construction of
language-based fictions or has become a repetitious shadow of it-
self) and about the ability of texts to represent “reality” (because
forms of representation have become stale and clichéd, like the
phrase “I love you,” which Eco suggests has been used so often it
can only ever be placed inside quotation marks). However, there is
still an attempt to articulate, or comment on, “reality,” even if it in-
volves highlighting either the fictional nature of the text or of real-
ity itself. Examples of such texts are the historiographic metafic-
tions that Hutcheon analyzes (such as John Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, or E.L. Doc-
torow’s Ragtime), because they seek to represent history even while
being aware that they are reproducing it as a fiction; midfictions
that present everyday experiences while showing awareness that all
of these experiences have already been represented (such as Julian
Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot or the stories of Max Apple and Donald
Barthelme); or texts that engage with politics (for example, Robert
Coover’s The Public Burning or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow) because their concern is with the ideologies and political
fictions that shape everyday reality.

–J–

JABÈS, EDMOND (1912–1991). Egyptian-born poet who settled in

France when President Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled the Jewish
community from Egypt in 1957 after the Suez War. This event caused
Jabès to confront both the condition of exile and his Jewish heritage
which led, in turn, to the creation of numerous works that were
arranged into a series of books, the most significant of which were:
Le livre des questions (The Book of Questions, 1963–1973), Le livre
des ressemblances (The Book of Resemblances, 1976–1980), Le livre
des marges (The Book of Margins, 1982–1987), and the posthu-
mously published Le livre de l’hospitalité (The Book of Hospitality,
1991). These books collectively form an open-ended work that could
effectively never be finished because of its foundation on principles
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JABÈS, EDMOND • 159

of uncertainty, heterogeneity, and, Jabès commented, unreadability if

attempts were made to understand it according to conventional sys-
tems of meaning. The books engage with the relationship between
language and silence, something that develops out of Jabès’ concerns
with the absence of God and with the Nazi murder of the Jews. Both
of these lead Jabès to question how it is possible to speak about
something that is either “unsayable” or “unspeakable.” The crisis of
the loss of meaning becomes a key issue in Jabès’ poetry which can
be seen as a way of writing against the void so as to both construct
the possibility of meaning and to evade silence and “absence”—even
if such a possibility within referential meaning systems seems im-
possible. Jabès’ poetry is, therefore, a world of signifiers that cannot
name a signified (hence its openness) and can perhaps be understood
as a manifestation of one of Jean-François Lyotard’s versions of
postmodernism: the representation of the unrepresentable.
Of Jabès’ many books, the most important are the seven volumes
of The Book of Questions. These not only most fully engage with
such issues, but also exemplify the openness of form and the chal-
lenge to understandings of what constitutes a system of meaning (in
this case the “poem” as a system that implies certain expected forms
and ways of organizing ideas, discourses, and experiences). The Book
of Questions is based on the endlessness that epitomizes the act of
asking questions because any answer that can be discovered only
leads on to further questions. As a discourse, the book becomes an
endless act of composition in which the processes of writing and ask-
ing questions become its “content.” In its form it also challenges the
idea of the text as a closed unity because its major textual configura-
tion is the fragment which, as part of an endless text, becomes part of
a larger accretion of fragments that create not unity but a heteroge-
neous mosaic. Like his subsequent books, The Book of Questions is
a composite of styles and techniques including poems, dialogues,
songs, thoughts, essays, fables, and questions. The text is also in de-
bate with other texts through its intertextual allusions and its con-
cerns with philosophical enquiries undertaken by others in both real
and imagined discourses. The text becomes a labyrinthine world of
its own, announcing at one point that “The book is my world, my
country and my riddle” to express the ways in which meaning is con-
tained only in the writing of the world and not in the world itself.
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160 • LA JALOUSIE

LA JALOUSIE. See JEALOUSY.

JAMESON, FREDRIC (1934– ). American Marxist scholar whose ac-

counts of postmodernism have probably had more influence on the
study of postmodernist culture and literature than any other critic. Al-
though Jean Baudrillard’s conceptualization of postmodernity by
reference to simulation has been more prominent in shaping a gener-
alized view of contemporary culture, it was Jameson’s attempts to un-
derstand postmodernity as a totality (assimilating economics, social
factors, cultural processes, and textual practices) that established post-
modernism as an important area of academic study and brought Bau-
drillard and other theorists of postmodernism to wider awareness.
Jameson’s early academic writings came about as a result of his en-
gagement with French poststructuralism and his interest in 20th-
century literature. They include The Prison House of Language
(1972), a study of Wyndham Lewis in Fables of Aggression (1979),
and Marxist theories of literature in Marxism and Form (1971) and The
Political Unconscious (1981). Jameson’s discussion of postmodernism
began with two articles published in the early 1980s: “Postmodernism
and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic (1983) and
“Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in New
Left Review (1984). They were followed by a book-length study in
1991 with the same title as the New Left Review article and by further
writings later collected in The Cultural Turn (1998). Throughout these
works Jameson insisted on postmodernism as a cultural totality, in
which textual forms (literature, art, architecture, film) that had previ-
ously been treated as separate areas were integrated into a synthetic
study of contemporary culture.
For Jameson, the key principles of postmodernism are commodifi-
cation, fragmentation, and reproduction, with commodification hav-
ing most significance because it generates the others through the re-
placement of economic value by cultural and aesthetic value, thereby
destabilizing traditional hierarchies of value and creating a culture of
copies where the emphasis is on image, style, and surface. These fea-
tures inform each of the areas that Jameson catalogs as features of
postmodernism, of which pastiche can be seen to be typical (and
which Jameson considers as the paradigmatic form of postmod-
ernism) because it describes texts that are fragmented by their inter-
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JEALOUSY • 161

textual reproduction of other texts. Other phenomena Jameson iden-

tifies, and which present similar alignments with the larger cultural
processes noted above, include the aesthetic or textual forms of nos-
talgia (or the retro-mode), the effacement of high and low culture,
and the death of originality; cultural processes such as the death of
individuality, schizophrenia, the perpetual present, the recycling
of the past, the waning of affect, and cognitive mapping; with other
aspects combining both textual and cultural dimensions, such as the
loss of critical distance. Although, these features develop as a result
of the dominance of the “cultural” in postmodernism, Jameson also
provides economic and social causes for their appearance as para-
digms of postmodernity in, for example, “Periodizing the Sixties”
where he argues that postmodernism arose in the 1960s as a result of
both the development of consumer culture and the fragmentation of
politics into single-issue movements such as the Vietnam War
protests, Civil Rights, and Women’s Rights.

JEALOUSY. Novel by French author Alain Robbe-Grillet published

in 1957 as La Jalousie which is probably the classic example of the
late-modernist style of the early nouveau roman. The novel is set on
a plantation in the French colonies, but avoids any consideration of
politics in its flat presentation of the “objective” reality of the jealous
obsession of a husband (who may also be the narrator) with regard to
the relationship between his wife (called simply A.) and his neighbor
(Franck). These latter two characters are the only ones apparently
present in the narrative with the husband effectively “invisible” even
though there are clues to his presence at the conversations over din-
ner and drinks between A. and Franck, such as a third chair, an extra
place set for dinner, or Franck explaining things that A. already
knows as if for a third person. The husband’s involvement in telling
the narrative may also extend to the narrative itself which goes over
events and possible events several times. All of the actions of the
novel are presented in different ways and with different implications,
as if they are half-seen events (an idea suggested by the fact that “la
jalousie” also means “Venetian blind” in French) that are being sub-
jected to continual reinterpretation. Time is also problematized by the
narrative perspective because the repeated events occur as if in a lin-
ear progression even when the text is circling back on itself.
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162 • JELINEK, ELFRIEDE

By such strategies Robbe-Grillet produces a narrative that is im-

possible according to the conventions of reality but which is emi-
nently allowable if the cause and effect conventions of the traditional
realist form are stretched to their logical conclusion. The reader is
thus invited to consume the novel as if it were a realist novel, but
finds that the skewed narrative temporality forces him or her to doubt
the “reality” of any of the novel’s events. Although the indeterminate
fictional reality of the text may be a result of the husband’s jealous
compulsion to repeat events in his mind, the overall strategy is to fo-
cus attention on the fictionality of the text and on the ability of nar-
rative and language to create impossible textual realities that have no
reference to external reality.

JELINEK, ELFRIEDE (1946– ). Austrian playwright, poet, and nov-

elist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Her
works are particularly concerned with issues of power, whether this
develops from feminist investigations of women’s subordination or
Marxist accounts of power in capitalist societies that are based on
class systems. Like Thomas Bernhard she has criticized Austrian
society for its xenophobia, misogyny, and for the culture of forget-
ting it has fostered with regard to the country’s role in the rise of
Nazism, but her political concerns, founded in her membership of
the Communist Party between 1974 and 1991, also extend to insti-
tutional, economic, and ideological systems found within the capi-
talist world as a whole. For Jelinek, capitalism is intrinsically patri-
archal, but she sees this not only as a cause of the oppression of
women, but also of men who are turned into commodities by the sys-
tem and who only find compensation within official discourses of
masculinity which are, however, also self-destructive. Jelinek’s first
published works were in the area of fiction, beginning with wir sind
lockvögel, baby (we’re decoys, baby, 1970) and Michael: Ein Ju-
gendbuch für die Infantilgesellschaft (Michael: An Adolescent
Novel for an Infantile Society, 1972), both of which use formal ex-
perimentation (such as montage, word games, and a mobile narrative
voice) to deconstruct ideological forms of reality. Die Liebhaberin-
nen (Women as Lovers, 1975) uses parody to explore the exploita-
tion of women by interrogating the idealization of love in romance
novels by reference to cultural realities.
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JELINEK, ELFRIEDE • 163

Jelinek’s later novels are her best-known works, beginning with

Die Ausgesperrten (Wonderful, Wonderful Times, 1980), a novel set in
the 1950s which uses a series of hallucinatory episodes to tell a story
about gang violence that explores affectlessness and the loss of val-
ues (both moral and political). Her most famous work is Die Klavier-
spielerin (The Piano Teacher in the UK; aka The Piano Player in the
U.S., 1983), which explores sexual fantasy and forms of abuse and
self-destructiveness in telling the story of a music teacher who at-
tempts to break away from her overly protective mother. Lust (1989)
is more overtly feminist and details the abuse inflicted on a wife by
her husband through serial and repetitive pornographic descriptions
of sexual power that act to foreground masculine power structures un-
der capitalism. In the late 1970s Jelinek began to write drama, which
has been her main mode of writing ever since, developing experi-
mental anti-theater that questions conventional dramatic forms. In
particular, her plays foreground their own “flatness” as textual forms
within which characters are self-consciously presented as fictions
whose primary function is as “language makers” or speakers of dis-
course and who have none of the “dramatic” qualities normally asso-
ciated with characters in the theater. She thus uses her drama to draw
attention to the artifice of theatrical forms and to emphasize the ideas
and explorations of politics that her dramas articulate.
Jelinek’s plays in the 1980s include: Clara S. musikalische Tragödie
(Clara S. Musical Tragedy, 1982), which continues Jelinek’s concerns
with the lack of female autonomy in capitalism, Burgtheater: Posse
mit Gesang (Burgtheater: A Musical Farce, 1984), which focuses on
fascism as part of everyday language, and Krankheit; oder Moderne
Frauen (Disease; or, Modern Women, 1987), which deals with women
as objects. In the 1990s her drama has continued to focus on fascism
in contemporary Austria, in Wolken.Heim (Cloud.Cuckooland, 1990),
Totenauberg (Death/Valley/Summit, 1991), and Stecken, Stab und
Stangl (Stick, Staff and Pole, 1996) which portrays the murder of four
gypsies as a result of their “othering” by official language. Other plays
include: Ein Sportstück (A Sportsplay, 1998), which identifies sport
with the aggression of war, Macht nichts. Eine kleine Trilogie des
Todes (No Matter: A Little Trilogy of Death, 1999), which returns to
concerns with Austria’s past, and Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V:
Prinzessinnendramen (Death and the Maiden I–V: Princess Plays,
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164 • JENCKS, CHARLES

2003), which comprises five pieces that either rewrite fairy tales in a
modern context or present pieces exploring the cultural ideologies
within which women are trapped by reference to, for example, Jackie
Kennedy, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Sylvia Plath.

JENCKS, CHARLES (1939– ). Architectural critic who has rejected

modernist principles in favor of postmodernist aesthetics and who
uses the term “postmodern” to indicate that he believes that post-
modernism is a radical break with modernism. Jencks has produced
a number of books on architecture and urban design (which he has
updated quite regularly), including What Is Post-Modernism? (1986;
4th ed., 1996), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1987, 6th
ed., 1991), and Heteropolis (1993). While many cultural critics have
historicized postmodernity by offering a general time frame for its
inception, Jencks is very specific about the origins of postmodernism,
which he claims began on July 15th 1972 at 3.32 in the afternoon
when the Pruitt-Igoe building (a large apartment block) in Philadel-
phia was demolished. This event signals for Jencks the death of mod-
ernist ideas (the fetishization of system and the imposition of mono-
lithic buildings without respect for context or landscape) and the
arrival of postmodernist principles based on the notion of double-
coding. This latter principle initially described the creation of both
elite and popular meanings in postmodernist architecture, but has
been extended to all areas of cultural production by Jencks so that it
can also describe a process of rearrangement and pastiche in which
different forms or styles are brought together to create variety in de-
sign and plurality of meaning. Jencks has also considered issues re-
lating to postmodern culture, particularly the information society
which he argues has created a new “paraclass” based on access to in-
formational rather than economic capital and which he says is di-
vided into “cognicrats” (those with access to a large amount of reli-
able information) and “cogniproles” (those with access to smaller
amounts of less reliable information).

JOHNSON, BRYAN STANLEY (B.S.) (1933–1973). British novelist

and filmmaker whose experimental novels form a bridge between
modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. In his short life, ended
when he committed suicide as a result of family problems and be-
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JOHNSON, BRYAN STANLEY • 165

cause of his failure to find commercial success, Johnson produced

some of the most important experimental work in postwar British fic-
tion. His most important works are his later novels, but his early fic-
tion demonstrates a commitment to innovative writing. Travelling
People (1963) presents a different style of writing in its nine chapters,
as each of the characters attempts to form a meaningful identity, and
reveals a postmodern understanding of selfhood as an arbitrary con-
struction of language enacted through the linguistic creation of con-
sciousness. Albert Angelo (1964) is more metafictional, experiment-
ing with typography (including holes in the page that allow other
texts or sections to be seen) and self-consciously addressing the
reader with the famous statement about the fictionality of the text:
“Fuck all this lying.” After Trawl (1966), an interior monologue,
Johnson produced his most important work, beginning with The Un-
fortunates (1969) which has gained some notoriety because of its
presentation as a “book in a box.” The novel is narrated by a jour-
nalist recollecting that a friend who died from cancer originated in
the East Midlands city where he has been sent to report on a football
match. The content of the novel, arranged into self-contained sec-
tions, is a set of memories that are quite conventional in style, but the
book is innovative in the way in which it is presented. Only the first
and last chapters have a fixed place in the narrative, while the rest are
separately bound as short pamphlets and can be arranged in any or-
der by the reader. The narrative is structured, therefore, according to
the way in which it is assembled by the reader, questioning the for-
mal linear structures associated with conventional notions of plot.
House Mother Normal (1971), set in an old people’s home, has a
cyclical narrative that records in successive chapters the thoughts of
the characters as they respond to the same events, each of them given
the same number of pages, and with each page focusing on their per-
ception (or lack of perception) of the same event. What comes
through most strongly in the experimental form of the novel is the
poignancy with which the characters’ thoughts are presented, most
notably in the use of blank spaces which indicate either that there are
no thoughts in the character’s mind, that they have fallen asleep or, in
the case of the last character, have most likely died, the blank space
thus finding a way to communicate meaning even in the absence of
words in its representation of the failure of consciousness. The novel
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166 • JONKE, GERT

ironizes itself in the final section when the House Mother breaks out
of the frame of the text and admits that the characters have no sub-
jective existence because they are linguistic constructions, suggesting
that the character’s probable death is nothing more than an empty
textual device. Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973) is a
metafictional novel about a man who uses the double entry account-
ing system to calculate the offenses done to him and the acts of re-
venge (credits) appropriate to these debits. Although the novel deals
with social injustice, by implying that there are larger “debits” such
as ideological falsehoods or economic inequalities, the novel enacts
its own double entry system by insisting that these are, at least within
the novel, only fictional devices. Thus, characters comment on nar-
rative contrivances, most notable in Christie’s mother deciding to die
in order to allow him independence and in a wage clerk’s comment
that another character will be “indisposed for the rest of the novel.”
These metafictional strategies mean that Christie’s acts of vengeance
are problematized as a political response because they are increas-
ingly foregrounded as textual acts derived from the novel’s aware-
ness of its own fictional strategies.

JONKE, GERT (1946– ). Austrian writer who wrote a series of exper-

imental novels and collections of stories in his early career before
turning in recent years to the production of drama where he has fo-
cused on the relationship between music and language, in works such
as Sanftwut oder Der Ohrenmaschinist (Gentle Fury, or The Ear En-
gineer, 1990), Insektarium (Insectarium, 2001), and Seltsame Sache
(A Strange Business, 2005), a fictional portrayal of the life of the li-
brettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Jonke is best known for his early fiction,
notably Geometrischer Heimatroman (Geometric Regional Novel,
1968), a structured collage of burlesques and fantasies that circles
around a narrative about two people wanting to cross a village
square. The novel incorporates typographical experiments, parables,
absurdist discourses, parodies of bureaucratic and scientific lan-
guage, and metafictional comment on its own fictional status in its
display of textual techniques. Other works of fiction include
Glashausbesichtigung (Glasshouse Inspection, 1970), an absurdist
narrative about a textual inspection of a glasshouse that has a similar
interplay between a minimalist narrative and its subdiscourses; Die
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JOUET, JACQUES • 167

Vermehrung der Leuchttürme (The Increase of the Lighthouses,

1971), a novel about the building of inland lighthouses that includes
footnotes and which plays with syntax in addition to the devices
Jonke had already used; and Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound,
1979). His short story collections include: Beginn einer Verzfweiflung
(Beginning of a Despair, 1970), Erwachen zum grossen Schlafkrieg
(Wake Up for the Great Sleep War, 1982), and Der Kopf des Georg
Friedrich Händel (Georg Friedrich Handel’s Head, 1988).

JOUET, JACQUES (1947– ). French writer who has been a member

of OuLiPo since 1983. Jouet has produced texts in a variety of forms
including poetry, drama, fiction, and literary criticism, as well as pro-
ducing a lexicography listing French figures of speech relating to
parts of the body. Although Jouet takes an active role in the theater it
is for his poetry and fiction that he is best known and these display
an eclectic range of styles. 107 Âmes (107 Souls, 1991) is a collec-
tion of poems written under constraint that presents everyday con-
cerns gleaned from questionnaires Jouet distributed and offers poetry
written within an elaborate formal structure that draws attention to
the dissonance between form and content. Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux
(Turnip, Napkin, Old Man’s Eye, 1998) is a large-scale poetic work
that amounts to nearly 1,000 pages and contains an eclectic range of
styles and forms based on the idea of the “daily poem” which, col-
lected as a totality, are an attempt to compose the world. Poèmes de
Métro (Metro Poems, 2000) is a similar experiment and presents po-
ems dealing with everyday life that were written during journeys on
the Metro. These include a guide to writing a “metro poem” as well
as a piece nearly 500 lines long written during a 16 hour trip through
all the stations of the Paris subway.
Jouet’s fiction is organized under the title La République roman
(The Republic Novel), a series set in a fictional republic that mixes
fabulation with comment on contemporary culture and which cur-
rently consists of 19 works. The first novel, published in 1994, was
Le directeur du Musée des cadeaux des chefs d’Etat de l’étranger
(The Director of the Museum of Gifts from Foreign Heads of State),
which textually enacts the workings of a museum by describing a col-
lection of gifts and narrating the stories that are attached to them.
Other significant works in this series include the Oulipian exercises
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168 • JOYCE, JAMES

Annette et L’Etna (Annette and Etna, 1999) and Fins (Ends, 1999), a
text that uses mathematical permutations based on the number “six”
to determine the number of sentences within paragraphs. The two
most important novels in the series are La montagne R (Mountain R,
1996) and La République de Mek-Ouyes (The Republic of Mek-
Ouyes, 2001). The former mixes satire and parody in its presentation
of a story about the building of an artificial mountain as both a pres-
tige project and as a job-creation exercise. The novel is made up of
three set-piece episodes, a speech parodying political language, a
conversation between a contractor and his daughter, and a trial in-
volving the interrogation of a writer. In each section, the novel fo-
cuses on language, detailing both language’s creation of reality and
its imperfect products, something that is symbolized by the incom-
plete mountain that is built as a result of the speech of the first sec-
tion. The latter novel is a parodic text about the creation of a repub-
lic in a highway rest area that includes metafictional elements in the
inclusion of a writer working on a book called “La République de
Mek-Ouyes,” inserted stories written in a variety of styles, and fabu-
lational or absurd elements such as a boar who reads Queneau and the
story of a man who once sold ice cubes in Greenland.

JOYCE, JAMES (1882–1941). Irish modernist writer whose novels

have had a significant impact on postmodernist literature. Joyce’s im-
portant works are: Dubliners (1914), the semiautobiographical bil-
dungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses
(1922), and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). Of these works, it is the latter
two that have had most influence on postmodernism. Ulysses was
one of the most important novels produced during the period of mod-
ernism with each section after the first six chapters being written in a
different style. The many forms that the novel takes include: journal-
ism, Expressionist or psychological drama, and popular melodrama,
while it also includes sections that mimic the form of music (includ-
ing an overture), present a history of English Literature through par-
odies of texts and writers from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early
20th century, or dispense with all forms of punctuation, as in the fa-
mous last chapter which presents the thoughts of Molly Bloom in an
uninterrupted flow.
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JR • 169

Ulysses’ impact on subsequent experimental literature has been

significant and it has inspired a number of writers to mimic its scale.
The maximalist or encyclopedic novel of postmodernism primarily
owes its existence to Joyce’s masterpiece, with a particular conflu-
ence of interest developing in Latin America in the 1960s when both
Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Julio Cortázar, for example, drew
on its possibilities in Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Trapped Tigers) and
Rayuela (Hopscotch) respectively. Joyce’s final novel, Finnegan’s
Wake, which took him nearly 20 years to write, is even more radical
in its experimentation than Ulysses. Joyce effectively produced a new
language in Finnegan’s Wake through the use of both puns and neol-
ogisms. The novel has been valorized by postmodernist writers with
a penchant either for language games or for internal self-reflexivity.
Both poets and novelists have been influenced by Finnegan’s Wake,
including the Language Poets, writers of surfiction, and authors of
the Tel Quel group. Works produced by these writers (such as Julián
Ríos in Larva) tend to utilize the same play of language that
Finnegan’s Wake offers while also evading a referential axis in their
insistence on the importance of the play of textual signifiers as the
creator of meaning.

JR. An Epic maximalist novel by William Gaddis published in 1975

which presents a satire on the emptiness of corporate capitalism in
the United States through its story of JR Vansant, an 11-year old boy
who creates a business empire. The novel is told almost entirely in di-
alogue through characters who are unidentified until someone else
addresses them. The narrative of JR constructs itself by a process of
accumulation and synthesis, recuperating events and episodes into a
single narrative (the narrative of JR Corp) so that the many narratives
of JR (those of Bast, Gibbs, Amy Joubert, Black Jack Cates, and JR
himself) lose their definition as they are collapsed into one another.
There are no boundaries of any kind (including genre) and the novel
develops as a flow of events in which superficial cause and effect
connections between events and episodes are created because there
are no gaps or breaks in the novel. This means that the characters are
entirely within the flux of the text and have no fixed position because
they are constantly assailed by flows of information, unable to view
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170 • KANE, SARAH

the economic and cultural processes that move them through their
lives. Through his configuration of narrative as a flow, Gaddis maps
the movements of late capitalism and enacts the submergence of sub-
jectivity in the circulation of images, information, and commodities
of postmodern culture. The narrativization of JR’s creation of a cor-
porate empire also mimics the economic drives of late capital. A nar-
rative of accumulation and waste, interconnection and self-reflexiv-
ity is represented through JR’s accumulation of “junk” businesses, a
business empire that teeters on the edge of uselessness and immate-
riality even while JR and his employees assert its materiality because
it has monetary value. Although JR Corp seems to have a substance
in its agglomeration of companies (although whether these compa-
nies are anything other than names is questionable), Gaddis presents
it as an immaterial entity. It is a collection of self-generating compa-
nies controlled by an “invisible” owner who never has direct contact
with his businesses. The individual companies that JR “owns” have
no use or value in isolation but only become valuable when they are
connected with the other useless companies.

–K–

KANE, SARAH (1971–1999). British playwright whose “brutalist”

aesthetic (involving rape, masturbation, and cannibalism in Blasted
and torture and dismemberment in Cleansed) led her to be con-
demned in sections of the British press but who, in the few plays she
produced before her suicide, experimented with the form of drama
in order to investigate textual and performative relationships with
“reality.” Kane’s first play, Blasted (1995), for example has a setting
within the “theatrical reality” of a hotel room but, in addition to its
brutal events, also has a fabulated civil war in the English city of
Leeds, a character speaking even after a stage direction notes that
“He dies in relief,” and seasons changing over the course of a few
days, a temporality that foregrounds the fictional representations of
time in the theater. Phaedra’s Love (1996) is a revisionist adaptation
of Seneca’s Phaedra that focuses on violence and sexuality to prob-
lematize classical conventions of drama. Cleansed (1998) develops
concerns with identity and is set in an institution where Tinker, a fig-
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KATZ, STEVE • 171

ure of uncertain authority, tests the love the characters feel for oth-
ers by subjecting them to various tortures. Mutability of identity is
developed in Crave (1998), which adopts a more radical absurdist
form in the style of Samuel Beckett (who it references along with
allusions to T.S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, and Aleister Crowley).
The play is composed in the form of four “voices” identified only as
A, B, C, and M, and has no stage directions, a situation that gives the
impression that the characters exist only in the language they speak.
While the characters seemingly have distinct identities at the begin-
ning (most clearly in A, a self-confessed pedophile, and C, who
speaks in soundbite clichés), as the play progresses they blend into
each other as the pattern of “dialogue” increasingly involves them
continuing and concluding each others’ observations and sentences.
Kane’s final play, 4.48 Psychosis (2000), has no characters or stage
directions and was her most experimental work, taking the form of
a series of fragments that defy the construction of any totalizing
meaning system.

KATZ, STEVE (1935– ). American writer and member of the Fiction

Collective who is particularly associated with the surfiction move-
ment of the 1970s. Katz’s fiction is characterized by an eclectic and
pranksterish quality in which he plays with form as an end in itself.
This produces fictions that are often simply sets of narrative and lin-
guistic experiments and which have no significance other than as
records of Katz’s explorations of the possibilities of form, a configu-
ration that takes his texts beyond mere self-reflexivity (simply an-
other textual experiment for Katz) and toward the realm of the hypo-
thetical “pure writing” of écriture. After his early works, The
Lestriad (1962) and The Weight of Antony (1964), Katz produced
what is still his most important work, The Exagggerations of Peter
Prince (1968), in which he inserts himself into the text as an intrusive
presence to tell the story of Peter Prince using a catalog of typo-
graphical, narrative, and linguistic experiments that are constantly
changing or erasing themselves to produce a radical plurality of
forms. Creamy and Delicious (1970) is a set of experiments that de-
mythologizes the concept of “myth” itself through the presentation of
figures as diverse as Apollo, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Dickens, and
Wonderwoman in unlikely or quotidian situations, a configuration
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172 • KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG

that turns them into equivalents by virtue of the fictionalizing

process. Saw (1972) blurs autobiography and fantasy by represent-
ing Katz’s entry into the text in the role of “The Astronaut,” an alien
visiting a defamiliarized and soon-to-be-destroyed version of Earth,
and investigates the relationship between fact and fiction; an explo-
ration also found in the collection of stories, Moving Parts (1977).
After this collection, Katz turned to a form of self-conscious real-
ism in producing a trilogy of novels set in a Manhattan neighbor-
hood in Wier & Pouce (1984), Florry of Washington Heights (1987),
and Swanny’s Ways (1995).

KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG (1940– ). American writer whose

works offer collages of different styles in order to express the frac-
tured experience of being Chinese-American. Her books are hybrid in
form, mixing history, contemporary settings, autobiography, and
memory with fictionalized versions of Chinese myth that take on the
form of complex fabulations as she imagines a fictional version of
herself and her characters. Kingston’s first book, The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) is her most important
work and presents a fictionalized autobiography in which she uses el-
ements of magic realism, myth, history, fantasy, her mother’s memo-
ries, and the experience of diaspora to consider the difficulty of estab-
lishing an identity in a culture that divides the narrator against herself.
Crucial to this consideration are the “ghosts” that inhabit the novel
(which are both the stories brought to America from China and the
people of America themselves) and the complexities entailed by the
use of “I” as a form of self-reference because the narrator’s feminin-
ity is disparaged or left unrecognized; one memorable sequence in-
volves a grandfather complaining he has no grandsons before refer-
ring to his granddaughters as “maggots.” China Men (1980) uses the
same techniques, beginning with a story about emasculation from
Chinese legend and then using this as the informing principle for a
consideration of the history of Chinese migration to the United States
and the sexism experienced within the immigrant Chinese culture.
Tripmaster Monkey (1989) is set in the 1960s and mixes a countercul-
tural narrative with Chinese stories and legends, ending with a critique
of binary visions of identity that questions the hyphenated Chinese-
American identity and the stereotyping of Asians in American culture.
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KUNDERA, MILAN • 173

Kingston’s most recent work is The Fifth Book of Peace (1993), a col-
lage of stories that deals with memory, writing, and history with a par-
ticular focus on the Vietnam war, which also includes further adven-
tures of Wittman Ah Sing from Tripmaster Monkey.

KUNDERA, MILAN (1929– ). Czech-born novelist who left Czecho-

slovakia after government censorship of his work, settling in France
in 1975 where he took up citizenship in 1980. Kundera’s early works
were written while he was still a member of the Communist Party and
his poems and plays of the 1950s and early 1960s display a liberaliz-
ing communist viewpoint. His first fictional work was the short story
collection, Smĕšné lásky (Laughable Loves, 1963), an exploration of
sexual games that also began to develop Kundera’s problematization
of binary oppositions, such as truth and lies, as they fade into ambi-
guity. Kundera’s first novel, Žert (The Joke, 1967), tells the story of
a man whose life is ruined by a joke and takes the form of a poly-
phonic musical composition with four characters narrating events.
The novel is partly a satire on totalitarianism, but the multiple per-
spectives (which lead to some renarrations of events with different
emphases) also pose questions around the determinacy of reality.
Concerns with notions of truth are also manifest in Život je jinde (Life
is Elsewhere, 1969), a novel about a poet who adapts his poetry to the
demands of the Soviet system. The book was refused publication by
the hardline Czech authorities who took control of the country after
the Prague Spring and was first published in France in 1973.
It was during Kundera’s early years in France that he produced his
best-known novels, Kniha smíchu a zapomnĕní (The Book of Laugh-
ter and Forgetting, 1979) and Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbear-
able Lightness of Being, 1984), which were published in translation
before Czech versions were published in Canada. The former work is
a polyphony of voices that mixes real people with fictional charac-
ters and arranges its seven chapters and several story lines around the
musical principle of variations on a theme, substituting a formal
structure—whose coherence develops out of reflections on memory
and laughter—for a narrative structure based on plot. The latter novel
tells the story of the lives of two couples and has a more traditional
form although there are philosophical digressions and intrusive com-
ments by the narrator that create a playful fiction where surface and
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174 • L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E

insignificance become paradoxically significant. Nesmrtelnost (Im-

mortality, 1990) is a collage with an episodic form (and includes a
self-reflexive consideration of “episodes”) in which story lines de-
velop by association out of anecdotes, digressions, and meditations
after the novel’s initial motivation in the narrator’s act of imagining
a woman who becomes one of the main characters. The novel has a
particular concern with “fictions” and “lies,” using stories involving
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernest Hemingway to develop this
theme, while its own basis in an imagined act of imagination com-
ments on its own status as a fiction in an involuted metafictional
way. La Lenteur (Slowness, 1995) was the first of Kundera’s books to
be written in French and has the same mixture of digression and nar-
rative (as well as including an appearance by Kundera), and was fol-
lowed by L’Identité (Identity, 1998), a love story that develops into a
consideration of the interpretation of reality, and L’Ignorance (Igno-
rance, 2002), a novel about memory and nostalgia.

–L–

LⴝAⴝNⴝGⴝUⴝAⴝGⴝE. Magazine edited by Bruce Andrews and

Charles Bernstein that ran for 13 issues between February 1978 and
October 1981. L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E was one of the most im-
portant forums for the theorization and discussion of Language Po-
etry. Much of the writing involved conceptualization of poetics and
analyses of texts rather than poetry itself, although for many Lan-
guage Poets, including Bernstein, the theorization of poetics and the
practice of poetry were interchangeable. Most of the major Language
Poets contributed to L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E, including Lyn
Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, cov-
ering areas such as poetic form, signification, language theory and
semiotics, and the politics of poetry. In 1984 Andrews and Bernstein
coedited a collection of writings drawn from the magazine in The
L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E Book.

LANGUAGE POETRY. An avant-garde form of postmodernist poetry

that developed in the United States which places emphasis neither on
the symbolic meanings of words nor on their reference to a reality
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LANGUAGE POETRY • 175

outside the text but on the internal structures of language within the
text itself. Language Poetry originated in This, a journal founded and
coedited by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten in 1971, becoming
more formalized as a movement with the foundation of the
LⴝAⴝNⴝGⴝUⴝAⴝGⴝE magazine in 1978, coedited by Bruce
Andrews and Charles Bernstein, which provided a forum for writ-
ers to present their theories on poetics. Important influences on Lan-
guage Poetry include: the Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky; the theo-
ries of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly with regard
to the idea of “language games”; the modernist writer Gertrude Stein,
whose opaque texts (such as Tender Buttons) focus meaning within
their own configurations of language and resist interpretation by ref-
erence to a reality outside the text; and poststructuralist theories of
language. Important Language Poets in addition to Andrews, Bern-
stein, Grenier, and Watten include Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Su-
san Howe, Bob Perelman, Leslie Scalapino, and Ron Silliman,
while English poets such as Allen Fisher and Tom Raworth have
been influenced by their poetry and ideas.
Bernstein, one of the key theorists of Language Poetry, has de-
scribed in Content’s Dream the principle by which poetry should ex-
press “the factness of the world in the factness of the poem,” direct-
ing attention to the poem as a material fact in itself not as a reflection
or representation of something else. The “content” of Language Po-
etry is invested within the articulation of language and the relation-
ships between words. Language Poets are particularly interested in
the notion of “difference” (or, in poststructuralism, “différance”) by
which linguistic signifiers gain their meaning by reference to other
signifiers rather than by reference to a signified that exists as a
“thing,” “concept,” or even “image” of a thing or concept. Such a
construction of language creates a plurality of meanings for each in-
dividual signifier because it exists meaningfully in relation to a mul-
titude of other signifiers not only in its consonances, but also in its
differences. Language Poetry is, as a result, opaque in its meanings,
providing no reference point other than its own words and linguistic
structures, a situation extended by its avoidance of narrative poetic
forms. For Language Poets, one of the key units of meaning is the
sentence in both its internal syntactical arrangements (theorized, for
example, by Ron Silliman, in The New Sentence) and its relationship
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176 • LATE-MODERNISM

to other sentences within the poem, although again the operation of

relationships is often by difference, producing poetry that uses dis-
junctive syntactical forms that are themselves related to other sen-
tences only by dissonance. Many of the movement’s poets (including
Bernstein and Silliman) also argued that poetry which avoided refer-
ential language structures had a political dimension, and even a
utopian impulse, because such poetry not only evaded already exist-
ing ideological meanings, but also “de-formed” language in its cur-
rent usage thereby defamiliarizing the “normality” of everyday real-
ity and its conventional modes of representation.

LATE-MODERNISM. A term that is frequently used to refer to fic-

tional or poetic texts that are felt by critics to be neither fully mod-
ernist nor fully postmodernist. Late-modernism is often used to refer
to a transitional stage of literary history in the 1950s and early 1960s,
after the end of high modernism (which is commonly dated around
about 1940), but before the appearance of postmodernist literature in
the mid-1960s. In this version, the French nouveau roman, the writ-
ings of Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake, Latin American magic realism, and the poetry of
Charles Olson are said to be late-modernist because they appear dur-
ing this period. Most accounts of late-modernism, however, base
themselves on theorized taxonomies of modernism and postmod-
ernism that focus on their differences, with late-modernism usually
being used to refer to those texts that either fit into both or neither cat-
egory. There is, however, no agreement among critics as to the dom-
inant characteristics of late-modernism because, depending on the
theoretical perspective adopted, different groups of texts and literary
strategies are assigned to modernism and postmodernism whose def-
initions determine the shape and content of late-modernism.
John Barth, for example, argues that late-modernist fiction is
characterized by the creation of self-reflexive metatexts that com-
pensate for the death of originality by substituting texts-about-texts
for the text itself. Barth cites Borges as the paradigmatic late-
modernist writer because he creates metatexts out of nothing but the
imagined possibility that such a text could exist. The Borges’ story
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” exemplifies this literary discourse for
Barth by creating a pseudolearned metacommentary on imaginary
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LATE-MODERNISM • 177

texts from the imaginary world of Tlön, fake signs of which the main
character has come across. The story creates a text about an imagi-
nary world, but in so doing also conjures the imaginary world into ex-
istence. Thus, although Tlön only exists in a fictional story, Borges
has nevertheless fabulated both a fiction and a “reality” that had not
previously existed. By this means, according to Barth, Borges has
overcome the sterility created by modernism’s exhaustion of literary
styles and subject matter and constructed an “original” text out of
nothing more than a “metatext” and the imagined possibility of a
nonexistent world. Such processes can be seen in the works of writ-
ers such as Italo Calvino, most notably Se una notte d’inverno un vi-
aggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveller), which creates a novel
out of a series of false starts and a dialogue between the author and
the reader, and Umberto Eco’s Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s
Pendulum) in which a publishing editor brings into “reality” a con-
spiracy by planting fake signs of its existence.
John Mepham argues a similar case to Barth in relation to what he
refers to as ultra-modernism, noting the anti-mimetic tendency of
late-modernist texts by discussing them in terms of their radical loss
of referentiality and their emphasis on language games. For Mepham,
late-modernist texts display only a self-reflexive concern with the
processes by which language constructs meaning and have no inter-
est in generating reference to a reality external to the text. By these
criteria, Borges is a late-modernist writer because he writes stories
that reveal the fictionality of the worlds created within literary texts.
Other writers are late-modernist because their anti-mimetic impulses
foreground the structures of language within their texts. Such practi-
tioners of nonmimetic late-modernism would include: William H.
Gass, Raymond Federman, novelists of the French nouveau roman,
and the Language Poets. Many critics, however, including Ihab
Hassan, consider such narcissistic linguistic experimentation to be
the paradigmatic form of postmodernist literature because such texts
extend avant-garde forms of modernism while rejecting high mod-
ernism’s impulse to create master narratives. Similarly, a critic such
as Brian McHale argues for their postmodernist credentials because
of the way their linguistic and narrative self-reflexivity problematizes
stable ontologies. These disagreements suggest that, as a concept,
“late-modernism” is ultimately a description of the fluidity of the
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178 • LATIN AMERICAN BOOM

terms “modernism” and “postmodernism” themselves, leading to the

conclusion that one critic’s modernism can often be another critic’s
postmodernism, and vice versa.

LATIN AMERICAN BOOM. A term used to refer to the upsurge in

literary and cultural activity that took place in Latin America in the
1960s and 1970s. The major “Boom” writers are Julio Cortázar,
whose Rayuela (Hopscotch) is often regarded as its founding text,
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes,
Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The term is
often simply used to describe the arrival of a new generation of
writers, but can also be used to refer to the idea of the “Boom” as
literary movement that developed new experimental textual prac-
tices in opposition to those used by the modernismo writers of the
early 20th century. More specifically it has also been used to iden-
tify a group of writers unified by their use of the techniques and
forms of magic realism. This latter view is less frequent than the
others because the “Boom” writers generated a range of different
styles of writing that cannot simply be reduced to the label of magic
realism, but does find usage in the notion of a “post-Boom” gener-
ation of writers who responded to the aesthetics of the “Boom”
writers rather than to modernismo and who paid more attention ei-
ther to textual strategies (Severo Sarduy) or to the media culture
developing in Latin America (Manuel Puig). This distinction is of-
ten used to foreground the fact that the works of the “Boom” writ-
ers are defined by their relationships and consonances with both
modernist and postmodernist styles, whereas the “post-Boom” writ-
ers are defined more by a relationship with postmodernism (either
by the embrace of its principles or by a rejection of them in favor
of more realist forms of writing).

LE CLÉZIO, JEAN-MARIE GUSTAVE (J.-M.G.) (1940– ). French

writer who splits his time between France, Mexico, and Mauritius
and whose early works were written in the style of the nouveau ro-
man before he turned to more realist styles of writing in the 1970s
when he began to question the rationality of western culture and de-
veloped concerns with ecology, mysticism, and nonwestern tradi-
tions, especially Amerindian culture. His first novel, Le procès-ver-
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LEM, STANISLAW • 179

bal (The Interrogation, 1963) focuses attention on both the subjective

creation of reality and its indecipherability in its portrayal of Adam
Pollo wandering around a town that is represented according to the
skewed topography of it that exists in his mind. Other early works,
such as La Fièvre (Fever, 1965), Le Déluge (The Flood, 1966), Le
Livre des fuites (The Book of Flights: An Adventure Story, 1969), La
Guerre (War, 1970), and Les Géants (The Giants, 1973), develop
similar concerns with reality as a system of signs that requires read-
ing as if it were text and foreground the roles of language and narra-
tive as textual and “real” processes.
These novels also articulate Le Clézio’s concerns with modernity
and its architecture of signs by mapping its chaotic forms textually as
well as offering more overt critiques. In The Flood, for example, Le
Clézio deals with urban modernity, which also forms one of the many
competing realities of War, an experimental narrative that alternates
a history of a timeless war in an irreal fantasy form with the narrative
of Bea B., presenting fragments of contemporary consciousness to ar-
ticulate the fractured and chaotic world of contemporary culture. A
similar textualization of complexity and disconnected identity can be
found in The Book of Flights, which articulates such concerns
through a focus on the linguistic schizophrenia of ruptured significa-
tion. In the mid-1970s, Le Clézio’s fiction began to focus more on
story as he developed his critique of western modernity through the
embrace of other cultures, partly based on his experiences living with
the Embera Indians in Panama. These concerns have been developed
in novels that include: Désert (Desert, 1980), Le Chercheur d’or (The
Prospector, 1985), which deals with colonialism and war, Onitsha
(1991), which has an autobiographical basis, Étoile errante (Wander-
ing Star, 1992), and Coeur brûlé et autres romances (Burnt Heart and
Other Stories, 2000).

LEM, STANISLAW (1921–2006). Polish writer of science fiction who

in the 1960s developed concerns with the “inner space” of the mind
that are resonant of New Wave science fiction and who in his later
works turned to more fabulational and metafictional textual forms.
Lem’s first novel, Astronauci (Astronauts, 1951), is a conventional
science fiction story about an expedition to Venus and was followed
by collections of stories that focused on Ijon Tichy, a space pioneer.
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180 • LESSING, DORIS

At the beginning of the 1960s, in Powrót z gwiazd (Return from the

Stars, 1961), Solaris (1961), Niezwyciężony I inne opowiadania (The
Invincible, 1964), and Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie (Tales of Pirx the
Pilot, 1968), he turned to cognitive issues concerning the inability of
his characters to understand “alien” realities or meaning systems,
through which he questioned conventional SF and scientific notions
of reality as an empirical fact rather than a cultural, psychological, or
linguistic construction. These issues were developed as textual con-
cerns in the fabulational Cyberiada (The Cyberiad, 1965) and in the
more metafictional works Glos pana (His Master’s Voice, 1968),
Doskonała próżnia (A Perfect Vacuum, 1971), and Wielkość urojona
(Imaginary Magnitude, 1973), which involved the collection of fic-
tional introductions and reviews for nonexistent books in the manner
of Jorge Luis Borges, whose influence can also be seen in Wizja
lokalna (Inspection of the Scene of Action, 1982), a story concerning
the study of a fictional civilization. In his later works Lem returned
to more orthodox science-fictional forms, in Fiasko (Fiasco, 1986)
and Pokoj na Ziemi (Peace on Earth, 1987), while retaining his inter-
ests in cognition and the forms of reality.

LESSING, DORIS (1919– ). Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean) novelist

born Doris May Tyler in Persia (now Iran) who lives in the United
Kingdom and who has written prolifically in many forms (novels,
nonfiction, poetry, and plays) and fictionally in many styles, includ-
ing fabulation, science fiction, and social realism. Lessing’s first
novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1949 and she then be-
gan work on the five volume Children of Violence series
(1952–1969), which investigated the position of women in society by
tracing the life of Martha Quest. Her early works are realist in style,
but in 1962 Lessing published The Golden Notebook which signaled
a shift to more experimental forms of writing while retaining con-
cerns with gender. In the novel, Anna Wulf tries to organize her life
and experiences into various notebooks (including one written by her
alter ego) as she faces a nervous breakdown, commenting on the util-
ity of each with regard to their ability to represent her life. The novel
is not written as a linear narrative, but as a life constructed out of the
fictions that organize Anna’s account and which also include an em-
bedded novel-within-a-novel that creates a sense of continuity be-
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LETTERS • 181

tween its fragments. It is thus narrative itself and its mode of arrange-
ment that not only creates the record of her life, but also the experi-
ences themselves, with the novel implying that different categories
and arrangements would create a different life.
Lessing’s engagement with experimental forms led to an altered fo-
cus for The Children of Violence with the result that the final volume,
The Four-Gated City (1969) developed a fabular form that moved the
action into a postapocalyptic world while dealing with notions of re-
ality and transcendence. Such concerns developed out of Lessing’s in-
terest in Sufi mysticism and inform other novels such as The Memoirs
of a Survivor (1974), one of her best-known novels, which is set in a
postapocalyptic dystopia in which the narrator experiences two dif-
ferent realities and reaches transcendence at the end of the novel. In
the 1970s Lessing turned increasingly to the production of works that
can be classified as postmodernist science fiction, the most impor-
tant of which are the novels of the Canopus in Argos series (Shikasta,
1979; The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, 1980; The
Sirian Experiments, 1980; The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8, 1982; and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire,
1983), which revise the space opera form by imbuing it with spiritual
and metaphysical concerns. Although Lessing returned to realism in
the 1980s she also continued to produce innovative SF in, for exam-
ple, The Fifth Child (1988), which deals with genetic concerns using
a variety of styles including SF, Gothic, and fairy tale.

LETTERS. Encyclopedic novel by John Barth, published in 1979, that

acts as a summary of his previous fictions, so much so that most of
the main characters derive from his other works: Todd Andrews from
The Floating Opera, Jacob Horner from The End of the Road, Am-
brose Mensch from Lost in the Funhouse, while A.B. Cook VI is a de-
scendent of two characters from The Sotweed Factor and Jerome
Bray is a descendent of Harold Bray from Giles Goat-Boy. All of
these characters are gathered together in a fiction that focuses around
the familiar Barth terrain of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay, par-
ticularly around the fictional college, Tidewater Tech, where the one
new character Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, is employed. The last
character is Barth himself. The format of the novel involves the char-
acters writing letters, frequently to Barth, sometimes to themselves,
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182 • LEVY, DEBORAH

and at other times to their parents (dead or living). However, the ex-
change of letters is not a random process but one that Barth has or-
ganized into an elaborate formal pattern based around a self-reflexive
structure involving the title and its subtitle. The characters are in-
serted into this formal scheme, each of them having importance only
for Barth’s narrative project rather than as “well-rounded” characters
from the traditional novel. The development of narrative is away
from a master narrative, although each character attempts to find one
within the fictions that surround them. Lady Amherst, for example,
hopes to uncover the structures of a contemporary zeitgeist, figured in
terms of both 18th-century letters and modernism. The most impor-
tant of these strands is the A.B. Cook VI narrative, which for a long
time seems to offer the novel a master narrative, and has attracted
most attention from critics, because it draws attention to the fiction-
ality of history and the unreality of its production and recording. Ul-
timately, however, although the seven subplots seem to cohere at cer-
tain points, it is suggested that it is narrative itself that is the dominant
form of the novel as each of the subplots disentangles itself from
Barth’s formal structure and develops its own momentum.

LEVY, DEBORAH (1959– ). Novelist and playwright born in South

Africa who currently lives in the United Kingdom. Levy began her
writing career as a dramatist and her plays include Pax (1984), Clam
(1985), and Honey Baby (1995). Her dramatic works include self-
reflexive elements (as in Pushing the Prince into Denmark, a dia-
logue between Hamlet’s Ophelia and Gertrude that is set in a snow-
storm), or present ironic investigations of contemporary culture, as in
The B File (1993), a play performed by women that deals with the
loss of identity in postmodern Europe. Levy has increasingly turned
to fiction, producing works typified by fractured narratives that map
a skewed postmodern culture of disconnection with characters who
are unable to create meaning out of its fragmentation. Beautiful Mu-
tants (1989) is a series of fragments written from multiple points of
view that portrays a group of maladjusted people in a city that seems
on the verge of collapse. This representation maps a magical
dystopian version of contemporary Great Britain in which people
have been reified into abstract ideas and where out of the ordinary
events are everyday.
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LEYNER, MARK • 183

Swallowing Geography (1993) uses the same textual features, fol-

lowing the disconnected experiences of J.K. in order to map an atom-
istic culture of displacement, where people are all strangers repre-
sented only by initial letters and where cultural, cognitive, and
imaginary geographies seem not to allow any kind of mapping of
contemporary reality. The Unloved (1994) is ostensibly a murder
mystery, but develops more of an interest in postmodern forms of per-
verse desires while Billy and Girl (1996) maintains Levy’s concern
with the meaninglessness of postmodern culture and the brutalities
for those on its margins by presenting a fabulational tragicomedy
about two adolescents abandoned by their parents many years ago.
While Girl tries to find their parents by knocking on doors, Billy fan-
tasizes himself out of their predicament by creating imaginary worlds
based on the simulations of media culture with Levy using both to
suggest that the fantasies of postmodernity provide no kind of com-
pensation for the marginalized. Levy has also produced two collec-
tions of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea (1989) and Pillow
Talk in Europe and Other Places (2004), which includes “Cave Girl,”
a story about a “pretend woman” that deals with the performance and
simulation of femininity that contemporary culture demands.

LEYNER, MARK (1956– ). American writer whose use of a wide va-

riety of styles produces an excessive quality that is matched by the
exaggerated comic content of his fictions. Leyner’s novels and sto-
ries are full of incongruous metaphors, ludicrous situations, and out-
rageous possibilities, presented with an attention to detail that blurs
the difference between parody and pastiche. A typical strategy is to
inflate T.S. Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” by combining
improbably disjunctive images that generate humor because they
never form a “natural” consonance. The incongruity is often the re-
sult of the collapse of high and popular culture as, for example, in
The Tetherballs of Bougainville (1998) where the narrator describes
the latest album released by the famous Three Tenors: a set of covers
of punk classics that are listed in full to draw attention to the incon-
gruity of the image. This technique is parodic, but there is also a plea-
sure in the absurdities of the commodified culture of postmodernity
that allows such mixing of codes or pastiche combinations to be
imagined. Leyner’s first book, a collection of stories called I Smell
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184 • LEYNER, MARK

Esther Williams (1983), differs from this general tendency. The col-
lection is comprised of a series of nonlinear fragments that are self-
referential in the style of the nouveau roman or William Bur-
roughs’ cut-up narratives, particularly the title story which is a series
of disconnected thoughts that presents an atemporal narrative and a
problematized subjectivity.
Leyner’s next work, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), is
ostensibly a novel, but is more like a set of disconnected stories
written in a variety of styles. The text uses pastiche to mix popular
and literary genres, such as the detective story, science fiction, and
the superhero narrative, also including more experimental pieces
that play with typography by avoiding punctuation and using only
extra spaces to indicate where sentences begin and end. The novel
has a particular concern with the loss of individuality in its presen-
tation of characters whose thoughts are random or disjunctive. My
Cousin, My Gastroenterologist also develops a digressive style that
becomes dominant in Leyner’s subsequent novels, the self-
conscious metafictions Et Tu, Babe (1992) and The Tetherballs of
Bougainville. These texts are effectively plotless digressions where
narrative events become nodes in the story from which meditations,
descriptions, and absurd scenarios can be developed at a tangent. Et
Tu, Babe parodies the cult of the celebrity and the ideology of the
individual in its presentation of a fictional version of “Mark
Leyner,” an arrogant world-famous writer whose creativity is fo-
cused on self-publicity rather than textual production. A related
text, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog (1995), is a collection of writ-
ings by the “Mark Leyner” imagined in Et Tu, Babe. The Teth-
erballs of Bougainville is the autobiography of young “Mark
Leyner,” and tells the story of how he wins a screenwriting prize by
writing a script based on the events surrounding the failed execu-
tion of his father. The screenplay is included in the novel which it-
self incorporates a review written by “Mark” of the yet to be made
film. After reading the script aloud to another character, “Mark” is
killed, an event that precludes him from writing the autobiography,
screenplay, and review that comprise the novel that the reader has
just finished, generating an involuted loop that metafictionally
problematizes the status of the text.
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LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL • 185

LEZAMA LIMA, JOSÉ (1910–1976). Cuban author who mainly pro-

duced poetry written in a baroque style and which drew influences
from diverse cultures and literary histories, but who is best known for
the encyclopedic novel, Paradiso (1966), which exercised an impor-
tant influence on writers of the Latin American Boom such as
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas
Llosa. Like his poetry, Paradiso makes intertextual reference to a
range of literatures and has a dense complex syntax. The main vision
of the work is the creation of a totalizing portrait of society, in the
manner of modernist novelists such as William Faulkner and Marcel
Proust, by focusing through language on the detail of everyday life in
Cuba, the internal psychologies of the characters as they are pro-
jected onto the world that surrounds them, and by developing dia-
logues, meditations, and digressions concerning a range of areas in-
cluding philosophy, ethics, and politics. The narrative’s ostensible
focus is on José Cemí in his quest for his dead father and this jour-
ney, as well as the blurring of his consciousness with others, intro-
duces magical elements into the novel, that are combined with myth
and philosophy to generate a panoramic textual reality in which
Cuban culture is reimagined and defamiliarized.

LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL. Encyclopedic novel by Georges Perec

published as La Vie mode d’emploi in 1978 that uses literary con-
straints typical of the OuLiPo group to develop a complex set of in-
terwoven and fragmented narratives. The novel is a permutational
work whose narrative details the lives of the occupants of a Parisian
apartment block by moving round a grid pattern of the building’s
rooms according to the moves a knight would take on a 10⫻10
board if it were to make one visit to every square. In addition, the
content of the chapters is further constrained by the generation of
lists of components that are organized according to mathematical
principles which drive the internal production of the novel’s fic-
tions. The novel is also strongly influenced by the narrative forms
found in the fiction of Raymond Roussel and comprises discon-
nected fragments that like a jigsaw (an important metaphor that also
informs the text’s content) also form a complete whole. The narra-
tive presents an array of stories, catalogs of objects and texts (some
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186 • LINS, OSMAN

real, some fictional), permutations (such as Hutting’s paintings and

the pronunciations of Cinoc’s name), and intertextual references to
create an internalized world which, despite the fact that most of the
stories occur in the world outside the apartment block, nevertheless
presents a reality that is more textual than referential, often with
stories and characters (such as Bartlebooth and Winckler) that take
their inspiration from other fictions.
Thematically, the novel has a variety of concerns. It is a novel of
irrelevance with many characters undertaking pointless or self-
defeating enterprises, such as Bartlebooth’s quest to produce nothing
in his life (involving the painting of five hundred watercolors that are
turned into jigsaws which, after he has reassembled them, are re-
turned to the point of composition to be bleached and then destroyed)
and Anne Breidel’s dietary regime. It is also a novel of repetition,
with the iterated lists of texts and objects (including Hutting’s paint-
ings) forming interwoven variations. The novel can also be read as a
book of the dead. Many of the stories are about how people met their
deaths, but there are also a number of characters who either have not
left their apartments for long periods or who are effectively dead
(Winckler and Valène, both of whom increasingly isolate themselves
in preparation for death). Many of the characters are also collectors
who invest themselves in the dead objects they accumulate and who
only gain “life” linguistically through the textual elaborations, sto-
ries, and catalogs (such as Cinoc’s dead words) associated with their
collections. The narrative is also a “dead” narrative because its form
as a series of synchronic snapshots means that there is virtually no di-
achronic movement onward, with the result that even though the
characters are represented as alive they are textually dead because no
narratives develop out of the moments within which they are frozen.
This leads to an ironized sense both of the “life” to be found in the
novel and its usefulness as a manual because the characters effec-
tively only have a past life as a result of being frozen in the present
with no future narrative life in view.

LINS, OSMAN (1924–1978). Brazilian novelist who is best known for

his later inventive novels, most notably Avolavara (1973), which has
become a classic of Latin American experimentalism because of its
similarities with Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. The narrative of
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LITERATURE OF EXHAUSTION • 187

Avolavara follows a character called Abel as he follows three

women: the inaccessible Roos, the hermaphrodite Cecília, and a char-
acter identified only by an ideogram. Avalovara’s importance lies in
its experimentation with a spiral narrative that plays with open-ended
possibility both formally, in its structural arrangement, and in its rep-
resentation of multiplicity and ambivalence with regard to Abel’s
quest, during which characters become variations of themselves ac-
cording to their place on the spiral of the narrative, a configuration
that is most notable in the way in which Roos changes identity ac-
cording to the city she occupies (or which occupies her). At the same
time, the novel foregrounds its own textuality, not only in naming a
character with an ideogram that has no verbal form, but also in the
numerous puzzles and self-reflexive comments that meditate on the
novel’s narration as well as on its own structural composition by con-
sidering the meaning of the spiral as an infinite topographical form.
Other innovative works by Lins include Nove, Novena (Nine,
Novena, 1966) and his last novel, A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia
(The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, 1976), a metafiction that takes
the form of a journal kept by an anonymous narrator who meditates
on a novel written by his deceased lover in the hope that it will help
him understand her better. However, his explorations of her “textual”
mind only lead to less certainty and system not only for the narrator
but also for the reader as various levels of fictions, as well as inter-
textual references, interact with one another.

LITERATURE OF EXHAUSTION. Concept developed by John

Barth, in a 1967 article of the same name, that is part of the debates
that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s over the death of the novel and
which partially influenced Fredric Jameson’s theory of the death of
originality. The literature of exhaustion, or exhausted possibilities
(as Barth also refers to it), is a way of producing fiction in a contem-
porary world where “reality” has been represented so many times that
it can only either be shown in already expressed clichés or in dissim-
ulated forms. The concept also suggests that writers are unable to
write within the old conventions of fiction, except through ironic im-
itation, because the traditional forms of the novel (plot, character, and
dialogue) have become overrepeated “clichés” that look stale in com-
parison to the innovations generated by modernism. Modernism,
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188 • LOCUS SOLUS

however, has also contributed to the feeling of exhaustion because it

developed a demand for the “new” that exhausted the repertoire of
significant experimental forms and made subsequent emulation of its
“newness” look trivial and imitative. Barth proposes the work of
Jorge Luis Borges as a model for new ways of writing by referring
to the way that Borges imagines a nonexistent text but who then, in-
stead of writing it (and therefore replicating the clichés of the tradi-
tional novel), produces a commentary on the text instead to create
something that imagines both new forms and fictional worlds. The
literature of exhaustion, therefore, is a parasitic form of writing that
rearranges or revises existing literature by using it as a source. Barth
partially revised this position in his 1979 essay “The Literature of Re-
plenishment” where he suggested that contemporary (or postmod-
ernist) writing should seek to synthesize the ideas and forms of mod-
ernist and premodernist writing within a contemporary cultural and
aesthetic context.

LOCUS SOLUS. Short-lived avant-garde magazine founded in Paris in

1964 by the American writers Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, Ken-
neth Koch, and James Schuyler, that ran for four issues. The journal
took its name from a novel by Raymond Roussel and developed ex-
perimental strategies in poetry and prose. The journal is more inter-
esting as an example of the internationalism of postmodernist litera-
ture than for any significant impact it had on aesthetic practices
although it does form a precursor for some of the ideas later adopted
by the OuLiPo group, of which Mathews became a member.

LOSS OF CRITICAL DISTANCE. An idea theorized by Fredric

Jameson, who argued that the ability to maintain a critical perspec-
tive with regard to the operations of capitalism and corporate culture
has become problematic in postmodernity. For Jameson, any view-
point or practice that is critical of, or even directly in opposition to,
the dominant postmodern capitalist system and existing power struc-
tures is appropriated by the very people, power groups, or institutions
being criticized. Jameson’s main focus concerns capitalist economics
and the way that commercial groups (such as corporations) utilize
critical or oppositional ideas (and drain them of their original mes-
sage) in order to sell products. His example is the corporate use of The
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LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE • 189

Clash to advertise Levi’s jeans, but the idea is also true of Virgin Air-
lines’ use of The Beatles’ “Revolution” to advertise their own “revo-
lution” in commercial aviation (seats with more leg room), something
that demonstrates how the exploration of social revolution present in
the original song has simply come to refer to any kind of change in
current practice, thus removing the political message of the song and
replacing it with an anodyne cliché. A literary example of the loss of
critical distance is Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho which, de-
spite its criticism of contemporary culture has an ambiguous relation-
ship to commodity culture because of the exuberance of its represen-
tation of designer brands. It has also been highly influential in
creating a literary subgenre that revels in designer lifestyles and com-
modity culture. Although the latter aspect is not part of Easton Ellis’
aim and does not devalue the critique American Psycho offers (be-
cause it is a product of misinterpretations of his novel), it nevertheless
indicates how criticism can be transformed into conformism.

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE. A collection of short stories by John

Barth published in 1968 that typifies the self-reflexive strategies
adopted by metafictional postmodernist writers. The stories in Lost
in the Funhouse generally focus on self-consciously fictional forms
of writing, specifically the act of narration and the self-reflexive con-
struction of narrative, adopting an approach that locates the content
of a story neither in a world external to the text nor in the specifics of
language, but in the act of narration itself. The opening story of the
collection, “Frame Tale,” exemplifies this process. The story consists
of 10 words that are printed along the edge of two sides of a page that
read “Once upon a time there/was a story that began,” with accom-
panying instructions to the reader to cut out the edge of the page and
fold the slip of paper into a Möbius strip. The result of doing this is
to create an endless story made up of these 10 words repeated ad in-
finitum, but the story has no content other than the telling of the story
itself and is, indeed, merely the beginning of a tale and nothing more.
Other stories in Lost in the Funhouse are just as concerned with
narrative and the act of narration as textual processes. The title story
of the collection offers a form of mimesis by describing a trip to a
funhouse but its constant narratorial intrusions presenting comments
on the narrative events and the self-referential remarks on whether
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190 • LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS

the use of a particular simile is appropriate or not turns the story into
a meditation on the process of writing within which the “funhouse”
becomes a metaphor for any written fiction. “Life-Story” deals more
fully with fictionality and concerns a writer trying to overcome a
writer’s block who comes to suspect that he is in a story being writ-
ten by another writer also trying to overcome a writer’s block. It soon
becomes clear, however, that there is not one writer, but a whole se-
ries of writers trying to overcome their block by writing stories about
a writer in a similar situation. As the writers take their place in the
scheme, they begin to wonder whether they are actually “real” writ-
ers or simply fictional constructs.

LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1924–1998). French philosopher

and theorist whose 1979 book La Condition postmoderne: rapport
sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge)
is one of the seminal texts of postmodern theory. Lyotard’s earlier
work, in Discours, figure (1971) and Économie libidinale (Libidinal
Economy, 1974), had focused on the idea of libidinal energy, ini-
tially in relation to representation and then with regard to wider con-
cerns such as politics, and developed a focus on plurality that char-
acterized Lyotard’s approach to the postmodern. The Postmodern
Condition, commissioned by Quebec’s Conseil des Universités, out-
lines a theory of postmodern knowledge that directs attention to “pe-
tits récits” (small narratives) at the expense of “grands récits”
(grand narratives, or metanarratives). Lyotard argues that the post-
modern is defined by an “incredulity to metanarratives,” an idea that
has become known as the death of the grand narratives, in which
the organizing principles (“cognitive knowledges”) of the Enlight-
enment are challenged because they no longer seem tenable as forms
of knowledge. According to Lyotard grand narratives have failed as
ways of organizing information because their structuring principle is
based on the legitimation of knowledge by reference to the grand
narrative. This means that knowledge is created not by reference to
ontology (what Lyotard refers to as “practical knowledge”) but gains
legitimacy only if it accords with the ideological and discursive sys-
tem of the grand narrative itself.
Lyotard argues that “positive knowledge” can be created by a re-
unification of cognitive and practical knowledges in the form of “par-
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MAGIC REALISM • 191

alogy” which privileges the creation of small narratives that do not

aspire to the totalizing imperative of the grand narrative. These types
of knowledge, which Lyotard also refers to as “language games,” ad-
mit to their provisionality and offer local open-ended knowledges that
can be developed according to the conditions of the practical knowl-
edge that they encounter. This theorization of knowledge led Lyotard
into a debate with Jürgen Habermas over the status of knowledge in
which Lyotard privileged dissensus and plurality and Habermas fore-
grounded notions of integration and consensus. Lyotard’s focus on
plurality can also be seen in his wider theorization of postmodernity
which can be found in the Appendix to The Postmodern Condition,
“Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Here he articu-
lates postmodernism in several ways: as a political project that will
“wage war on totality” (a response to the increasing homogenization
of everyday life that results from capitalism’s tendency to corporati-
zation); as a cultural condition that can be characterized by eclecti-
cism (in which “one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats Mc-
Donald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris
perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; [and where]
knowledge is a matter for TV games”); and as an aesthetic strategy
expressed by the idea of the “postmodern sublime” (or the represen-
tation of the unrepresentable), which can be defined as the impossi-
ble representation of the totality of postmodernism’s plurality through
form itself without however submitting to a totalizing imperative.

–M–

MAGIC REALISM. The term magic realism (realismo mágico, also

referred to as “magical realism”) has its origins in different meanings,
but has gradually come to be associated with one of the aesthetic prac-
tices generated by a group of writers during the Latin American
Boom of the 1960s (including Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and
Gabriel García Márquez) in which “reality” is represented as hav-
ing strange, mysterious, or “magical” qualities. The term developed
out of ideas expressed by Alejo Carpentier in the introduction to his
novel De reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) in 1949
where he expounded the idea of “lo real maravilloso” (“the marvelous
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192 • MAGIC REALISM

real”) which suggested that Latin America and its culture was more
amenable to irreal or irrational occurrences than Europe or North
America because it was somehow embedded within different layers of
reality. This position suggests that Latin America is inherently a world
of fantasy and magic, a Eurocentric view that Carpentier developed
from his association with the surrealists and which implies that Latin
America is more authentic because it has not been submerged under
the rational systems of modernity. While this view still has some cur-
rency, it has usually been displaced by a view of magic realism in
which it is the forms of representation that generate the magical or
fantastic qualities, not the “reality” being represented.
Magic realism as an aesthetic practice developed in postwar Latin
America as a response to modernismo of the early 20th century which
placed emphasis on European culture and literature as a model for
Latin American writing. Magic realism became one of the ways in
which the “Boom” writers of the 1960s defined themselves in oppo-
sition to modernismo, along with the embrace of the oral, local, and
indigenous traditions of Latin America and a more overtly politicized
approach to writing. As a form of representation, magic realism en-
tails the reimagination of reality within codes of fantasy in order to
reromanticize everyday life within the telling of the story. Reality is
invested with an “aura” that it doesn’t have empirically, so that it is
no longer simply taken for granted as the ordinary backdrop for
everyday life, even if the magical elements are taken for granted by
the characters as if they were everyday occurrences (and often by
readers outside Latin America who tend to lean more toward Car-
pentier’s view of Latin America as inherently marvelous or strange).
Much is made of distorted representations of time and logic in which
apparently irrational events such as dreams, legend, and myth enter
reality, a textual configuration that also has a political and cultural
imperative because it involves postwar Latin American writing dis-
tinguishing itself from the perceived rationality of European and
North American modernity and challenging the entry of associated
industrial, technological, philosophical, and social processes into the
region. Not all writers adopt such principles because of a view that
aspects of modernity are relevant and progressive so that, for exam-
ple, Eduardo Galeano develops what he calls “magical Marxism”
which combines European and Latin American perspectives.
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MAJOR, CLARENCE • 193

As an aesthetic practice, magic realism uses the naturalization of

fantasy elements within its textual reality to either defamiliarize the
realities outside of the text (a strategy that has affinities with mod-
ernist strategies) or to draw attention to the fictionality of the work
by highlighting its impossibility. In Fuentes’ novels, Terra Nostra
and Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn), for example, strategies
including skewed temporal perspectives in the former and an unborn
child narrating the novel from inside the womb in the latter are used
to demythologize the “normality” of social reality by highlighting the
abnormal power structures that Fuentes sees in operation in Latin
America across history. In Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch), on the
other hand, the integration of magic realist effects with the permuta-
tional strategies of combinatory literature produces a novel that
foregrounds its own textuality in an internalized fictional world. In-
creasingly, magic realism is a textual form that has been adopted by
writers from outside Latin America, including Umberto Eco, Ben
Okri, Milorad Pavić, Christoph Ransmayr, Salman Rushdie, and
Jeanette Winterson, who develop either of these strategies depend-
ing on their political or aesthetic perspective. Rushdie, for example,
uses the form to defamiliarize empirical reality while Eco adopts it to
heighten the fictional elements of his texts. Alongside this develop-
ment, however, has come the overgeneralized use of the term to de-
scribe any realist text that has some fantasy elements within it, to the
extent that its overuse is in danger of making it a meaningless term.

MAJOR, CLARENCE (1936– ). American novelist, poet, and painter

who uses postmodernist avant-garde forms of writing as a strategy to
foreground his belief in the liberating powers of imaginative nonreal-
ist fiction. Major was part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s
before developing experimental literary forms that shifted his aes-
thetics away from the more politically engaged writing espoused by
other members such as Amiri Baraka. This brought him into contact
with other writers of nonmimetic fiction, including Raymond Fed-
erman and Ronald Sukenick, with whom he helped to cofound the
Fiction Collective in 1973. Major nevertheless retained a focus on
African-American cultural issues, using defamiliarizing textual
strategies to focus on concerns with consciousness and identity
within the context of the circulations of ideology in society. Having
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194 • MAJOR, CLARENCE

initially concentrated on poetry, Major’s first novel was All-Night Vis-

itors (1969), a first-person narration about sexual encounters whose
fragmented plot, spatial shifts, and blurred chronology map the nar-
rator’s consciousness as a flow of language. The narrative exagger-
ates and modifies the “reality” he experiences, configuring a distorted
world of perception in order to enact the grossly distorted stereotypes
that this ideological reality attributes to African-American men. No
(1973), a novel about coming of age, also presents a map of con-
sciousness, using a doubled narrative voice and metafictional textual
strategies to reflect on the African-American experience in the United
States by linking the history of slavery to contemporary lack of free-
dom for African-Americans.
No was followed by Major’s best-known novels, Reflex and Bone
Structure (1975) and Emergency Exit (1979), which developed more
experimental strategies in alignment with the surfiction of the Fic-
tion Collective. Reflex and Bone Structure plays with the possibilities
of fiction in its use of a narrator who, in telling the story of his life,
makes up the action as he goes along. Along the way, he “erases” an-
other character and plans events that, in their articulation, become
part of the narrative. It becomes unclear how many of the events are
“real” within the fictional world and how many are “fabrications,”
the novel using such strategies to draw attention to the illusion of re-
ality created in fiction. Emergency Exit (1979) has a collage form and
uses reproductions of Major’s paintings, self-contained stories, as
well as freestanding sentences that are disconnected from the whole,
to problematize the referentiality of fiction in the development of an
internalized abstract narrative. A further experimental fiction, My
Amputations (1986), which makes great play of intertextual allu-
sion, deals primarily with the nature of identity and tells the story of
a writer who tries to regain the identity that has been stolen from him.
Toward the end of the 1980s Major decided he had taken post-
modernist aesthetics as far as he could and subsequent novels became
less formally experimental in developing more referential configura-
tions. Such Was the Season (1987), for example, is a family saga
about African-American culture and politics told by a narrator who
shapes the events in the telling, while Painted Turtle: Woman with
Guitar (1988) is an episodic narrative about a Native American
woman. Although the story collection Fun and Games (1990) in-
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MANGANELLI, GIORGIO • 195

cludes a mix of experimental and realist styles, it is the latter style of

writing that has been dominant in Major’s recent fiction. Dirty Bird
Blues (1996) is a realist novel about a blues singer trying to patch up
his marriage which deals with contemporary racism and One Flesh
(2003) explores both the relationship between poetry and painting
and the cultural diversity created by the United States’ ethnic variety.

MANGANELLI, GIORGIO (1922–1990). Italian author of experi-

mental writing, born in Milan, who was part of the postwar neoa-
vanguardia movement. His first novel Hilarotragoedia, a mono-
logue, was published in 1964, by which time he had become a
member of Gruppo 63. Manganelli published many pieces of work
after this time, as well as working as a literary critic for Corriere
della Sera. For much of his writing career Italo Calvino acted as an
important patron and promoter of his work and Manganelli’s fictional
works show the influence of Calvino in their construction of inter-
nally consistent fictional worlds whose reality depends on the lan-
guage that creates them. His work also, however, utilizes other ex-
perimental forms, including surrealist devices, as well as digressions
and textual detours. His best-known work, Centuria (1979) is made
up entirely of digressions. Manganelli has described it as “one hun-
dred romans fleuves” and the novel is exactly that, although the sto-
ries that fill the volume are compressed versions of novels that are
only one or two pages in length. The novel has an imaginary quality
resonant of the fabulations of Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, with
varied forms and concerns, including ghost stories, fantasy (such as
a tale about the Creation that is similar in style to Calvino’s Le cos-
micomiche [Cosmicomics]) and stories with both everyday and sur-
real elements (one of the chapters tells the story of how a middle-
aged man is robbed of the Universe). The book also skews temporal
order by presenting characters who often meet themselves or fall in
love with people yet to be born.
In his writing, Manganelli also plays with the differences between
the real and the unreal and sense and nonsense. The former config-
uration can be found, for example, in Tutti gli errori (All His Errors,
1986) which includes stories about a self-aware labyrinth and a soul
that is about to enter a body. The most interesting stories in the col-
lection are those that deal with space. “Travel Notes” is set in an
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196 • MARÍAS, JAVIER

allegorical reality (that perhaps has no allegorical meaning) and tells

the story of a man who is given the task of walking through a world
that is empty of people but filled with roads, houses, and villages.
The reason for his presence is never explained and, although it may
be a punishment, it may also simply be that a world with roads and
houses requires someone to walk the former and to stay in the latter.
“The H Point” and “System” are both set in irreal universes and deal
with the arbitrariness of systems of meaning, the former by explor-
ing spatial relativity in a world of whiteness constructed out of num-
bers and the latter by inventing a universe that is entirely composed
of its own abstract structures of meaning. The concern with sense
and nonsense can be seen in the figure of the fool who forms a re-
curring motif in Manganelli’s work. In another text that is resonant
of Calvino’s fiction, Pinocchio: un libro parallelo (Pinocchio, a
Parallel Text, 1977), which is both a retelling of and a commentary
on Collodi’s tale, Manganelli uses Pinocchio, who takes on the role
of trickster, to express the anonymity of the world of reason and re-
ality and the individuality or distinctiveness that comes with the
transgressions created by nonsense and the imagination. In this way,
Manganelli privileges the possibility that the imaginative world of
fiction represents above the mundanity found in reality.

MARÍAS, JAVIER (1951– ). Spanish novelist whose fiction is prima-

rily defined by its experimental pastiche style (an imaginative de-
velopment in Spanish of the style of authors such as Henry James and
Joseph Conrad) in which syntax is governed by long paragraphs and
sentences (themselves often a paragraph long) that generate digres-
sive and oblique meditations on textual events and ideas. Marías’
novels are also patterned around recurring phrases and sentences
(which are often repeated from one novel to another) as well as ques-
tions of ambiguity and interpretation, which strategies contribute to
the internalized fictional reality of his novels. Marías has developed
and refined this mode of writing in novels that include: El hombre
sentimentale (The Man of Feeling, 1986), a narrative of digressions
meditating on the past’s relationship to the present whose title am-
biguously refers to two characters; Todas las almas (All Souls, 1989);
Corazón tan blanco (A Heart So White, 1992); Mañana en la batalla
piensa en mí (Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, 1994), which tells
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MARKSON, DAVID • 197

the story of a ghostwriter; the story collection Cuando fui mortale

(When I Was Mortal, 1996); and Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark
Back of Time, 1998), a self-reflexive novel that meditates on truth
and fiction through a consideration of the ways fictional inventions
take on a life of their own and in which the narrator is Marías him-
self reflecting on the reception of All Souls. His most recent project
is the Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow) trilogy which tells the
story of a Spaniard recruited to the British secret service, the first two
volumes of which are Fiebre y lanza (Fever and Spear, 2002) and
Baile y sueño (Dance and Dream, 2004).

MARKSON, DAVID (1927– ). American avant-garde novelist whose

works use a range of experimental devices including modernist
stream of consciousness and collage forms as well as postmodernist
aesthetics such as metafiction, intertextual allusion, and pastiche.
Markson’s early novels are more conventional in form than his later
works, with The Ballad of Dingus McGee (1965) presenting a pas-
tiche version of the western and Going Down (1970) offering a
story set in Mexico that is resonant of the work of Malcolm Lowry.
Springer’s Progress (1977), a novel about creativity and desire, de-
velops more experimental forms in its use of allusions, puns, and
wordplay, but it is in Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), the novel that
made Markson’s name, where his avant-garde aesthetics become
fully evident. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, written in the form of a mod-
ernist interior monologue with a host of literary and scholarly allu-
sions, deals with perception, history, memory, and philosophy. It
also self-consciously analyzes the process of thinking (presented in
a written form) as it maps the consciousness of a woman who has
created the illusion that she is the last person left on earth. Mark-
son’s subsequent novels have questioned both the form of the novel
and the function of narrative. Reader’s Block (1996) is a metafic-
tional and intertextual novel about an author identified only as
“Reader” who contemplates the books he has read as the sum total
of his life and uses a pattern of allusions to enact the creation of a
life out of texts. This Is Not a Novel (2001) is an experimental as-
semblage of meditations, anecdotes, and facts offered by a narrator
referred to as “Writer” that has no illusions of plot or character and
which challenges the notion of what constitutes a “novel” by
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198 • MASO, CAROLE

stretching the form to its limits. Vanishing Point (2004), with a main
character called “Author,” has a similar collage form and questions
the ability of narrative to create order in presenting Author’s dis-
connected notes for a novel rather than the novel itself.

MASO, CAROLE (1955– ). American novelist whose work develops

stylistic experiments that resemble those of the modernist writer
Gertrude Stein and who has developed nonlinear and impressionist
forms of writing in both narrative and language. Maso’s early novels,
Ghost Dance (1986) and The Art Lover (1990), developed a poetic
style of prose writing, with the latter drawing out more experimental
forms and flirting with self-reflexivity in its narrative patterns and
use of inserted material. Ava (1993) is Maso’s most important work
and more clearly displays the influence of Stein in a fractured narra-
tion that is driven by the thoughts of Ava Klein on her last day of life
as her mind moves through discrete observations, thoughts, and
memories. These are articulated in very short unconnected para-
graphs, often only one line long, which generate much of the novel’s
play of meaning through their proximity, but which are also comple-
mented by intertextual allusions to other writers that create a pattern
of signification through difference rather than consonance. The
American Woman in the Chinese Hat (1994) has more of a plot,
telling the story of a bisexual writer jilted by her lover who engages
in a string of sexual liaisons to counter depression, but still retains a
fragmented narrative that also shifts in and out of first and third per-
son. Aureole (1996) continues concerns with sexuality in offering a
collection of sketches dealing with sensuality and lovemaking while
also reflecting self-referentially on its own language play and Defi-
ance (1998) tells the story of a professor (who is also a murderer)
while she waits on death row but, like Maso’s other works, focuses
on interiority in its stream of consciousness style. Maso has also writ-
ten critical works, including a study of Frida Kahlo and a collection
concerning language and fiction, Break Every Rule: Essays on Lan-
guage, Longing and Moments of Desire (2000), which includes “A
Novel of Thank You,” a metatext addressed to Gertrude Stein.

MATHEWS, HARRY (1930– ). American writer who has been a

member of the OuLiPo group since 1972. Mathews writes in a vari-
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MATHEWS, HARRY • 199

ety of styles and has produced novels, short stories, fragmentary ex-
periments, poetry, and a memoir. In the 1960s Mathews coedited the
literary journal Locus Solus, the title of which was taken from a
novel by Raymond Roussel, a writer whose influence is evident in
Mathews’ earliest published work, The Conversions (1962) and
Tlooth (1966). These two novels are structural experiments that pres-
ent fabulated worlds within the form of the quest. The narratives,
however, are merely an excuse to incorporate inserted textual mate-
rial such as fake documents, experimental poems and songs, as well
as extended descriptions, analyses, or discussions of a wide variety of
things and ideas. Examples include the worm race in The Conver-
sions or the belief system of the “Defective Baptists” and the musi-
cal instruments they make out of dead bodies in Tlooth. In many
ways it is the inserted material and the narrative digressions that form
the significant content of these novels. Mathews uses such digres-
sions to imply either that “truth” is only found in apparently in-
significant material or that the search for truth is a pointless exercise
involving a chase after endless insignificant details that leads only
away from meaning and truth rather than toward it.
After becoming a member of OuLiPo, Mathews’ fiction developed
styles that were in consonance with their strategies of writing under
constraints while initially maintaining the impossible scenarios of his
earlier novels. The Sinking of Odradek Stadium (1975) is an episto-
lary novel about the search for treasure which is set in a half-familiar
world, but which also includes long set-piece descriptions of out-
landish phenomena such as a building made out of weapons. The
novel also develops alternate forms of English, contrasting the vital-
ity of a language of neologisms and imaginary English in one char-
acter’s letters with the archaic formal language of her husband. Math-
ews’ other writing in the 1970s and 1980s was primarily poetry, in
Trial Impressions (1977), Planisphere (1974), Out of Bounds (1989),
criticism in The Way Home (1988), or short experimental prose, in
Country Cooking and Other Stories (1980) and Twenty Lines a Day
(1988). The most interesting of his works in this period are: the title
story of Country Cooking, which presents an elaborate recipe for a
dish that exists only as a fictional construction; The Orchard (1988),
a remembrance of Georges Perec; and Selected Declarations of De-
pendence (1977), a set of Oulipian experiments that include perverbs
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200 • MAURIAC, CLAUDE

(poetry or prose consisting of mixed-up proverbs) and paraphrases

(where proverbs are rewritten in terms of dictionary definitions).
Mathews has also published two other novels, coedited The Oulipo
Compendium (1998), and written a memoir (My Life in CIA, 2005).
Cigarettes (1987) is a psychological novel with a structure very sim-
ilar to Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, with each chapter pairing up two
people and describing their relationship, while other characters move
through in the background, before moving on to a new arrangement
in which one of the previous pair becomes a minor character. This ap-
proach gives the novel a rigid formal structure that breaks with the
traditional narrative distinctions of foreground and background, with
the characters being major or minor players as the structure deter-
mines. The Journalist (1994) presents the story of a narrator recover-
ing from a breakdown who tries to organize his life so he can reen-
gage with reality by writing a diary of his experiences, but who
creates such a complicated system of classification that it begins to
become the diary itself. The framework he constructs takes over from
his experiences and he gradually withdraws from reality as it takes up
more and more of his time, although it does provide a beautifully or-
dered fiction for him to inhabit.

MAURIAC, CLAUDE (1914–1996). French novelist associated with

the nouveau roman whose novels resemble the late-modernist early
works of Alain Robbe-Grillet in their problematization of reality
and perception because of the way that they focalize events through
the interior consciousnesses of the characters. Little attention is paid
to traditional novelistic conventions of time and space in Mauriac’s
novels, with the result that the reader is often required to construct a
chronology and a setting from the hints offered by the inner narra-
tions of the characters. Mauriac’s major novels were part of a tetral-
ogy that was connected by the figure of Bertrand Carnéjoux and dealt
with articulations of consciousness and time. Toutes les femmes sont
fatales (Femmes Fatales, aka All Women Are Fatal, 1957) is divided
into four chapters and follows the narrator’s stream of consciousness
during short periods of his life, recording his thoughts and impres-
sions as a flow. Le Dîner en ville (Dinner in Town, aka The Dinner
Party, 1959) similarly deals with the flow of time, while Mauriac’s
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MAXIMALISM • 201

most interesting work, La Marquise sortit à cinq heures (The Mar-

quise Went Out at Five, 1961) creates its narrative by moving from
the consciousness of one character to another in a cyclical manner
and only identifies people by name when other characters address
them. The final novel in the sequence was L’Agrandissement (The
Enlargement, 1963) which was followed by La Conversation (The
Conversation, 1964) and later novels in the 1970s. Mauriac’s major
works in this period, however, are the ten volumes of Le Temps im-
mobile (Motionless Time, 1974–1988), a journal in 10 volumes that
reflects on literature and politics, but whose nonchronological form
challenges notions of time and reality.

MAXIMALISM. Maximalism is a structuring principle, found pre-

dominantly in fiction, which generates excessive, overinflated, or en-
cyclopedic texts that attempt to incorporate a totalizing vision of his-
tory, literature, contemporary culture, or combinations of all three.
Although maximalism is not specifically a postmodernist textual
configuration, the tendency to produce encyclopedic texts has be-
come an important feature of postmodernist literature. Postmodernist
maximalism primarily derives from the upsurge of encyclopedic texts
in early 20th-century modernism, which emerged as a response to the
internationalization of culture that occurred as a result of global in-
dustrialization. The paradigm shift created by mass production and
culture, large-scale urbanization, improved transport systems, scien-
tific innovation, and the aesthetic experimentation that accompanied
such changes created new forms of perception, ways of thinking, and
modes of expression for the diverse experiences of modernity. While
some writers took a minimalist approach in order to cohere meaning
within small fragments (in Imagism, for example), other writers
adopted a maximalist perspective as a way of expressing the totality
of modernity and its origins, even if they either knew that such ex-
periments could never achieve an encyclopedic vision or consciously
designed their texts to question literature’s ability to be all-inclusive.
Examples of modernist maximalism include encyclopedic novels
such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg
(The Magic Mountain), and John Dos Passos’ U.S.A.; romans fleuves
such as Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man
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202 • MAZZA, CRIS

Without Qualities) and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps

perdu (Remembrance of Things Past); and epic poems such as Ezra
Pound’s Cantos and Louis Zukofsky’s A.
Various factors have helped to create postmodernist maximalism
and these include: the globalization of power and politics during the
Cold War; the extension of capitalist economics through the global-
ization of markets; the rationalization of everyday life; the develop-
ment of postcolonial cultures; and the ways in which technological de-
velopment has allowed cultures to experience each other more fully
than before in film, television, literature, and art. Nevertheless specific
local circumstances also influence their formation as is the case with
American maximalist texts which are partly a cultural response to the
United States’ rise to superpower status and the global pervasion of its
ideologies, but also arise out of literary factors such as the discovery
of the experimental forms of the French nouveau roman and Latin
American magic realism. Examples of American postmodernist max-
imalism include John Barth’s LETTERS, Thomas Pynchon’s Grav-
ity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, Robert Coover’s The Public
Burning, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge and Women and
Men, and William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and JR. Other maxi-
malist texts arise out of wider cultural patterns such as the Latin Amer-
ican response to modernismo and to its own postcolonial cultural and
political landscape, in texts that include Gabriel García Márquez’
Cien años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Guillermo
Cabrera Infante’s Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Trapped Tigers), and
Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, or derive from specific circumstances
as, for example, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which
seeks to totalize the experience of Indian culture in the wake of inde-
pendence, and The Satanic Verses, which articulates the dislocation of
the exile cast loose into a world of conflicting discourses.

MAZZA, CRIS (1956– ). American writer associated with the avant-

pop movement who writes in an episodic realist style that also shows
influences of dirty realism. Mazza has written quite prolifically since
her first collection of stories, Animal Acts, was published in 1989,
and her works include the novels How to Leave a Country (1992),
Your Name Here (1995), Dog People (1997), Girl beside Him (2001),
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MCCAFFERY, LARRY • 203

and Disability (2005), and several volumes of short stories: Is It Sex-

ual Harrassment Yet? (1991), Revelation Countdown (1993) and For-
mer Virgin (1997). In addition, she has coedited two collections of
postfeminist writing: Chick Lit (1995) and Chick Lit II (1996).
Mazza’s fiction focuses on postmodern identity and gender relations,
particularly marginal or transgressive desires and forms of behavior,
primarily through a distorted realist style that is focalized through her
characters’ thoughts. Her writing does display some experimentation
with form, primarily in narrative and structure, such as the conversa-
tion set out in columns in “BMW Conversation” (from Revelation
Countdown) and the use of textual inserts in Girl beside Him, which
interrupt the characters’ thoughts and generate a distancing effect,
while Your Name Here has a disrupted time flow that creates a set of
shifting perspectives.

MCCAFFERY, LARRY (1946– ). American academic who has both

written about postmodernist literature and become involved in its
aesthetic and cultural practices. McCaffery’s initial works were part
of postmodernism’s early phase of criticism which dealt with issues
in terms of their specific medium in isolation from contemporary cul-
tural and social contexts. The Metafictional Muse (1982) is a literary-
historical account of the works of Donald Barthelme, Robert
Coover, and William H. Gass that focuses on their differences from,
and continuities with, previous fiction. During this period McCaffery
also coedited Anything Can Happen (1988), a collection of inter-
views with postmodernist writers, and Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-
Bibliographical Guide (1986). McCaffery developed a cultural per-
spective for his work when he embraced science fiction and
cyberpunk, producing another collection of interviews, Across the
Wounded Galaxies (1990), and editing an important collection on cy-
berpunk, Storming the Reality Studio (1991), that located the move-
ment within its postmodern cultural context. McCaffery’s involve-
ment in aesthetic and cultural debates also expanded with his
promotion of the avant-pop movement for which he has produced
both manifestos and critical accounts as well as editing two collec-
tions of short stories: Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation
(1993) and After Yesterday’s Crash (1995).
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204 • MCELROY, JOSEPH

MCELROY, JOSEPH (1930– ). Innovative American novelist whose

works blur the boundary between modernist and postmodernist writ-
ing. Although McElroy is predominantly concerned with phenome-
nological and referential issues that are typical of modernism in nov-
els that seek to find new ways of representing inner and outer reality
through the redefinition of textual configurations of language and
narrative, these features have often also been taken as proof of his
credentials as a postmodernist writer because his experiments seem
either to foreground the nonnaturalistic status of his fictions or to re-
vise the concept of the novel itself because of the complexity of the
systems and ideas that he incorporates within his works. McElroy’s
oeuvre is difficult to classify as a whole because, over 40 years, he
has varied the style, genre, and narrative structure of his fictions from
one novel to another. Certain motifs do, however, recur and include:
concerns with the social and cognitive relationships between people;
concepts of “complexity”; scientific and mathematical systems; and
the role of narrative in the creation of relationships and connections.
McElroy often uses the latter two areas to explore the “fields” of op-
eration that create interactions between consciousnesses in his nov-
els. Textually, McElroy’s innovations are principally within narrative
and syntax, the configurations of which can be described in terms of
“synthetic disjuncture” because of the way they articulate connec-
tions and disconnections (often simultaneously) between characters,
ideas, words, and realities.
McElroy’s early novels share a similar form in that they tend to deal
with a postmodern or phenomenological mystery that develops into is-
sues around knowledge and its ordering or disordering. A Smuggler’s
Bible (1966) takes place on a ship during a transatlantic crossing and
involves David Brooke scrutinizing a number of manuscripts (which
alternate with more self-conscious chapters commenting on narrative
and its ability to create either order or open-endedness) in order to find
the truth about a set of relationships in an apartment block in Brook-
lyn. The mystery in Hind’s Kidnap (1969) concerns the reinvestigation
of a child’s kidnapping by Jack Hind and deals with similar tropes in
the opposition between the unfulfilled order created by Hind’s detec-
tion and the disordering of knowledge created by its unraveling, while
Ancient History: A Paraphrase (1971) uses field theory to inform its
narrative as it seeks to create both complexity and order. For many
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MCELROY, JOSEPH • 205

years considered to be McElroy’s major achievement, Lookout Car-

tridge (1974) concerns the theft of a film and the quest by the narra-
tor, Cartwright, to find it. The novel focuses on systems of power and
information and uses a narrative focalized through Cartwright’s inter-
nalized and limited perspective to configure a society that appears dis-
connected (imagined through the metaphor of separate “cartridges”
plugged into different systems), but which, through the metaphor of
the “lookout” (someone who can see and understand society in its to-
tality), gradually reveals to Cartwright the connection and complexity
within which he is powerlessly enmeshed.
In Plus (1977), McElroy created a highly experimental speculative
fiction about a disembodied brain (called IMP) which awakens to
consciousness aboard a satellite orbiting the earth. As the novel pro-
gresses IMP develops its own complex language which it uses in in-
creasingly poetic ways to define itself and its relationship to external
reality, a process that leads to it becoming IMP Plus, a consciousness
that is more than its programs. McElroy’s most important work, and
one of the most significant novels produced in postwar American lit-
erature, is the encyclopedic novel Women and Men (1987) which
deals with culture, politics, communication, systems theory, and sci-
ence. Ostensibly about two people (a journalist and a women’s rights
activist) who live in the same apartment block but who never meet,
the novel ranges across American and global perspectives both geo-
graphically and historically by creating a complex nexus of narratives
(incorporating a vast array of characters) that both impinge upon each
other and run in parallel. The novel challenges the notion of both plot
and character by creating its “agents” as consciousnesses in a com-
plex web of systems and relationships and by including chapters
called “Breathers,” which radically experiment with narrative point
of view and create a pattern of simultaneous connection and discon-
nection. Women and Men was followed by The Letter Left to Me
(1988), a more personal novel that returned to the mystery format of
McElroy’s earlier works and which concerns a son’s attempts to un-
derstand the meaning of a letter left to him by his father. McElroy’s
most recent novel is Actress in the House (2003) in which an arbitrary
but seemingly necessary meeting between an actress and a member
of the audience gradually reveals narratives of connectedness be-
tween the two of them.
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MCGUANE, THOMAS (1939– ). American writer whose novels have

a fabular quality in their representation of a strange and disorienting
America, but whose works have increasingly become realist in form.
McGuane’s first novel, The Sporting Club (1969), developed fabula-
tional elements as a political allegory, but his next few novels tended
to exaggerate the fictionalized quality of his texts and of America. The
Bushwhacked Piano (1971) is a picaresque novel that views the
United States as a peculiar land, defamiliarizing it in the tale of Nick
Payne as he travels through it, while Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973)
can be termed “countercultural realism” in its story about eccentricity
and marginality in Key West. McGuane’s most interesting novel is
Panama (1978), which maps a narrative of dislocations in its articu-
lation of Chet Pomeroy’s alinear experience of time, portraying a con-
sciousness that is out of control. The narrative shifts temporal frames
in a disconnected fashion to map Pomeroy’s fragmented perceptions
while reflecting on the fictionality of both existence and the text itself
in its use of the detective that Pomeroy hires to fill in the gaps of his
memory. After Panama McGuane’s novels adopted the form of re-
gional fiction by charting the strangeness of the contemporary west in
the isolated vastness of Montana in novels such as Nobody’s Angel
(1983), Keep the Change (1989) and Nothing but Blue Skies (1992).

MCHALE, BRIAN (1952– ). American academic who has produced

influential studies of postmodernist literature. Postmodernist Fiction
(1987) presented a taxonomy of postmodernist fiction in which
McHale argued that ontological concerns with the projection of fic-
tional worlds distinguish postmodernism from modernism’s episte-
mological interests, shifting focus from the indeterminacy of repre-
sentation and perception to the indeterminacy of reality itself.
Constructing Postmodernism (1992) presented an alternative per-
spective in which McHale questioned his previous account and ar-
gued for postmodernism as a constructed language game rather than
a well-defined object of study. McHale has also extended his study of
postmodernism to consider contemporary poetry in The Obligation
toward the Difficult Whole (2004).

METAFICTION. A form of writing that draws attention to the textual

status of works of fiction. This is primarily articulated through a
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METAFICTION • 207

text’s self-conscious awareness of its own constructed nature and of-

ten involves the creation of fictions about fiction, although less ex-
treme forms of metafiction include unreliable narrations, “found”
texts, or the use of intertextuality and pastiche. Although metafic-
tion is not specific to postmodernist forms of literature, being found
historically in novels such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,
François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and James Joyce’s
Ulysses, it is nevertheless one of the key features of postmodernist
fiction because of its pervasiveness in contemporary experimental
writing and because of the self-consciousness that is utilized in order
to either problematize textual reference to reality or to question the
novel’s ability to mediate reality in order to defamiliarize forms of
representation. Postmodernist writing performs this task either by
focusing on the way language as a system creates meaning through
the relationships between signifiers (rather than through reference to
the thing or idea that is apparently signified) or by investigating the
structures of novelistic discourses themselves. In the latter case,
metafictional strategies are used to question the fiction-making
process, and its demands for certain types of plot or event that occur
only because generic or textual patterns require them, by focusing at-
tention on the textual contrivances determined by the conventions of
fiction (such as the successful solution of a crime in detective fiction)
at the expense of verisimilitude.
Postmodernist metafictional texts usually start from a position that
assumes that verisimilitude is a textual impossibility because the act
of literary creation involves using linguistic and narrative structures
that can only fabricate a textual world rather than reflect an external
reality. Postmodernist metafictions therefore self-consciously an-
nounce themselves to be fictional texts whose references are not to
reality, but variously to their own internal structures, the discourses
of language, or intertextually to other fictions. Postmodernist
metafiction investigates its own construction as a text or fiction and
never attempts to create any kind of naturalistic reference to any ex-
ternal reality. Patricia Waugh has argued that this process means that
metafictional texts are based on a contradiction because they self-
consciously construct a fictional illusion, but simultaneously defa-
miliarize the process of the illusion-making process itself. Waugh
also argues that metafiction examines the function of realism, not
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208 • METAFICTION

only by demystifying the “reality effects” that allow a fiction to pre-

tend that it is real, but also by demystifying reality itself by suggest-
ing that it too is a “made-up” fiction constructed out of cultural con-
vention, ideology, or invented “truths.” Such a strategy creates a
referential function for metafiction that allows it to comment on cul-
tural and social reality. While there are postmodernist novels that use
metafiction to question the power-inflected forms that the “fictions”
of society take (such as Robert Coover’s The Public Burning or
Carlos Fuentes’ Cristóbal Nonato [Christopher Unborn], postmod-
ernist metafiction is often content to lay bare the clichés and conven-
tions of textuality alone.
The ways in which metafictional texts foreground their fictional-
ity are various and are not confined to textual self-consciousness, al-
though this is an important feature. In such cases, a text can overtly
present itself as a construction with no reference to reality (as in John
Barth’s “Life-Story”) by showing the characters’ awareness that they
are inside a fiction or by breaking the frame, a process in which the
narrator directly addresses the reader to ensure that he or she knows
that the text is a fiction that is aware of its own constructedness. This
technique is most famously used by Italo Calvino in Se una notte
d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter’s night a traveller). Other
similar devices include: the use of characters from other novels; the
textual investigation of language’s construction of meaning, a
process that is typified by works produced by the Tel Quel group or
by writers of surfiction; literary analyses of textuality as, for exam-
ple, the sections in Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak on the value of
intertextuality and on “How to write a story in five minutes”; formal
self-analysis as in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Topologie d’une cité fân-
tome (Topology of a Phantom City), which draws attention to the con-
ventions of describing objects in reality by exhaustively describing
precise angles, declinations, and attitudes of objects as they relate to,
or rest against, each other; and typographical experiments which
highlight textual features that are normally hidden, such as catalogs
that are presented in table form, oversized or undersized page num-
bers, and changes in font.
One important metafictional device involves the use of fantasy to
highlight the fiction-making process, either in apparently everyday
settings, such as in magic realism where a character might return
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MIDFICTION • 209

from the dead or be turned into a snake (as in Gabriel García

Márquez’ Cien años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude]),
or in the form of fabulation where impossible fantasy worlds, fic-
tional versions of reality, or alternate histories are created. Examples
of such metafictional forms are Borges’ “The Library of Babel,”
where the universe is imagined as an infinite library, and Donald
Barthelme’s “Paraguay” in which the Paraguay that forms the setting
for the story bears no relationship to the real country. A less obvious
metafictional technique occurs in the creation of fragmented or dis-
sociated novels whose lack of structure suggests that they cannot
hold themselves together as “well-crafted” fictions (as in William H.
Gass’ “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”), although this is not
always a paradigm of self-consciousness because it can be used as a
“reality effect” either to map the disintegration of consciousness in
first-person narrations such as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club or to
express cultural fragmentation in objective narrations such as Dou-
glas Coupland’s Generation X.

MIDFICTION. A term used by Alan Wilde in Middle Grounds (1987)

to refer to “referential but nonmimetic literature” that has similarities
with ironic mimesis. Midfiction, according to Wilde, is fiction that
situates itself between mimetic and metafictional forms of writing
and uses both realist and self-reflexive modes of expression without
privileging either of them. Instead, it tests out the utility of each form
in the creation of both textual and referential meanings, adopting
each approach as appropriate to the context or design of the fiction
overall. Midfiction ironizes its relation to reality but does not aban-
don it entirely because it often uses metafictional or self-conscious
strategies to reflect on the disparity between representation and real-
ity. A novel that uses such strategies is Robert Coover’s The Uni-
versal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which includes
a metafictional final chapter to reflect on reality’s inability to create
order and perfection in contrast to invented systems. Wilde cites the
works of Max Apple, Stanley Elkin, and Donald Barthelme as par-
adigmatic of the forms of midfiction in opposition to the more radi-
cal experiments of the surfictional or metafictional writers of the
1960s and 1970s. Arguably, midfiction has been the dominant form
of postmodernist writing since the mid-1980s, following the waning
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210 • MINIMALISM

of interest in avant-garde anti-mimetic aesthetics and the rise of a

new generation of writers who are more concerned with either repre-
senting everyday life or cultural processes, but who have also been
made aware of the limits of mimetic representation by the previous
generation. The avant-pop movement can be considered to be a ver-
sion of midfiction. Other writers who have dealt with contemporary
culture or everyday experience while ironizing the modes of expres-
sion they use include: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Gianni Celati,
Jonathan Coe, Stephen Wright, and authors associated with the
nouvelle génération de Minuit in France.

MINIMALISM. Minimalism is mainly associated with avant-garde lit-

erature and foregrounds nonmimetic and nonnarrative forms by fo-
cusing on the creation of internal textual relations. Its origins lie in
early 20th-century modernist experiments with form (such as Imagist
and Concrete poetry) and its use by contemporary writers might be
regarded as a continuation of such strategies in late-modernist
forms. Minimalist texts are often constituted by fragments that have
little narrative continuity even if they develop a consistency of the-
matic tropes as, for example, in Gertrude Stein’s modernist experi-
ment, Tender Buttons, or Giorgio Manganelli’s Centuria, a collec-
tion of short roman fleuves. The exhaustion of language and narrative
is often an important feature of minimalism, most obviously in the
short fiction of John Barth and in the works of Samuel Beckett, for
example, where enervation, repetition, and disconnection (textual,
cultural, and cognitive) are significant tropes. Minimalism is particu-
larly concerned with the reduction of the self and consciousness, a
process that William H. Gass’ “In the Heart of the Heart of the Coun-
try” maps through its alignment of fragmented text with fragmented
selfhood. In this case, the production of a text is an attempt to hold
the self together, an attempt that fails because of the necessity of us-
ing language which is the cause of fragmentation in the first place.
Gass’ story also articulates an important feature of minimalism,
which is that silence often appears to be the only response to the in-
ability to express either reality or the self as meaningful unities. This
means that minimalism is often concerned with absences, negativity
and the unspoken, with silences or ellipses in a text forming an im-
portant generative principle, specifically in the paradox that mini-
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MIRRORSHADES • 211

malism both desires and fears silence. A further paradox is added be-
cause minimalism also desires and resists language. Language is
necessary for the production of the text but it is perceived as a bab-
ble of nonsense that threatens to fragment the synchronic order pro-
vided by minimalism’s use of internal correspondences. Language’s
power to stave off silence is important to minimalist fiction because
it frequently concerns itself with survival, either of language or of
narrative. Writing becomes a means by which death can be averted,
whether this is at the level of content (the characters’ deaths) or form
(the death or exhaustion of literature). In some cases, both these fea-
tures are present, as in Donald Barthelme’s story “Sentence,” in
which a sentence continually extends itself through additional
clauses and parentheses (even if this means it becomes “nonsensi-
cal”), because it realizes it will die and pass out of existence if it
completes itself.

MIRRORSHADES. An important anthology of cyberpunk writing

published in 1986 that brought together a group of science fiction
writers as a literary grouping under the label of “cyberpunk.” Not all
of the stories express cybercultural ideas because some are more
concerned with the “punk” discourses of cyberpunk in their adop-
tion of a “street” culture ethos that became a typical trope of many
cyberpunk writers. Other stories combine technology with the
“punk” aesthetic as is the case with “Rock On” by Pat Cadigan (the
only woman writer included in Mirrorshades), which deals with the
convergence of pop music and technology in the prosthetically
modified mind of a human synthesizer. The two most acclaimed sto-
ries are William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” and Bruce
Sterling and Lewis Shiner’s “Mozart in Mirrorshades.” The former
offers a self-reflexive retrospective on the science fiction genre in
its representation of a contemporary world that is ruptured by vi-
sions of a parallel universe where all the technological innovations
and architectural wonders described in science fiction of the
“Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s have come into being. The
latter story again has a traditional science fiction premise in its con-
cern with time travel to the past, where alternative Earths are
stripped of their resources, but has a “rock ’n’ roll” aesthetic typical
of cyberpunk that can be seen most obviously in the representation
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212 • MITCHELL, DAVID

of Mozart as a “street punk” with a spiky hairstyle and a desire to

travel to the future to make technologized music there. Mirror-
shades is also important for Bruce Sterling’s “Preface” where a
summation of what Sterling considers to be the dominant character-
istics of cyberpunk can be found. These include: cyberpunk as a lit-
erary and cultural movement; the “street” appropriation of technol-
ogy; cyberpunk as an outlaw culture or counterculture; and the
libertarian politics that has become popular in cyberpunk writing.

MITCHELL, DAVID (1969– ). British novelist who produces for-

mally inventive works that include pastiche elements and self-
reflexive narrative games involving a range of different popular cul-
tural and fictional genres. Mitchell’s novels are hybrids composed of
already used forms, but adopt principles of rearrangement and accu-
mulation to organize the different elements into an integrated whole.
Mitchell lived for several years in Japan and this is reflected in his
first two novels. Ghostwritten (1999) is influenced by the work of
Haruki Murakami and generates a sequence of separate narratives
told by nine narrators across the world, revealing their interconnec-
tions as the novel develops. The novel also includes a number of in-
tertextual allusions (to Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mu-
rakami) that lay out Mitchell’s postmodern influences while also
incorporating fictionalized history and supernatural elements that
self-reflexively focus attention on the text as a fiction-making ma-
chine. number9dream (2001) is a novel about a character’s search for
his father in Tokyo and has postmodernist elements in its use of songs
to forward the narrative and in its conscious use of the devices of fab-
ulation. The novel works by the principle of discursive alternatives
in which each chapter is structured around parallel narratives with
shifts between the narrative present and a complementary narrative
that varies with each chapter. These include fantasies based on video-
games, tech-noir, dreams, flashbacks, a diary, and fabulation. Cloud
Atlas (2004) is Mitchell’s most ambitious novel so far and develops
the episodic aesthetic of accumulation found in his previous works by
placing his six narratives within a cyclical framework. The novel
moves forward sequentially and across genre and history, beginning
with a tale of a Pacific voyage in the 19th century, moving forward
to the story of a composer in Belgium in the 1930s, the United States
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MOORCOCK, MICHAEL • 213

in the 1970s, contemporary Great Britain, a dystopian future in Ko-

rea and finally to a postapocalyptic world before rewinding to tell the
remainder of each narrative in reverse order. Mitchell’s most recent
work, Black Swan Green (2006), is a more traditional autobiograph-
ical novel but has some formal innovation in its structuring around
stand-alone chapters.

MOORCOCK, MICHAEL (1939– ). British novelist who came to

public attention as part of the New Wave movement in science fic-
tion and as editor of New Worlds magazine between 1964 and 1971.
He is the author of over 100 books, mostly in the science fiction and
fantasy genres, although in recent years Moorcock has produced
more literary fiction, most notably Mother London (1988) and the re-
cent Between the Wars series of historical novels. Although Mother
London has postmodernist features, with its episodic nonlinear narra-
tive made up of many fragments of stories and the use of overheard
thoughts as “voices” in the text, the postmodernist aspects of Moor-
cock’s fiction are primarily present in his science-fictional work.
This, however, has less to do with the style in which they are written
and more to do with the conception of the multiverse of the “Eternal
Champion.” The Eternal Champion is the manifestation of a hero in
multiple universes within a constantly changing dialectic, with each
novel or series of novels offering a different perspective on the end-
less struggle between order and chaos. The continuing shifts and dis-
placements in the universe of the Eternal Champion (whose most fa-
mous incarnations are Elric of Melniboné and Jerry Cornelius) means
that there is never any fixed position or final meaning offered by the
works within the overall project. Each novel either presents only a
partial version of the multiverse or finds itself questioned by alternate
visions in other novels.
It is in Jerry Cornelius Chronicles where Moorcock’s most exper-
imental postmodernist writing occurs. The series began with The Fi-
nal Programme (1968) and incorporates a range of books and stories
not only by Moorcock but by other writers as well (The Nature of
Catastrophe, 1971). In addition to The Final Programme, Moor-
cock’s Jerry Cornelius novels include several novels about Cornelius,
the most important of which are A Cure for Cancer (1971), The En-
glish Assassin (1972), and The Condition of Muzak (1977) as well as
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214 • MORRISON, TONI

other novels, novellas and stories, some of which focus on other char-
acters within the series, such as The Adventures of Una Persson and
Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century (1976). The major
Moorcock novels in the Cornelius series all have a dissonant episodic
format, with sudden changes in perspective and narratorial position
engendering a disconnected narrative that maps a disoriented culture
uncertain of its direction. The books dramatize a society without a
structure that is searching for a messiah in the form of Cornelius who,
however, does not bring order when he takes on a superhuman her-
maphroditic form in The Final Programme, but instead becomes a
trickster figure creating chaos simply by his presence. In The Final
Programme his transformation results in an ever increasing number
of followers rampaging across Europe, but the succeeding works of-
fer similar chaotic events and suggest that diversity can very easily
become postmodern fragmentation.

MORRISON, TONI (1931– ). American novelist (who changed her

name from Chloe Anthony Wofford) who was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1993. Morrison’s works are primarily con-
cerned with creating a literary archaeology for African-American ex-
periences and use realism and literary imaginings to generate narra-
tives dealing with a range of issues, including slavery, identity,
community, and gender relations. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye
(1970) is set in a black community in a small town and deals with the
disjuncture between African-American perceptions of themselves
and the images of white “normality” shown in a reading book that is
used to frame the narrative. The novel is told from the perspectives
of different characters as they try to understand events, including the
insanity of Pecola Breedlove, whose desire for blue eyes (which she
believes will change her life for the better) gives the novel its title.
Sula (1973) follows the friendship of two friends and develops within
a frame of symbolism in which the two main characters represent or-
der and disorder, good and evil, and rationality and emotion. Al-
though often overshadowed in critical appreciation by later works,
Song of Solomon (1977) establishes more innovative forms in Morri-
son’s fiction in its literary archaeology of slavery (focusing on the re-
naming of slaves and the erasure of history and genealogy that this
entails) through the narrative of Milkman Dead. The novel involves
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MOSLEY, NICHOLAS • 215

a search for origins that traces back through history, storytelling tra-
ditions, and folktale, and offers a sense that meaning in African-
American culture is perhaps best provided by its own stories and “fic-
tions” rather than by the history written by white culture.
After Tar Baby (1981), an imaginative story set primarily in the
Caribbean, Morrison produced her best-known work, Beloved
(1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved tells the story
of Sethe, an escaped slave, who is haunted by the ghost of the infant
daughter (known as “Beloved”) she killed several years earlier in or-
der to save her from a life of slavery and whose life is changed by the
arrival of a teenage girl who claims to be “Beloved.” The novel deals
with memory, repression, guilt, and complicity in its representation
of slavery and the culture of abuse and violence on which it was
based. Jazz (1992) is set in 1920s Harlem and deals with love and
jealousy within Morrison’s most formally innovative work. The nar-
rative mimics the structures of jazz through call-and-response and
improvised “solos,” with the tone of the novel shifting according to
the form of the music being presented. Paradise (1998) is set in the
American South and moves freely between time periods to investi-
gate ideas on the patriarchal basis of utopias in recounting the found-
ing of an all-black town and the feuds and violence that arise. Love
(2003) also plays with temporal structures, shifting across time
throughout its narrative in telling the story of the widow and grand-
daughter of a dead hotel owner, Bill Cosey. In addition to her fiction,
Morrison also edited The Black Book (1974), a collection of docu-
ments relating to African-American heritage, and has produced es-
says on African-American literature and culture.

MOSLEY, NICHOLAS (1923– ). British author who for many years

was one of the few people producing experimental fiction in the
United Kingdom, beginning with existentialist novels that dealt with
determinism, choice, and illusions of freedom in the 1950s, in nov-
els such as Spaces of the Dark (1951), The Rainbearers (1955), and
Corruption (1957), before developing styles of writing more akin to
the nouveau roman in the 1960s in the objective narration, for ex-
ample, of Assassins (1966). These latter novels investigate philo-
sophical issues concerning cognition and relationships and focus on
the ways in which knowledge of reality and its patterns become
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216 • MOSLEY, WALTER

imprecise or indeterminate. Accident (1965), which was adapted for

cinema by Harold Pinter, has a first-person narration, like Natalie
Natalia (1971), and is similar to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s early works
in its representation of a “reality” that begins to shift in its interpre-
tation and reinterpretation. Impossible Object (1968) is Mosley’s
most important novel of this period and presents connected stories
about love in which ideas and characters recur with philosophical
fabulations as bridges between the sections.
Mosley’s most important works are contained in the “Catastrophe
Practice” series which develops a focus on systemic issues in its con-
cern with the social patterns of reality within which humanity is en-
trapped and which deals with the possibility of paradigm shifts (mod-
eled on catastrophe theory and its theory of complex systems that lead
to sudden leaps to new levels of evolution) that might release individ-
uals from such strictures. Catastrophe Practice (1979) is the most for-
mally inventive of the series in its presentation of a series of plays and
a novella with linking essays exploring philosophical and scientific
ideas. The other novels in the series, Imago Bird (1979), Serpent
(1981), Judith (1986), and Mosley’s best-known work, Hopeful Mon-
sters (1990), also deal with complex systems in terms of cognitive
processes, scientific theories, social structures, and patterns of reality
while also developing such principles in the narrative form of the nov-
els. Mosley’s recent novels, Children of Darkness and Light (1995),
The Hesperides Tree (2001), and Inventing God (2003), have contin-
ued such interests with a focus on issues of self-awareness and the net-
works of connectivity that seem to be implicit in reality.

MOSLEY, WALTER (1952– ). African-American writer of detective

fiction whose novels and stories work within a postnoir framework.
Mosley has written a range of fiction, but is best known for his Easy
Rawlins’ detective novels which include: Devil in a Blue Dress
(1990), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow
Dog (1995), and Little Scarlet (2004). These novels take place in the
African-American communities of Los Angeles and demythologize
the accounts of crime and corruption offered in classic hard-boiled
detective fiction such as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe nov-
els. There is therefore a retro aesthetic at work in Mosley’s fiction,
but this is not used simply as a textual effect, but operates to question
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MUMBO JUMBO • 217

official ideologies and histories of crime and corruption that have at-
tributed immorality to African-American masculinity.
The Easy Rawlins’ novels therefore focus on implicit and overt
racism, using Rawlins as a focus for consideration of economic and
racial forms of exploitation. Rawlins is very often made a scapegoat
to draw attention to the powerlessness of African-Americans in the
face of racism. This disempowerment is emphasized by the fact that
in his economic dealings Rawlins is attempting to achieve assimila-
tion by buying up property. However, this also blurs the boundaries
of official and unofficial and he is very often seen as part of white
culture’s oppression of African-Americans by characters in the nov-
els. Through a focus on ethnicity, Mosley articulates a “postnoir” vi-
sion of a culture of complicity, whether it is the genuinely corrupt in
white society, the “go-betweens” such as Rawlins, or the victims of
ethnic exploitation. In recent years, Mosley has extended his writing
beyond detective fiction, but even here in the Socrates Fortlow series
(Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997; Walkin’ the Dog,
1999), he presents a vision of disempowerment in which money cre-
ates a culture of complicity and exploitation that is still very resonant
of a postnoir sensibility.

MUMBO JUMBO. Novel by Ishmael Reed published in 1972. Mumbo

Jumbo is a postmodern detective fiction set in the 1920s that also in-
corporates elements of the suspense thriller, conspiracy narrative, and
the historical novel, and whose main concern is to uncover the reasons
why African-Americans are so systematically repressed. The novel
tells the story of the origins of Jes Grew, a “psychic epidemic” that
causes loss of self-control (a metaphor for a liberating breakdown of
the existing social order), the origin of which opens the novel but
which is soon supplemented by many other mysteries: a series of art
thefts, the death of Warren Harding, the U.S. invasion of Haiti, the
murders of Abdul Hamid and Berbelang, the mystery of Earline’s pos-
session, and the theft of Black religious mystery by Christianity.
Mumbo Jumbo is primarily a political detective novel that searches
among the images and fictions of contemporary culture for the mech-
anisms of social control. Reed suggests that the discovery of the op-
erations of ideology in culture will allow those who are oppressed to
more effectively direct resistance against those in power.
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218 • MURAKAMI, HARUKI

To this end, Reed explores the culture of 1920s America, an ar-

chaeology that seems not only to reveal the antecedents of contem-
porary forms of repression but also to mirror contemporary culture
quite closely. The novel is structured as a set of mirrors, opposing dif-
ferent ideas (African-American culture, represented by Jes Grew, and
white culture represented by the Wallflower Order), and time frames
(1920s America and Richard Nixon’s America) to create a paradig-
matic system that represents the stasis created by white culture in its
attempts to define and control African-American culture. Jes Grew
acts as a disruptive force to this textual and social structure as it
searches for a “Text” that will liberate African-Americans and allow
them to articulate their own experiences instead of being figured by
ideological representations. Narratively, Jes Grew undermines para-
digmatic stasis and produces a proliferation of mysteries that supplies
a dynamic to the text. Through this narrative development, Reed sug-
gests that Mumbo Jumbo is the text that Jes Grew desires because of
the way in which its constant narrative transformations mimic Jes
Grew’s dynamism.

MURAKAMI, HARUKI (1949– ). Japanese novelist whose works

have been influenced by postmodernist writers such as Kurt Von-
negut and Richard Brautigan and whose fiction uses innovative
forms to explore the consumerist and hyperreal cultural landscapes
of postmodernity. His early novels, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the
Wind Sing, 1979) and 1973-nen-no pinbōru (Pinball, 1973, 1980)
take the form of the bildungsroman, a format also used in Noruwei no
mori (Norwegian Wood, 1987), the novel that generated a cult audi-
ence for Murakami. This latter novel also has similarities with Amer-
ican blank fiction in its representation of a group of aimless charac-
ters adrift in postmodern Japanese popular culture (which it
references in the form of film and music), adopting a nostalgic per-
spective in looking back to times when life seemed more coherent. In
between these works, Murakami produced Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A
Wild Sheep Chase, 1982) and Sekai no owari to hâdoboirudo
wandārando (Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World,
1985) which developed more innovative strategies using intertex-
tual references and pastiche (in the form, for example, of the detec-
tive and science fiction genres) as well as exploring metaphysical
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MUSIL, ROBERT • 219

concerns. These novels more fully explore the radical commodifica-

tion of culture in contemporary Japan, engaging critically with the
waning of affect and loss of spirituality in late capitalism.
After Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi (South of the Border, West
of the Sun, 1992), a novel dealing with lost love that shares similari-
ties with Norwegian Wood, Murakami produced Nejimaki-dori
kuronikuru (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994), a long, digressive
novel that follows the life of an aimless main character, Toru, while
also incorporating historical sections as a context for the apparent
meaninglessness of contemporary culture. The novel also includes
pastiche elements from Gothic fiction, the hard-boiled detective
genre, and the war novel and also switches between dream and real-
ity in order to question the “reality” of a postmodern culture of sim-
ulations. Spūtoniku no koibito (Sputnik Sweetheart, 1999) shares a
similar concern with cultural aimlessness which it maps through its
meandering narrative. Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore, 2002)
has an alternating narrative that switches between past and present
while also incorporating mystery elements and the forms of Greek
tragedy. In addition to these novels, Murakami has also produced
short stories in Zō no shōmetsu (The Elephant Vanishes, 1993) and
Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru (After the Quake, 2000).

MUSIL, ROBERT (1880–1942). Austrian writer of modernist fiction

whose roman fleuve, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without
Qualities) drew out a number of concerns that have since been devel-
oped by postmodernist writers (particularly in Europe), such as cul-
tural psychosis, the purposeless individual, and a concern with
whether systems of meaning can adequately describe or explain real-
ity. Written in the 1920s and 1930s, the novel is set in Kakania (a fic-
tionalized version of Austro-Hungary) in 1913 and deals with the
preparations for the 1914 Jubilee of the Emperor’s reign that in reality
was never to be because of the outbreak of World War I. The narrative
concerns the quest for an “Idea” that will sum up the cultural experi-
ence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and provide a sense of totality
and purpose, organized by a committee led by the main character, Ul-
rich, a purposeless figure who drifts through society in the manner of
a flaneur and whose only real interest is in the murderer Moosbrugger.
The novel represents a society of “muddling through” where there is
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220 • NABOKOV, VLADIMIR

no structure to life, symbolized by Moosbrugger, who is unable to ar-

ticulate his reasons for killing (if he has any) and where there is a per-
vasive inability to comprehend the reality within which people live.
Effectively, the novel presents the search for a grand narrative that will
explain reality, but the quest for an “Idea” leads only to irrelevant or
redundant proposals that the novel parodies using Ulrich as its point of
focalization to cast doubt on the possibility of discovering such a com-
plete system. In parodying and questioning the possibility of ever
achieving a system of meaning, The Man without Qualities prefigures
a postmodernist disbelief in grand narratives while its fictionalization
of the failure to explain reality through symbols or forms of represen-
tation acts as a precursor to postmodernist texts’ questioning of mean-
ing within language systems. Similarly, “the man without qualities”
has become an important fictional figure in postmodernism, whether
this in the form of Tyrone Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow, Crab in Éric Chevillard’s La nébuleuse du crabe (The Crab
Nebula), the eponymous “hero” of Ann Quin’s Berg, or any of the
protagonists of absurdist drama and fiction.

–N–

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR (1899–1977). Russian-American novelist

born in St. Petersburg whose family left Russia in 1919 after the Civil
War that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution and who, after peri-
ods in Germany and Paris, emigrated to the United States in 1940.
Nabokov wrote a number of novels in Russian, the best known of
which are Podvig (Glory, 1932), Kamera Obskura (Laughter in the
Dark, 1932), and Dar (The Gift, 1938), but it is his novels in English
that are of most importance for postmodernism. Of these, Pale Fire
(1962) has been most influential, alongside Lolita (1955) and Ada or
Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), while Pnin (1957) is of some in-
terest for the way in which it plays with ideas of narratorial ambigu-
ity. In these texts, Nabokov’s writing primarily displays late-
modernist tendencies with language, creating doubts about the “re-
ality” of the fictional world and generating epistemological uncer-
tainties that cannot be resolved. Lolita is of a slightly different order
because in telling the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessional desire
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NABOKOV, VLADIMIR • 221

for a young girl the novel directs attention to issues of sexual domi-
nation while also offering a satire on the perceived vulgarity of
American consumerism and loss of value in the 1950s. It does, how-
ever, also have an unreliable narration, some self-reflexive elements
commenting on the construction of narrative (in the “plotting” that
occurs between Quilty and Humbert), and a fake “Foreword” by a
fictional scholar framing the text and its “reality.” Ada or Ardor: A
Family Chronicle tells a story of love between Ada and her cousin in
the projected world of Antiterra, an alternative reality that has a dif-
ferent geography and history. Here, the Tartars of the Golden Horde
fight the Crimean War and North America is inhabited by a Russian-
speaking population. The novel also foregrounds itself as a textual
construct in its range of intertextual reference, with allusions drawn
from the whole history of western literature.
Pale Fire has been of most interest to both academics and post-
modernist writers and bears similarities to some of the works of
Jorge Luis Borges, with whom Nabokov has often been compared.
The novel consists of a long poem by the murdered fictional author
John Shade followed by a commentary by Charles Kinbote that forms
the bulk of the text. Kinbote claims to be the dispossessed king of a
fictional European country called Zembla and his commentary argues
that the meaning of Shade’s poem, “Pale Fire,” does not concern the
human values and Wordsworthian sentiments it apparently affirms,
but deals with Kinbote’s own life in a highly allusive way. The com-
mentary becomes a means by which Kinbote can tell both his story
and the story of Zembla, narrated in a nonlinear fashion according to
the lines he comments on, in the course of which he “reveals” that
Shade’s murderer was a revolutionary assassin who mistook Shade
for Kinbote. This situation is further complicated by the presence of
the figure of Professor Botkin, an ex-colleague of Shade’s, who may
be the actual author of the commentary if he is not in fact Kinbote in
another guise. Such a convoluted set of “fictions” causes radical un-
certainty as to the novel’s fictional reality, casting doubt not only on
Kinbote’s story and the existence of Zembla, but also on the very ex-
istence of the “characters.” In an involuted fashion, Pale Fire both
questions textual referentiality and textual reality itself, with the re-
sult that it draws attention to its own linguistic status and to the “lan-
guage world” it has created.
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222 • THE NAKED LUNCH

THE NAKED LUNCH. Avant-garde novel by American author

William S. Burroughs which was originally published in Paris in
1959 and which not only influenced the aesthetic and political forms
of contemporary experimental writing but also had an important im-
pact on countercultural thinking in the 1960s. The novel was prose-
cuted for obscenity in the United States in 1960 (a ban lifted in 1966),
an event that only added to its reputation. The Naked Lunch begins
with a section written as a realist linear narrative detailing a drug ad-
dict’s flight from the police across America to Mexico and finally to
Tangiers, which Burroughs uses to exhaust the narrative possibilities
of linear realism so that he can replace it with the experimental forms
that shape the rest of the novel. The main body of The Naked Lunch
configures narrative as a cumulative series of events or stories which
foregrounds temporal dynamic and avoids the stasis of linear narra-
tive and its drive toward closure. Burroughs generates multiple nar-
ratives and perspectives to present a political deconstruction of real-
ity and ideology by creating alternatives to the systematization of
experience in contemporary culture. Because organization is per-
ceived as a form of control in the text, The Naked Lunch is arranged
in fragmented or, as Burroughs puts it, “permutated” episodes. As
control or the agents of control (commerce and the police, for exam-
ple) become evident in each chapter the section ends and the narra-
tive begins anew at a different temporal location, in a different place
and with different characters. The novel also introduced many ele-
ments that were to recur in Burroughs work, including figures who
reappear in later novels, fantasy and science fiction elements (focus-
ing around the Mugwumps in The Naked Lunch) and concerns with
systems of control. Burroughs’ main focus is on the alienating forces
that determine human behavior (such as power structures, ideologies
of “normality” and “difference,” and patterns of thought) with the
alien Mugwumps, for example, becoming part of Burroughs’
metaphoric treatment of the way in which human society has been
turned against its “natural” inclinations.

THE NAME OF THE ROSE. Novel by Umberto Eco first published

in Italian in 1980 as Il nome della rosa. When translated into other
languages, the novel became an international bestseller and helped to
popularize postmodernist aesthetic practices such as pastiche, inter-
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NARCISSISM • 223

textuality, and metafiction. The novel is a historiographic metafic-

tion in the form of a murder mystery that involves the investigation
of a series of killings at a monastery in 1327 while also including the-
ological debate over the suppression of the spiritualist branch of the
Franciscan order of friars. In particular, the novel deals with the rela-
tionship between history and fiction, not only in its focus on the tex-
tual construction of reality (the plot concerns the discovery and use
of a manuscript of Aristotle’s lost work on comedy), but also in the
use of both historical figures (such as Michael de Cesena) and char-
acters whose reality is solely textual, most notably the detective fig-
ure, William of Baskerville, who is a medieval version of Sherlock
Holmes. In the course of his detection, William reads texts and signs
in order to determine both the “aesthetic” system of the murders and
the reality of the murderer’s identity, through which the novel incor-
porates the idea of the text-as-world. Much of the action takes place
in the Scriptorium where manuscripts are copied (and the novel im-
plies that reality is just a series of copies) while there is also a Library
whose structure is based on a medieval mappa mundi. The burning of
the Library at the end of the novel, however, problematizes the view
that texts form the reality of the world. By destroying the texts and
leaving reality standing, Eco suggests an apocalypse for medieval
metaphysical “fictions” of reality as they are replaced by the “mod-
ern” rationality used by William (albeit in a version of logic that is
based on famous medieval theologians such as Roger Bacon and
William of Ockham) which allows a proper understanding of the re-
lationship between signs and reality.

NARCISSISM. A term used to refer to inward-looking metafictional

texts that are about their own textual processes. Such texts are gener-
ally self-reflexive, but can have a referential matrix that extends
meaning outside of the text. If narcissistic texts do generate external
reference, however, it is usually ironized in order to suggest that real-
ity itself is a fiction or a set of linguistic codes. The result of this is to
create a set of self-reflecting mirrors in which a self-consciously fic-
tional text ironically reflects a fictional reality. An example of such a
technique occurs in a short story by William H. Gass called “In the
Heart of the Heart of the Country” where the narrator describes and
reflects on the nature of physical reality not in terms of its objectivity,
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224 • NEOAVANGUARDIA

but as a set of names or signs. The story reaches a position where it is

the act of naming and the named objects’ circulation as words that be-
come the abiding reality in the consciousness of the narrator.

NEOAVANGUARDIA. An Italian literary movement of the 1960s that

sought to challenge the hegemony of realist and neorealist styles that
had been the dominant literary form in postwar Italy. The neoavan-
guardia was closely tied to Gruppo 63, many of whose members
adopted its textual strategies, and who included Umberto Eco,
Francesco Leonetti, Giorgio Manganelli, and Edoardo Sanguineti.
The movement adopted a variety of styles, but, like the Tel Quel
group, focused attention on the revision of textual strategies and the
codes of language in order to eliminate the traces of realist discourse
from their writings. The texts of the neoavanguardia took the form
of both poetry and prose and adopted the view that stripping texts of
their referential function also entailed the removal of bourgeois and
capitalist ideologies that they believed to be endemic within the
form of realist discourses. Texts produced by the neoavanguardia, as
a consequence, tend toward concerns with linguistic forms rather
than having a political or social content. The works produced by
writers of the neoavanguardia have an experimental imperative that
tries to imagine possibilities for literature that evades ready-made
language. In this respect, the neoavanguardia is closer in spirit to
late-modernism than to more reflexive or metafictional forms of
postmodernism.

NEUROMANCER. Novel by William Gibson published in 1984 that

soon became regarded as the definitive cyberpunk text and which,
even 20 years on, is still used as a byword in both academia and
popular culture to describe the relevance of cyberpunk concerns to
contemporary informational society. The novel tells the story of the
release of an Artificial Intelligence from its corporate imprison-
ment, but is most important for its form and style, its representation
of a near-future culture, and its articulation of the new identities
created by technologies such as cyberspace. Neuromancer is a hy-
brid pastiche text with a style that has been designated “tech-noir”
because of its use of the forms, conventions, and language of hard-
boiled crime novel within a science fiction setting. More radical is
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NEW WAVE SCIENCE FICTION • 225

its imagination of a near-future culture dominated by the death of

nature that is represented in megacities such as “The Sprawl” and
in the clutter of manufactured junk and commodities, the only es-
cape from which is the equally artificial territory of cyberspace.
Corporations are the emblem of this artificial culture, their instru-
mentalist systems turning human beings into biological machines or
commodities. In opposition are individuals who are part of an al-
ternative “hacker” culture, such as Case and Molly, who use tech-
nology either to challenge the corporations or to transcend reality;
although it is also suggested that technology also uses them, both
narratively and in their construction as cyborgs. Thus, the dissocia-
tion of the mind and the body created by the entry into cyberspace,
where the mind transcends the “meat” of the body in order to roam
through cyberspace, may lead to freedom but may also enmesh the
individual further into corporate machine systems.

NEW NOVEL. See NOUVEAU ROMAN.

NEW WAVE SCIENCE FICTION. A movement that developed in the

United Kingdom and the United States in the 1960s and which was
initially associated with the magazines New Worlds (edited by
Michael Moorcock) and Dangerous Visions (edited by Harlan Elli-
son). The New Wave radically changed the discourses, settings, and
ideas of science fiction by shifting its focus from traditional galactic,
scientific, and technical concerns (where it was the setting and the
hardware that drove the narrative) to the social and cultural impacts
of scientific change, with an emphasis on psychological issues (such
as transformed ways of thinking) and social behavior. Writers associ-
ated with the New Wave movement include J.G. Ballard, Brian Ald-
iss, and Michael Moorcock in the UK and Harlan Ellison, Thomas
Disch, Samuel R. Delany, and Roger Zelazny in the U.S., while the
Polish writer Stanislaw Lem can also be loosely associated with the
movement at a distance because of the same shared concerns. The
New Wave movement can be seen to be the modernist moment of sci-
ence fiction, shifting attention from the old grand narratives of outer
space and technology to experiments with new approaches that fo-
cused on the everyday experience of scientific changes. New Wave
writing was not always specifically scientific and, indeed, the term
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226 • NIHILARTIKEL

“SF” was often used to indicate that the New Wave’s “science fic-
tion” was “speculative fiction” with particular interests in conscious-
ness, the unconscious, desire, forms of behavior, political move-
ments, and social transformation.
The New Wave movement, however, was still as wildly fantastical
or imaginary as traditional science fiction and its “everyday” experi-
ences were often either skewed or speculative representations of the
possible “everyday lives” that might result from technological change
(as in Moorcock’s The Final Programme and Delany’s postapocalyp-
tic The Einstein Intersection) or exaggerations of technological de-
velopments that were occurring at the time. Ballard’s High Rise is an
example of the latter tendency with a premise based on the ways that
the development of superskyscrapers creates new forms of con-
sciousness, social grouping, and patterns of behavior, even if these
are actually based on an atavistic regression that leads to the release
of primeval or instinctive desires. The New Wave movement can also,
therefore, be regarded as postmodernist because it occurred within a
developing postmodern culture of the 1960s and 1970s with concerns
that often mirror postmodern cultural patterns and ideas. Delany, for
example, has developed concerns with semiotics and poststructuralist
theory in the Nevèrÿon series of fantasy novels while Ballard’s fiction
has increasingly foregrounded cultural phenomena such as commod-
ification, new patterns of urbanism, and simulation. The New Wave
movement therefore represents an emerging future based on contem-
porary concerns, such as a consumer-led media landscape, signs and
commodities, and new technological relationships between humans
and machines. It was also very aware of its own science-fictional his-
tory and the way in which previous science-fictional visions had en-
tered the everyday life of contemporary society. By this process, the
New Wave adopted a postmodernist perspective in which reality was
becoming a construct of texts, with Ballard famously noting in 1971
that “everything is becoming science fiction.”

NIHILARTIKEL. German name for a nonexistent piece of writing al-

luded to within a novel, essay, or poem. The practice of including
such fictional texts, often written by an equally fictional author, is a
common feature of postmodernist metafiction. Jorge Luis Borges
tried at every opportunity to include fake texts in his works which
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NOOTEBOOM, CEES • 227

would deceive researchers into trying to locate the text in reality. The
use of the nihilartikel is an act of simulation in which the fake fabu-
lates itself as a “real” text in order to question the boundaries between
fact and fiction.

IL NOME DELLA ROSA. See THE NAME OF THE ROSE.

NOOTEBOOM, CEES (1933– ). Much traveled Dutch writer, born

Cornelius Nooteboom, who divides his time between Amsterdam,
Berlin and Spain, and who has been producing fiction, poetry, and
travel writing since 1956 when Philip en de anderen (Philip and the
Others), a novel based on a hitchhiking trip, was published. Noote-
boom’s novels use fractured narrative perspectives, multiple narra-
tive voices, and intertextual structures of literary reference while
also, in some cases, playing around with the fictionality of the text.
This is the case, for example, with the early novel Die ridder is
gestvoren (The Knight Has Died, 1963) which plays with textual
composition and the creation of reality by fiction in its involuted
story of writers writing books about writers. Nooteboom concen-
trated on travel writing and poetry in the 1960s and 1970s and did not
return to fiction until Rituelen (Rituals, 1980), which deals with or-
der and chaos, and Een lied van schijn en wezen (A Song of Truth and
Semblance, 1981).
After Mokusei! (1982), a novel set in Japan, Nooteboom wrote In
Nederland (aka In de Bergen van Nederland; translated as In the
Dutch Mountains, 1984), a metafictional novel set in the fictional
country of Zaragoza about an Inspector of Roads who writes a fairy
story set in an imaginary Netherlands which he reimagines based on
his time in that country. Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story,
1989) is a cosmic fantasy in which a teacher is mysteriously trans-
ported to Lisbon and experiences the last moments before and after
death as if it were a lifelong experience. Allerzielen (All Soul’s Day,
1998) is set in Berlin and follows a filmmaker as he wanders around
the city looking for a girl whose address he does not know. The novel
uses digressions, meditations, and unidentified voices to comment on
history and time. Nooteboom has published poetry throughout his
writing career, dealing with issues similar to those found in his fic-
tion, such as the role of the poet and the ways in which writing and
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228 • NORFOLK, LAWRENCE

composition form a selfhood. A representative selection of his poetry

has been anthologized in The Captain of Butterflies (1997).

NORFOLK, LAWRENCE (1963– ). British novelist whose first novel

appeared in 1991. His three novels have each offered different textual
approaches to the creation of fiction within the domain of postmod-
ernist writing, although they generally favor historiographic
metafiction. Norfolk’s first novel Lemprière’s Dictionary (1991)
was one of the first of a slew of novels that appeared in the 1990s and
in the first decade of the 21st century that set their narratives in the
18th-century period of the Enlightenment. The novel is a postmod-
ernist conspiracy fiction that is heavily influenced by the writings of
Thomas Pynchon and includes many textual and narrative citations
of his works. The Pope’s Rhinoceros (1996) follows the same histor-
ical format with a magic realist narrative set in Europe and Africa
that is ostensibly about the quest to find and deliver a rhinoceros to
the pope, but which also ranges across plots that deal with Renais-
sance warfare, a group of monks seeking to rebuild their monastery,
and the colonial rivalry between the Portuguese and the Spanish. The
novel includes other postmodernist tropes including the use of his-
torical figures and conscious anachronisms, such as a search for
treasure using a diving bell and a protorock band called King Caspar
and the Mauritians. In the Shape of the Boar (2000) fits less obvi-
ously within the forms of historiographic metafiction, although it
does have a historical dimension. The novel has aspects of different
types of postmodernism, opening with a heavily footnoted section
detailing the myth of the Kalydonian Boar and including Chinese-
Box structures with regard to the film one of the characters is mak-
ing about another character’s poem about the boar. Such devices also
indicate the novel’s pretensions to modernist mythification, with the
metaphor of the hunt for the boar appearing in a variety of revisitings
of the event (whether literally in the description of partisans hunting
a German officer in Greece or symbolically in the psychological
challenges facing the characters) and articulating a cyclical frame-
work to suggest a timeless mythic landscape for human activity.

NOSTALGIA. Also known as the retro-mode, nostalgia is a term orig-

inated by Fredric Jameson to refer to the sense that postmodernist
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NOUVELLE GÉNÉRATION DE MINUIT • 229

cultural and textual production is either directly nostalgic for the past
or feeds off it parasitically because there is nothing new to do any
more. It is thus related to processes such as pastiche, intertextual-
ity, and the recycling of the past. Postmodern nostalgia generally
expresses an overall sense of cultural loss in which the death of orig-
inality, commodification, the death of authenticity, cultural fragmen-
tation, and the death of the individual lead to a nostalgia for a lost
past that is perceived to be better than the present. Nostalgia repre-
sents a desire to recover authenticity, originality, or cultural cohesion
by looking back to a time when these seemed to exist. The 1960s, for
example, are often referenced in film as a time of authenticity be-
cause individual action seemed to make a difference then, while a
number of nostalgia films return to the 1950s in order to evoke a
sense of cultural cohesion.
In its textual forms, Jameson argues that nostalgia is primarily
found in mass cultural texts, such as cinema and television, rather
than in literature, although postmodernist historical novels such as
Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) or Neal
Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle share similar principles to those
identified by Jameson with regard to film, albeit very often with a
parodic element. Jameson identifies three types of nostalgia in texts.
The first type can be characterized as nostalgic quotation in which
texts that are set in the contemporary world reuse old textual forms
and pastiche old texts. The second form of nostalgia describes his-
torical fictions that are set in the past and simulate history through
recognizable images of the past rather than its reality. The final ver-
sion refers to texts that are set either in the present or the past that
evoke a sense of cultural nostalgia through nostalgia for the images
or texts of the period on show rather than its historical reality. This
latter type expresses the paradox of nostalgia in that rather than gen-
erating anew the principle yearned for in reality, nostalgia simply in-
volves its reproduction as a simulated and inauthentic textual copy, a
replication that exacerbates the problems that engendered the nostal-
gic response in the first place.

NOUVELLE GÉNÉRATION DE MINUIT. An informal name used

to refer to a group of contemporary French writers that includes Éric
Chevillard, Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, and Jean-Philippe
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230 • NOUVEAU ROMAN

Toussaint, whose books are all published by Les Éditions de Mi-

nuit and who have come to be seen as the post–nouveau roman
generation of writers. The works of this group tend toward humor-
ous parody or pastiche, often involving self-conscious reworkings
of literary forms. They also foreground narrative experimentation
as opposed to the self-reflexive concern with language that charac-
terizes the nouveau roman in its investigation of the relationship be-
tween writing and reality and in its focus on the linguistic con-
struction of consciousness. Although the narratives of this group of
writers can be equally fragmentary (as in Chevillard’s La nébuleuse
du crabe [The Crab Nebula]), open-ended in their conclusion (the
irresolution of Echenoz’s Lac [Lake, aka Chopin’s Move]), or focus
on the way in which reality is constructed (Chevillard’s Palafox),
the overall tendency of the “nouvelle génération de Minuit” is to-
ward absurdist fabulation. This produces a comic dimension in
their storytelling, focusing on the ludicrous or the illogical, their
humor further distinguishing them from the rather solemn formal
experimentation of the nouveau roman. Arguably, the “nouvelle
génération de Minuit” writers have produced the first fully post-
modernist fiction in France, in spite of the contributions of OuLiPo
(with exceptions such as Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud),
the Tel Quel group and authors of the nouveau roman, whose fic-
tion may display a postmodern outlook, but whose experimenta-
tion with form could be regarded as late-modernist in style rather
than postmodernist.

NOUVEAU ROMAN. Movement in French fiction, also known in En-

glish as “the New Novel,” that developed as a countertendency to ex-
istentialist writing in the 1950s and which is more significant as a lit-
erary movement even though existentialism has more fully entered
into wider cultural consciousness. Where existentialist fiction tends
to focus on a quest for authenticity in individual action and locates it-
self textually within referential relationships to the reality that osten-
sibly forms the characters’ “lived” environment, the nouveau roman
presents an assault on such forms of realism by challenging textual
representations of reality. Important writers of the nouveau roman in-
clude: Michel Butor, Claude Mauriac, Claude Ollier, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, while others
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NOUVEAU ROMAN • 231

who have been associated with the movement at certain times include
Marguerite Duras, J-M.G. Le Clézio, Robert Pinget, and Jean Ri-
cardou. Many of these writers, including Robbe-Grillet, Butor, and
Ollier are still active in the production of experimental writing and a
number have also offered theories of new forms of fiction, most no-
tably Robbe-Grillet in Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel,
1963), Butor in a range of essays, a selection of which has appeared
in English in Inventory (1970), Sarraute in L’Ère du soupçon (The
Age of Suspicion, 1956), and Ricardou in Pour une théorie du nou-
veau roman (For a Theory of the New Novel, 1971).
The nouveau roman is primarily late-modernist in form and fo-
cuses attention on the internal linguistic and fictional structures of
textuality by challenging conventional notions of the novel such as
plot, character, dialogue, and stable positions of narration. This latter
aspect is particularly important in the nouveau roman because the use
of ambiguous or unstable narrations creates textual positions that
question notions of verisimilitude or textual “truth” by developing
uncertain or mutable textual realities whose signifying structures are
not easily mappable against recognizable “external” realities. One
strategy has been to focalize events through the narrator’s conscious-
ness, but not in the organized form of the conventional first-person
narration, because consciousness in novels of the nouveau roman is
often either pathological (in Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie [Jealousy])
or incapable of organizing experiences because of a radical uncer-
tainty over how “reality” is constituted (Butor’s L’emploi du temps
[Passing Time]). The result of such narratorial positions is a sense
that reality is being created in the minds (and the narration) of the
narrator. A further configuration involves the use of an objective nar-
ration which, however, challenges textual reference to reality either
by giving too much detail and too many perspectives for a compre-
hensible totality to be created (Ollier’s La Mise-en-scène [The Mise-
en-scène]), or by using modes of realism in order to parody them
through the creation of impossible narrations that offer abrupt shifts
in narrative position (Robbe-Grillet’s Project pour une révolution à
New York [Project for a Revolution in New York]). This latter aspect
is also part of another narratorial strategy which either involves the
creation of multiple narrative perspectives (polyphony), as in many
of Sarraute’s works, such as “Disent les imbéciles” (“Fools Say”) or
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232 • O’BRIEN, FLANN

the configuration of different narrative threads that are interwoven

with each other, as in Claude Simon’s Triptyque (Triptych), where
perspective and narrative reality change very suddenly.

–O–

O’BRIEN, FLANN (1911–1966). Irish writer (whose given name was

Brian O’Nolan) who wrote mainly in English, but who also wrote
journalism under the name “Myles na Gopaleen” (var. “na gCo-
paleen”). O’Brien’s novels are important modernist precursors to
postmodernist fiction and his use of metafictional and self-reflexive
textual forms have been influential on a number of writers, with
Gilbert Sorrentino in particular adopting aspects of O’Brien’s nov-
els in his own works (including the names of some of his characters).
O’Brien’s major works are the first two novels that he produced, At
Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. At Swim-Two-Birds
(1939) is an involuted metafictional novel that falls somewhere be-
tween modernism and postmodernism. The novel has a satirical ele-
ment in its parodies of different styles and genres of writing (includ-
ing an Irish western), while also articulating concerns with Irish
literature and culture, but it is best known for its stories within sto-
ries. The novel configures a radical self-reflexivity in its story of a
student writing a book about a writer writing a book, in which the
characters of the latter fictional author (Dermot Trellis) take on a
life of their own (albeit under the control of the student author).
These characters, with the aid of Dermot’s fictional son, Orlick Trel-
lis, begin to write their own version of events in which they finally
put Dermot on trial for his “crimes.” These stem from the characters’
sense of injustice because Dermot has not treated them like “real”
people; one character, for example, accuses Dermot of leaving him
unfed, unpaid, and without underwear because Dermot has not de-
scribed or developed his character fully enough. Further experimen-
tal strategies include the three different openings the novel presents,
a modernist disjointed narrative that shifts from one set of events to
another without any narrative logic, a self-aware use of fantasy, and
playfulness with narrative conventions, such as the defamiliarization
of character construction displayed in the birth of one character as a
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O’HARA, FRANK • 233

full-grown man and the intermittent use of plot summaries to tell new
readers what is going on.
O’Brien’s second novel, The Third Policeman, was originally writ-
ten in 1940, but was only published posthumously in 1967, because,
after its rejection by his publisher, O’Brien embarked on a series of
elaborate lies regarding the loss of the only copy of the manuscript to
explain why it had not been published, rather than trying to get it pub-
lished elsewhere. The Third Policeman is a fantasy about a man who
finds himself in a version of Hell that looks very like the local Irish
countryside and includes impossibilities and paradoxes that have
some similarity to the fantasies found in Raymond Roussel’s novels
(albeit with far more humor), such as the policeman with a set of
boxes-within-boxes (the smallest of which might be so tiny it does
not exist), people who transfer atoms into their bicycles, a police sta-
tion in the walls of a house, and a color without a name that causes
derangement in people who “see” it. The playfulness of the novel
looks forward to postmodernist textual games, although by the time
it appeared in press many of these had already been established. Most
notable of these textual games are the footnotes that accompany the
text making reference to the ideas of the fictional author De Selby
which begin to displace the main narrative toward the end by provid-
ing plotlines of their own. O’Brien’s other books include a sequel of
sorts, The Dalkey Archive (1964), a pastiche novel that features De
Selby alongside James Joyce and St. Augustine; a novel in Gaelic,
An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth, 1941), that parodies the idealization
of aspects of Irish literature and culture; and The Hard Life (1961), a
comic novel subtitled “An Exegesis of Squalor” set in Dublin at the
turn of the 20th century.

O’HARA, FRANK (1926–1966). American poet who was a member

of the “New York School” of poetry that also included John Ashbery
and Kenneth Koch and whose collections include: A City Winter and
Other Poems (1952), Second Avenue (1960), and Odes (1960). His
work can be characterized as Beat poetry, although more for its con-
cern with the rush of experience as it appears in the text than with the
rush of language, and many of his poems give the impression that
they were transcribed as the experience was taking place. One of his
most acclaimed poems “The Day Lady Died” is, for example, a list
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234 • OKRI, BEN

of the things the poet did on the day Billie Holliday died with a sense
of sorrow interwoven at various points, rather than a meditation on
the life and meaning of Billie Holliday herself. O’Hara has thus been
seen as a poet of immediate experience in the tradition of Walt Whit-
man, where events occur and are recorded in poetic form without the
resulting text seeming to have any wider significance. Lunch Poems
(1964), for example, was so named because O’Hara wrote the poems
in this collection during his lunch break. There is, however, a self-
consciousness about O’Hara’s poetry, in which the artful is presented
as artless, which generates a stylized aesthetic project that has more
resonances with modernism or with the work of Jackson Pollock.
O’Hara’s work can be seen as the poetic equivalent of action paint-
ing where the “style” is on show even if the product appears simply
to be a rendering of experience. This is the case, for example, in
“Why I Am Not a Painter,” a consideration of the act of composition,
and “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” which
“records” a conversation with the sun, regarding the function of the
Muse, in a highly self-conscious fashion. While not strictly a post-
modernist poet, therefore, O’Hara has influenced other poets and his
self-consciousness, along with the mixing of high culture and popu-
lar culture that is found in his works (for example, “To the Film In-
dustry in Crisis” and “Ave Maria”), has resonance with postmod-
ernist aesthetics.

OKRI, BEN (1959– ). Nigerian writer who lives in the United King-
dom and whose novels use both postcolonial and postmodernist
forms. The mythopoetic elements of his writing combine African and
European traditions and lead to a concern with confrontations be-
tween foreign and indigenous cultures in Nigeria while also focusing
on a way of finding a voice through which the latter can speak. These
are presented textually through the use of experimental forms that in-
clude stream of consciousness as well as more typical postmodernist
strategies such as magic realism and the fantasy elements of fabula-
tion. Such textual tropes develop a concern with the relationship be-
tween illusion and reality to foreground the defamiliarization of so-
cial and cultural reality as inventions in opposition to the lived reality
of the Nigerian peoples. Okri’s first two novels, Flowers and Shad-
ows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), are realist novels that
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OLLIER, CLAUDE • 235

deal with modernization and politics in Nigeria, with the latter, how-
ever, developing a stream of consciousness style while articulating
postcolonial concerns in its representation of an artist’s attempts to
express the experience of Nigeria’s urban poor. Subsequent to these
two works, Okri turned to the writing of short stories and in two col-
lections, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew
(1988), he developed more experimental styles of writing that ex-
tended postmodernist strategies by using African oral traditions and
folklore to express cultural hybridity and polyphony.
Okri’s most important work so far, The Famished Road (1991),
won the 1991 Booker Prize and draws on the postmodernist styles de-
veloped in his previous story collections by combining magic realist
forms, satire, and mythic fantasy with social concerns in order to ex-
press the complexities of living in contemporary Nigeria. The story
follows Azaro, a spirit child who inhabits both earthly and ethereal
dimensions, the two worlds so represented providing a dual narrative
focus that allows exploration of the legacy of European colonialism
while highlighting the value of African experiences, stories, and his-
tories in their persistence in the present. Okri has developed the story
of Azaro in two further novels, Songs of Enchantment (1993) and In-
finite Riches (1998), using the same blend of magic realism and nar-
rative which can also be found, in modified form, in Astonishing the
Gods (1995), a fantasy that tells of a man searching for visibility on
a magical island and which deals with illusion and the invention of
“reality” through its fabulational setting. Okri has published two fur-
ther novels, Dangerous Love (1996), a love story set in post–civil war
Nigeria, and In Arcadia (2002), which is set in Europe and deals with
a journey to knowledge. He has also written poetry, in An African El-
egy (1992) and Mental Fight (1999), and a collection of essays, A
Way of Being Free (1997).

OLLIER, CLAUDE (1922– ). French novelist whose early works were

written in the style of the nouveau roman, but who began to develop
more postmodernist forms, such as pastiche, intertextuality,
metafictional fantasy, and self-reflexivity during the course of pro-
ducing his major work, the eight-volume cycle of fictions Le jeu
d’enfant (Child’s Play), which was written between 1958 and 1975.
The first volume in this cycle, La Mise-en-scène (The Mise-en-scène,
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236 • OLLIER, CLAUDE

1958) is set in Morocco and details a prospecting mission by an en-

gineer that ends with a hazy sense of what has actually happened. Ol-
lier uses techniques typical of the nouveau roman, such as mysteries
that are never resolved, contradictory information, shifts in narrator-
ial position, and implied occurrences beyond the main character’s
knowledge to problematize the fictional reality of the events. The fic-
tionalizing process, symbolized by the textual metamorphoses cre-
ated by Ollier’s trademark repetition of similar sentences in various
permutations, generates an indeterminate textual reality in order to
map Ollier’s sense of an uncertain external reality. La Mise-en-scène
also plays with the blurring of identities, an area that comes to the
fore within individual novels in Le jeu d’enfant series as well as in
the cycle as a whole. Le maintien de l’ordre (Law and Order, 1961),
Été indien (Indian Summer, 1963), and L’Échec de Nolan (Nolan Is
Lost, 1967) develop the skewed narrative techniques of La Mise-en-
scène, presenting similar enigmas to be solved (or not), blurred nar-
ratorial positions, uncertain identities, and recurring characters, im-
ages and events in a variety of settings (Morocco, New York, and
Norway), while also continuing to use Ollier’s trademark variations
on a theme to foreground the linguistic or textual nature of reality.
L’Échec de Nolan also uses self-reflexive forms and initiates a
concern with fiction as the creator of reality, a feature that is exag-
gerated in the remaining four volumes of Le jeu d’enfant, which also
introduce more postmodernist elements. La vie sur Epsilon (Life on
Epsilon, 1972) is a work of postmodernist science fiction in which
characters’ lives and thoughts begin to overlap; Enigma (1973) pres-
ents a metafictional fantasy using blurred textual spatiality; Our ou
vingt ans après (Ur, or Twenty Years Later) uses temporal shifts and
intertextual allusions; and Fuzzy Sets (1975) considers its own fic-
tionality and the role of narrative in shaping reality. Ollier’s works af-
ter Le jeu d’enfant have taken a range of forms, as in Marrakech me-
dine (Marrakesh Medina, 1979) and Mon double à Malacca (My
Double in Malacca, 1982), which deal with the blurring of fiction,
autobiography, and the recording of reality. Other works include: Une
histoire illisible (An Unreadable Story, 1986), a novel about history
as an indecipherable fiction, Préhistoire (Prehistory, 2001), which
sets out several possible story lines as preambles to a narrative, and
Déconnection (Disconnection, 1988), which has a double narrative
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OLSON, CHARLES • 237

set in the past (the Nazi labor camps) and in a future that is nearing
apocalypse, albeit a creeping destruction of human society, in which
Ollier meditates on forms of self-consumption.

OLSON, CHARLES (1910–1970). American modernist poet whose

theorization of projective verse and “open field” poetics along with
his association with the Black Mountain Poets has at times led him
to be considered as a postmodern poet, although his work is probably
better understood as an important link between modernist poets (Ezra
Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky) and postmod-
ernist poetry. Olson’s work was initially written under the influence
of modernist poetry, most notably Pound’s Cantos and resonances of
these forms and ideas can be discerned in In Cold Hell, In Thicket
(1953), his first collection of verse, particularly in the long poem
“The Kingfishers” which expounds a number of Poundian forms and
concerns developing out of a consideration of Heraclitus, including a
focus on time and philosophical concerns (such as a meditation on
animals and machines), diverse formal structures, and intertextual
references. The Distances (1960) is a less formally innovative col-
lection and deals with dreams and universal myths. Olson had al-
ready by this time produced his important essay “Projective Verse”
(1950) which strongly contributed to postwar poetics in the United
States, most notably in the works of Black Mountain Poets such as
Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, as well as influencing writers
from abroad, such as Iain Sinclair and Allen Fisher. In this essay,
Olson theorized “open field” poetics which referred to the creation of
verse where form followed content and where a free-form style de-
veloping out of ideas, images, and perceptions was emphasized.
While not overtly postmodernist, because such a form is intended to
recreate authentic experience, the challenge to the perceived artifi-
ciality of poetic convention provided by “open field” writing does
resonate with postmodern critiques of system for its own sake.
After leaving the Black Mountain College, Olson settled in
Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he embarked on what was to be his
most important work, The Maximus Poems, which is also one of the
most significant works in American poetry. Olson had begun the
work as a series of letters in 1950, modeled on the structure of
Pound’s Cantos, and published Volumes I and II in 1960 and 1968,
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238 • ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

with the final unfinished volume being published posthumously in

1975. The work is consciously developed as a modernist Epic poem
about “a person and a place” in which Gloucester becomes a focus
for a range of concerns, including American history, the concept of
nationhood, and issues of selfhood and identity. These were comple-
mented by a focus on myth and religion in the second volume, which
also experimented with “field composition” (in which the page be-
comes a landscape for the representation of the forces of history and
nature), and the loss of spiritual and communal values within a com-
mercial and materialist culture in the final unfinished part. The poem
also displays modernist forms in its totalizing imperative (as repre-
sented in its Canto structure), its aesthetics of presence, which is
based on the centering location and symbolic form of Gloucester, and
in its belief in authentic forms of language in which signifiers and
signifieds can be insolubly united. There are postmodern elements in
its serial structure, but its overall impulse is toward formal con-
straints rather than toward the open-endedness that Olson had theo-
rized in “Projective Verse.”

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Novel by Gabriel García

Márquez first published in Spanish in 1967 as Cien años de soledad.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most important novels to
have been written during the 20th century and is often viewed as the
most significant fiction to have been produced in Latin America. The
novel takes the form of an Epic family saga set in the fictional town
of Macondo (which provides the location for many of García
Márquez’s novels) and follows the lives of the Buendía family over
several generations. It is also, however, a consideration of the history
of Colombia presented through the history of Macondo from its
founding to its final destruction in the last few pages after one of the
characters reads a parchment which reveals that all the events that
have taken place within the novel’s history have been written in ad-
vance of their occurrence. Through its different levels of narrative,
the novel presents a variety of literary techniques. Most important of
these strategies is the use of magic realism, in which fantastic events
are presented as everyday occurrences, such as the plague of insom-
nia that affects Macondo, the nearly five years of rain, and the ascent
of Remedios the Beauty to heaven. These elements are compounded
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE • 239

by the way in which time develops cyclical, rather than linear, forms,
as is noted by Ursula, the matriarch of the novel who lives through
most of its narration, a feature most obvious in the way that personal
traits recur within characters of the same name, so that all characters
called Aureliano are selfish seekers after power. Further, the initially
internalized reality of Macondo, which is separated off from the rest
of the world, presents a mythic, timeless world in which events are
focalized and understood through the perceptions of the characters.
One Hundred Years of Solitude also develops other strategies that
play off its magic realist framework. Many of the fantastic events that
occur are presented as such precisely because they are focalized
through the characters, whose understandings of reality are based on
myth and legend rather than on empirical, scientific, or historical per-
spectives. Remedios the Beauty’s ascent to heaven, for example, is a
story told by her family, possibly to conceal a scandal, which is ac-
cepted by the community because such events are more credible
within their cultural and cognitive frameworks than the scientific mar-
vels of modern technology. Through such ironizing strategies, the
novel also develops a demythologization of both fictional and social
reality. In the former case, the novel’s own self-consciousness with re-
gard to the narration of fantastic events questions its presentation of
magical realities by directing attention to its own fictionality, some-
thing that the novel’s ending seems to privilege. However, such fic-
tionalizing strategies are also presented in order to problematize the
apparently irreferential aspects suggested by its mythic and magical
qualities and to direct attention to the social and historical narratives
that form the real history of Macondo, including the civil wars that
pervade the novel and the arrival of foreign investment which leads to
a strike against the fruit company and the massacre of 3,000 workers.
This latter event is particularly important within the novel because the
subsequent erasure of the massacre within the novel’s fictional history
focuses attention on the erasure of proletarian history in reality. The
event also contributes to García Márquez’s demythologization of the
fictions of Latin America as an exotic paradise that are suggested by
the novel’s magical qualities by emphasizing the fact that Latin Amer-
ica’s history has as its basis colonial oppression and intervention by
outside powers, both of which represent the real history of Latin Amer-
ica: the exploitation of its people and resources for economic profit.
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240 • OULIPO

OULIPO. A group of predominantly French writers whose aim is to re-

search the ways in which literary texts can be determined by formal
structures that operate simultaneously as generative principles for,
and constraints on, the act of composition. OuLiPo is an abbreviation
of “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle” which can be translated as
“workshop for possible literature.” OuLiPo was founded in 1960 by
the mathematician François Le Lionnais and the pataphysical writer
Raymond Queneau, developing out of a colloquium on Queneau’s
work that had been held at Cerisy-la-Salle earlier that year. The
OuLiPo group subsequently developed a loose membership with its
members continuing to operate their own experiments, often mathe-
matical in origin, in order to generate new formulae for composition.
In addition to the founders, Queneau and La Lionnais, the OuLiPo
group’s members include: Noël Arnaud, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques
Bens, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Grangaud,
Jacques Jouet, Harry Mathews, Michèle Métail, Georges Perec,
and Jacques Roubaud. Oulipians are considered to remain members
of the group even after their deaths.
OuLiPo’s strategies of “Production Automatique de Littérature
Française” (PALF), or “writing under constraints” as Roubaud de-
scribes their method, are mechanical or mathematical principles ap-
plied to language in order to generate new unconsidered possibilities
that traditional realist and avant-garde writing do not allow. In the
view of OuLiPo, existing literary forms do not only impose formal
structures, but also, even within experimental avant-garde writing,
create fixed parameters of thought or conception that channel writers
to adopt certain techniques within the discourses allowable. Thus, in
the Oulipian view, even where writers create textual innovations their
writings are still determined by the discourses or genres within which
they are positioned. OuLiPo’s intention is to create techniques or
principles that allow writers to think outside of categories, genres, or
discursive parameters (even if OuLiPo might itself be considered to
be a category or genre of writing) and to create texts that could not
have been imagined within existing literary conventions, whether tra-
ditional or experimental. In this, the OuLiPo group is strongly influ-
enced by the concept of pataphysics, which entails conceiving ideas
beyond what seems possible within existing systems of thought, and
by the writings of Raymond Roussel, whose texts have rigid formal
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OUREDNÍK, PATRIK • 241

structures but which imagine a series of impossible objects or ideas

as a direct consequence of system imposed upon them.
The techniques adopted by OuLiPo writers are various and have
been collected together by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie in
Oulipo Compendium. The most famous writing constraint is known in
English as N ⫹ 7 (standing for “Noun ⫹ 7”) and in French as S ⫹ 7
(“Substantif ⫹ 7”). In this process the writer takes either an existing
piece of work or one of his or her own pieces, then chooses a dic-
tionary and replaces every noun with the one that occurs seven places
later. The same process can be performed with verbs or adjectives, or
a modified denominator. Other procedures include “larding,” where
sentences from an existing text are filled in by supplementary sen-
tences; the “lipogram,” where words with a particular letter are
avoided (as in Perec’s La Disparition [A Void], where the letter “e” is
excluded), or “definitional literature,” where words are replaced by
their dictionary definitions. Two of the most famous examples of
Oulipian techniques are Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes
(One Hundred Million Million Poems, 1961), which contains 10 son-
nets with each line affixed to the binding as a single strip from which
the reader can construct the number of poems designated in the title,
and the pre-Oulipian Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style, 1947),
which tells a simple story about a bus journey and a later event in 99
different styles. Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Man-
ual) is probably the best-known Oulipian text and uses a range of
strategies within the text itself (including lists written under con-
straints) while having an overall structure governed by the Knight’s
Tour, a mathematical conundrum which requires the narrative to
move around the 10-by-10 apartment block according to one of the
possible paths that a lone knight can take on a similar sized board
while visiting every square only once.

OUREDNÍK, PATRIK (1957– ). A Czech writer who publishes prose

and poetry, but who has also translated some of the works of Boris
Vian, Raymond Queneau, and Samuel Beckett into Czech and
published two dictionaries, one on biblical phrases and another on
unconventional forms of the Czech language. He began his publish-
ing career in the early 1990s with two volumes of poetry, If Don’t Say
and Or, as well as a fairy tale and an essay on philology. In 1995 he
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242 • PALAHNIUK, CHUCK

published Year24: Progymnasma 1965–89, a quasi autobiography

with memories grouped into 24 sections that begins with 24 memo-
ries and then counts down to the final section, which contains only
one entry. In its form, it thus has the arbitrary rules of constraint typ-
ical of the OuLiPo group. Ouredník’s most important work so far is
Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (2001), a col-
lage that forms a quasi novel and which is similar in style to Ed-
uardo Galeano’s Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire). Europeana is
a short compressed encyclopedia that expresses its history of the 20th
century as a set of fragmentary opinions, anecdotes, and brief stories.
The novel’s jumble of facts and stories is shorter and less cohesive
than Galeano’s trilogy and the overall effect is not one of structure,
but of a burlesque cacophony of voices.

–P–

PALAHNIUK, CHUCK (1961– ). American novelist who is often as-

sociated with the Generation X style of writing. In general, his nov-
els deal with marginality in contemporary American society and of-
ten take a disturbing idea as their narrative premise. Examples of
such strategies include: Invisible Monsters (1999), which deals with
a model who loses her lower jaw, Lullaby (2002), which tells the
story of a culling song that kills anyone who hears it; and the short
story “Guts,” which has gained a level of notoriety for its story of a
teenager who has his intestines pulled inside out in the course of sex-
ually stimulating himself. Palahniuk’s novels are primarily realist in
form, albeit with an exaggerated hyperbolic style of writing where
sentences are often simply short punchy phrases that theatrically an-
nounce their own significance, but there are self-conscious elements
in some of his novels, such as Diary (2003), a novel about the turn-
ing of reality into performance, and Fight Club (1996) with its self-
conscious use of the unreliable first person narrator. Of Palahniuk’s
books, Fight Club is of most interest with regard to postmodernism
because of its meditation on the anxieties caused by postmodern cul-
ture, most notably the concern over commodities and the way in
which they seem to cause the death of individuality. Fight Club
presents an anti-corporate and anti-consumerist ideology that locates
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PARODY • 243

the loss of identity in corporate homogenization of a simulated cul-

ture that has pervaded America through the replication of the same
ubiquitous franchises and commodities. The creation of the fight
clubs is an attempt to regain individuality by returning to an “au-
thentic” selfhood that is focused on the body rather than its com-
modified accoutrements. The regaining of individuality is, however,
primarily about the return of a masculine identity, with the novel elid-
ing the death of individuality with the death of masculinity because
it sees in consumerism the feminization of the contemporary male.

PARAFICTION. A form of experimental writing that attempts to avoid

all forms of literary or aesthetic categories through the production of
what can be referred to as “pure” writing. The term develops out of
the double meaning of “para-” which means both “beside” and “be-
yond,” and parafiction can be considered to be writing that exists
“beyond” the boundaries of existing categories of literature such as
genres or “-isms” (for example, realism or Expressionism), but also
existing “beside” them because such categories are needed in order
for parafiction to have boundaries to transgress. Examples of parafic-
tional writing include the écriture of the Tel Quel group, which
sought to produce writing that had no contexts that were external to
the language of the text, and surfiction, which consciously trans-
gressed the categories of the novel (such as character and plot) by
self-consciously presenting them as illusions inside the text.

PARODY. A style of writing that is usually defined as an ironic rewrit-

ing of a literary form, genre, or text that satirizes its object, but which
has been redefined in debates on postmodernism. Fredric Jameson
uses parody as the basis for his definition of pastiche, which he ar-
gues is the result of postmodernism’s inability to create anything new
and which results in the creation of “blank parody,” which both fore-
grounds a literary work’s textual nature and imitates for the sake of
imitation. Linda Hutcheon, however, has argued that postmodernist
writers’ use of parody has a different function in which it is used to
defamiliarize textual conventions not with the goal of revealing the
constructedness of fictional or poetic texts, but to problematize the
cultural values and ideologies implicit within particular forms and
genres. For example, a postmodernist text that reuses the forms of the
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244 • THE PASSION OF NEW EVE

detective fiction, such as Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The

Name of the Rose) or Jorge Luis Borges’ “Death and the Compass”
may do so as pastiche, but may also have a parodic element in which
the ideological foundations of the detective formula are questioned.
In the case of Borges’ story, for example, the ideology of an objective
and knowable reality, the triumph of the law as a result of its ability
to comprehend reality, and the reassertion of order through the
reestablishment of the social status quo are all presented as literary or
social fictions. In this case, rather than simply replicating textual
forms, the use of parody questions the political ideology of detective
fiction within a revisionist configuration. Parody in such formula-
tions can therefore have a political purpose as, for example, in Amer-
ican postmodernist writing where the western has been parodied reg-
ularly (in novels such as Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke
Down and William Burroughs’ The Place of Dead Roads) because
of the role it plays in expressing American ideology.

THE PASSION OF NEW EVE. Novel by Angela Carter published in

1977 that investigates the construction of gender and identity in con-
temporary culture by exploring the myths created by social ideology.
The novel uses the form of the picaresque to tell the story of an En-
glishman called Evelyn who travels to the United States where he ini-
tially finds himself in the City of Dreadful Night (a nightmarish ver-
sion of New York) before a journey into the desert where he is
captured by a feminist called Mother and transformed into a woman
called Eve. Eve escapes Mother’s captivity with the body of a woman
but with a male identity and finds her/himself juxtaposed sexually
and narratively to an ex-movie actress called Tristessa who is actu-
ally a man masquerading as a woman. The novel uses a variety of
narrative and generic styles, including dystopian science fiction, fan-
tasy, allegory, and fabulation to explore the ways in which gender is
constructed as a spectacle through images and cultural ideologies. At
one point, Tristessa is described as a “spectacular wraith,” referring
to his/her position within the ideologies of gender created by the film
industry, as well as to the illusory nature of cultural notions of gen-
der and to his/her psychological and corporeal masquerade of gender.
The novel reveals the complex articulations of the politics of gender
as a construct of masculine desires by exploring the myths and fic-
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PASTICHE • 245

tions that create its configurations within culture and society, al-
though its ending, in which Eve sails off toward the primal scene,
mutes the previous insistence on the constructedness of gender by of-
fering an essentialist transcendent moment.

PASTICHE. Fredric Jameson defines pastiche as “blank parody” and

refers to it as the characteristic style of postmodernism. Pastiche is
related to parody but differs because parody entails some element of
criticism or satire of the text it imitates, whereas pastiche has no such
satiric intention. Pastiche is principally imitation, mimicry, or hom-
mage and is linked to the concept of the death of originality. While
parody involves the defamiliarization of common textual devices or
clichés in the text being parodied, with the aim of revealing such
forms as affectations or as failed attempts at realism, pastiche imi-
tates a text simply for the sake of doing so. It is empty parody for par-
ody’s sake and involves the replication of “dead styles” that have no
contemporary cultural relevance. Pastiche also produces fragmented
texts because where parody tends to direct itself to a particular genre
or text (and thereby retains its own textual unity) pastiche texts quote
from, or reuse, a range of often unrelated texts and genres. It might
be argued, therefore, that, although they are fragmentary, pastiche
texts are plural forms that can create new arrangements because of
their diverse references, while parodic texts are one-dimensional and
limited because of their parasitic dependence on a specific originat-
ing text; not least because, in contemporary culture, a literary parody
of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, has relevance only as an
aesthetic game.
Because of their fragmentary and intertextual qualities, pastiche
texts are hybrids that often do not fit into particular genres. Their use
of many forms, texts, or genres, therefore, often problematizes liter-
ary categorization. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, for example, is
ostensibly a historical novel set in the 1920s, but also includes the for-
mula of the detective novel, conspiracy suspense narratives, and
mythic elements, none of which are privileged as the master narrative
of the novel. Similarly, Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name
of the Rose) is both a historical and a detective novel, while self-
referential forms of poetry often quote from a variety of discourses,
not all of which are poetic languages, with Charles Bernstein and
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246 • PAVIĆ, MILORAD

Edoardo Sanguineti being the best-known proponent of such a prac-

tice in their intermingling of a range of “writings,” whether these are
nonsense, advertising copy, everyday sayings, or poetic quotations.
Although this suggests that pastiche does entail the loss of originality,
its use of a range of forms, texts, and languages provides an aesthet-
ics of combination in which new arrangements can develop through
contrasts and juxtapositions, where dissonance rather than textual
unity is the informing aesthetic principle.

PAVIĆ, MILORAD (1929– ). Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Ser-

bia), Pavić is a novelist and poet who has also worked as a translator
and written literary histories. Initially he wrote poetry and produced
a number of collections, including Gvozdena zavesa (The Iron Cur-
tain, 1973), Konji svetoga Marka (St Mark’s Horses, 1976), before
turning to fiction in the 1980s, where he developed playful postmod-
ernist forms of writing. Pavić’s novels include elements that are res-
onant of the fabulations of Leo Perutz and the fictional histories of
Umberto Eco, although he is most noted for the intricate games he
plays with narrative and structure, where his writing bears similarity
to the work of Italo Calvino. Thematically, Pavić’s works adopt
ideas based on structures of dualities, in particular Gnostic ideas with
regard to time (including concepts of “fast” and “slow” time) and re-
ality, the latter of which is configured in terms of language as both
the symbol and cause of a corrupt world. The division of the world
into feminine and masculine elements is also an important trope and
can be found in Pavić’s first novel Hazarski recnik (Dictionary of the
Khazars, 1984), which was published in feminine and masculine edi-
tions that have one paragraph that is different.
Dictionary of the Khazars, the novel that established Pavić’s liter-
ary reputation, is written as a lexicon, taking the form of combina-
tory literature which allows it to be read in any order as the reader
follows information and stories from one section or book to another.
The lexicon itself is a fictional found text in three parts (Christian,
Muslim, and Jewish) that deals with an imagined event concerning
the conversion of the Khazars (a historical tribe living in eastern Eu-
rope) to a new religion in the 9th century that was allegedly printed
by Joannes Daubmannus from compilations given to him by Father
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PAVIĆ, MILORAD • 247

Theoctist Nikolsky in the 17th century. In a further found text in one

of the Appendices Nikovsky not only admits that one part of it was
dictated by a parrot (the Christian book) and that one part of it is the
result of a seer’s visions (the Muslim book), but also confesses to
having inserted his own writings into other texts and most likely,
therefore, into the text he gave to Daubmannus. The “Dictionary of
the Khazars” becomes a patchwork of fictions (with each of the reli-
gions offering different versions of “history”) that becomes about it-
self rather than a “real” event, not least because many of the entries
deal either with events surrounding its publication or with figures in-
volved in researching its origins in the 20th century (including
Dorothea Schultz whose entry develops into a murder mystery and
contains the variant between the masculine and feminine editions).
Pavić’s other novels are just as formally inventive. Predeo slikan
cajem (Landscape with Tea, 1988) is a playful formal exercise that
uses the form of a crossword, having chapters that can be read
“down” and “across” and a solution that offers the possibility of the
answer to life. Unutrašnja strana vetra, ili, Roman o Heri I Leandru
(The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander,
1991) contains two unrelated stories loosely based on the Hero and
Leander myth arranged so that they start at either side of the book and
meet in the middle, allowing the reader to choose which he or she
reads first. “Leander” is an historical fantasy set during the Austro-
Turkish wars of the 17th and 18th centuries that plays with an anal-
ogy between buildings and writing in which creation and destruction
form important dualities. “Hero” is set in the 20th century and has an
uncertain narrative voice and a fragmentary form made up of patched
together components (including a fabulation written by Hero, ex-
cerpts from a play, allusions to other texts, and digressions). Posled-
nja ljubav u Carigradu. Prirucnik za gatanje (Last Love in Constan-
tinople: A Tarot Novel for Divination, 1994) is set in the Napoleonic
wars and tells the story of a father and son based on interpretations of
the Tarot with an underlying principle of parallelism, but in which bi-
nary positions shift over and change the fortunes of characters from
one chapter to the other. According to a note the chapters can be read
either serially or according to one of the different ways for laying out
a Tarot reading.
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248 • PAZ, OCTAVIO

PAZ, OCTAVIO (1914–1998). Mexican poet who served in the Mexi-

can Diplomatic Corps, whose service included positions in Japan, the
United States and India, as well as a period acting as Mexico’s am-
bassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), and who received the Nobel Prize for Lit-
erature in 1990. Paz began writing poetry in 1933 and published sev-
eral volumes in the 1930s (including works written while he fought
on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War) before turning
to surrealist themes and forms in the 1940s when he experimented
with automatic writing. However, his main period of innovation in
poetry did not begin until the postwar period when his works began
to consider questions of identity, forms of reality, and self-reflexive
meditations on language. A point that is often used to divide Paz’s
earlier work from his later poetry is El laberinto de la soledad (The
Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950), a book length study of Mexican and
Latin American culture that dealt with Latin America’s cultural and
literary isolation from Europe and the creation of its own distinctive
traditions. The book was not only important in relation to Paz’s own
poetic work, but also to other Latin American writers and it is often
cited as a significant factor in the development of the Latin Ameri-
can Boom. In his poetry after 1950 Paz developed new textual prac-
tices in his work that incorporated a range of influences, including
European and American modernism such as cubism (Salamandra
[Salamander], 1962) and concrete poetry (Topoemas [Topoems],
1971) as well as drawing on ideas and philosophies from around the
world, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Marxism.
Paz’s later poetry is particularly concerned with the relationships
between language, identity, and reality, issues that can be found in
poems written between 1958 and 1961, and which are collected in
his Poemas (1935–1975) under the title “Días Hábiles” (Days and
Occasions). In “Entrada en materia” (“Into the Matter”), for exam-
ple, Paz meditates on landscapes of language in which skyscrapers
and the tower of Babel are connected to suggest that reality is a con-
struct of signs, while “Aqui” (“Here”) presents an image of mirrors
in which reality is problematized through the self-reflexive image of
footsteps listening to each other. A later poem, “Viento entero”
(“Wind from All Compass Points”) also deals with this concern but
emphasizes the way in which “unreality” develops as a product of
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PAZZI, ROBERTO • 249

time and perception: “entre las casas y las gentes espectrales / Pres-
encia chorro de evidencias / yo vi través de mis actos irreales”
(“among wraithlike houses and people / Presence a fountain of real-
ity / I looked out through my own unrealities”). A fuller considera-
tion of these issues can be found in Pasado en claro (A Draft of
Shadows, 1975) where, however, both reality and the self have be-
come products of language, with the horizon between earth and sky
imagined as a “coma horizontal” (“a horizontal comma”) and per-
ception being seen to be generated by the words that create it: “No
veo con los ojos: las palabras / son mis ojos” (“I don’t see with my
eyes: words / are my eyes”). Here, it is suggested not that language
creates fictions about reality, but that reality itself is a set of texts or
signs that construct the ideas that construct it.

PAZZI, ROBERTO (1946– ). Italian novelist and poet whose publish-

ing career began in 1970 when his first poems appeared in Italian lit-
erary magazines. Pazzi is best known as a novelist whose style blends
magic realist effects with the techniques of historiographic
metafiction, and his novels display the influence of Italo Calvino.
His novels often present a reinvention or demythologization of his-
tory in their rewriting of the past as a fiction that is more convincing
than the official versions that masquerade as historical “truth.” Pazzi
thus brings an anti-historical perspective to his writings in which the
myths he creates generate a reality that replaces accepted versions.
These novels also utilize magic realist devices to create a fantasy ver-
sion of reality that within the confines of the text develops a consis-
tency and logic that drives the characters’ actions. In his first novel,
Cercando L’Imperatore (Searching for the Emperor, 1985), for ex-
ample, which deals with the killing of the Romanovs at Ekaterinberg,
the narrative presents the doomed quest of a Russian aristocrat and
his regiment as they seek to rescue the tsar from captivity. The rea-
son for their quest, however, disappears when they lose themselves in
the Siberian taiga, which becomes a realm of fantasy that determines
their perceptions and actions. Effectively, they enter a world of fab-
ulation where it is fictional and magic realist effects that drive their
narrative rather than any reference to real-life criteria or possibilities.
Pazzi has written a number of other novels that involve the fantas-
tic reinvention of history, including La Malattia del Tempo (Adrift in
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250 • PEREC, GEORGES

Time, 1987) and La Principessa e il Drago (The Princess and the

Dragon, 1986). The latter novel develops themes from Searching for
the Emperor in its focus on the Tsar’s younger brother, Grand Duke
George, and presents a fabulation in the form of his increasing isola-
tion from the world, which causes him to fantasize a new kingdom
which he can govern. Some of Pazzi’s novels have dealt with the con-
temporary world while retaining the same magical qualities. Con-
clave (2001), for example, is a novel about the election of a new pope
which blends attention to detail, through the form of verisimilitude,
with magic realist effects as a plague of rats and the appearance of the
Devil afflict a group of cardinals gradually losing touch with reality.
Here, Pazzi’s fabulation takes a naturalized form with the magical ef-
fects being created by the situation that the characters find them-
selves in rather than developing as a conscious fictional device. Nev-
ertheless, the fictiveness of the novel’s premise is still emphasized
even if it is based on an imagined “real” event.

PEREC, GEORGES (1936–1982). French writer of Polish Jewish ex-

traction whose father was killed in 1940 during the Battle of France
and whose mother died in a Nazi concentration camp. Perec was
brought up by an aunt and, after studying at the Sorbonne and serv-
ing in the army, began to write in the 1960s, becoming a member of
OuLiPo in 1967. Perec’s work takes diverse forms and is perhaps
best characterized by his interest in language play and puzzles, which
led him to not only produce poetry and fiction, but also to create other
works including parodies, dream narratives, word games, lipograms,
and crossword puzzles. His most important texts are his works of fic-
tion, which either utilize Oulipian strategies (particularly in the use of
the lipogram where words containing a particular letter are excluded
from the text) or offer examples of combinatory literature, both at
the level of narrative structure and in the linguistic play with ana-
grams, palindromes, and puns. Perec was also fond of mathematical
systems which he often used to generate the narratives of his texts.
Perec’s early works offer more conventional forms of fiction as, for
example, in Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante (Things: A
Story of the Sixties, 1965), a novel written in a variety of styles that
deals with consumerism by focusing on a bourgeois couple’s obses-
sion with acquiring “things.” Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond
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PEREC, GEORGES • 251

de la cour? (Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the

Back of the Yard?, 1966) is a short fiction about a soldier who wishes
to avoid combat that is written in a stylized version of spoken French
and begins Perec’s concern with language play, a tendency developed
in Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep, 1967) which is written in the
form of a second-person narration. After joining OuLiPo in 1967,
Perec’s works developed more complex concerns with narrative
structure and literary constraints. La Disparition (The Disappearance;
trans. as A Void, 1969) is a lipogram that avoids using words contain-
ing the letter ‘e’ and develops a series of disconnected parodies and
absurd adventures during which characters disappear from the text.
The novel’s structuring device foregrounds its lack of referentiality, a
process that is compounded by the novel’s intertextuality in its ref-
erences to writers such as Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Herman
Melville, and Raymond Roussel. Perec’s next work, Les Revenentes
(The Ghosts, 1972) has the same lipogrammatic form, but this time
refrains from using words with any vowel other than ‘e’.
After this novel, Perec shifted direction in producing Espèces d’e-
spaces (Species of Spaces, 1974), a text that focuses on the spaces of
existence and which, by including physical space, abstract space, and
textual space, challenges both the definability of space and the abil-
ity to represent it in other than textual form. Following this referen-
tial and self-reflexive text, Perec produced W ou le souvenir d’en-
fance (W, or, The Memory of Childhood, 1975), a complex text that
involves the attempt to remember and which combines an autobio-
graphical narrative of Perec’s childhood (based on fragmentary mem-
ories, photographs, and imagination) with a fictional narrative about
an island called W which is governed by a totalitarian regime that
uses sport as a form of control. Through these interwoven narratives,
Perec combines imagination with his attempts to remember his own
life in order to reflect on the Holocaust both as a personal, if absent,
experience and as an historical, but imagined, actuality. In 1978 came
La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), which is not only
Perec’s most important novel, but also one of the most significant
achievements in postmodernist fiction. The novel focuses on an
apartment block in Paris and tells the lives of its inhabitants by using
a complex set of mathematical constraints in which they become tex-
tual functions alongside the puns, catalogs, word games, and myriad
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252 • PERPETUAL PRESENT

of literary references that the novel articulates. At the time of his

death from cancer, Perec was working on a detective novel called 53
jours (53 Days, 1989).

PERPETUAL PRESENT. Part of the cultural condition of postmoder-

nity, the perpetual present (an idea developed by Fredric Jameson)
refers to the idea that cultural history has stopped. The perpetual pres-
ent is strongly related to the recycling of the past and describes the
view that postmodernity constantly repeats past forms of cultural pro-
duction (previous textual forms, genres, styles of music, or fashions)
with the result that advanced economies live in a state where nothing
really changes. There is a facsimile of change because different ver-
sions of the past follow each other in succession, but as these fash-
ions, genres, or styles of writing have already been reused several
times, it is difficult to tell whether it is the original version that is be-
ing recycled or a pastiche simulation based on its most recent rein-
carnation. The result of this is that various periods and their repro-
ductions circulate alongside each other in an ahistorical mishmash
where the culture of 2005, for example, looks very similar to that of
1995 or 1985.

PERUTZ, LEO (1882–1957). Austrian writer born in Prague during

the period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who lived in Vienna un-
til the time of the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, after which he emigrated
to Israel. During the 1920s and 1930s Perutz published a series of
novels that can be seen as precursors to metafictional forms of post-
modernism, with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino,
and Umberto Eco displaying the influence of his work. Perutz’s texts
are predominantly historical fantasies that can be described as a mag-
ical form of fabulation, but without the self-consciousness that be-
comes evident in later writers such as Borges. His novels very often
focus on imposters, counterfeits, secrets, or appearances that deceive,
focusing attention on the blurring of reality and fantasy, yet also
showing how reality can reassert itself unexpectedly and shine
through from beneath the illusions that individuals and society create.
Turlupin (1924), for example, narrates the story of a barber posing as
an aristocrat in Louis XIII’s Paris confronted with the possibility of
being unmasked, while the posthumously published collection of
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PINGET, ROBERT • 253

linked stories, Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke (By Night under
the Stone Bridge, 1975), set in late 16th-century Prague, deals with
the myths and stories that the city has generated as well as telling the
story of a love affair between a Jewish woman and the Emperor
Rudolf that takes place only in their dreams.
Perutz’s works also, however, suggest that reality can only be
found or achieved in dreams and illusions, and the fictional landscape
of Perutz’s novels map a world of possible or off-center versions of
reality and history by constructing seemingly mythic or symbolic fa-
bles that do not necessarily reveal a moral or a truth about the world.
Der schwedische Reiter (The Swedish Cavalier, 1936), a novel set in
Europe of the early 18th century, for example, involves an exchange
of identities between a cavalier and a thief that allows each of the
characters to live a “fictional” life as the other but does not resolve it-
self into an easy parable on the need for truth because the illusions
become lived as reality. Sankt Petri-Schnee (St Peter’s Snow, 1933)
does deal with the reassertion of reality which it explores in telling
the story of a German baron who seeks to revive faith in God by in-
fecting the peasants of a remote village with a hallucinogen that he
believes was present in plagues that accompanied past outpourings of
religious fervor. What he hasn’t noticed in his research is that these
religious outbreaks were based on anti-clerical and radical political
belief, with the result that, rather than creating the means to foster
submission to clerical and aristocratic hierarchies, he isolates an
agent that incites a revolution, one of whose first acts is to kill the lo-
cal priest. In this case, Perutz, writing in the period of the Nazi rise
to power, focuses on what he believes to be the illusions promoted by
Nazi techniques of mass persuasion and the unforeseen consequences
that he felt would result when reality reasserted itself. The book was
banned by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933.

PINGET, ROBERT (1919–1997). French novelist and playwright

born in Switzerland whose writing displays a stylistic invention and
dry humor that has similarities with the works of Raymond Que-
neau. In his novels Pinget invented the fictional town of Agapa, a
literary reality where any textual possibility could occur. For exam-
ple, in his best-known novel, Mahu ou la matériau (Mahu or the Ma-
terial, 1952), the first half of the text focuses on several characters
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254 • PINTER, HAROLD

writing books about each other whose words affect the fictional re-
ality the reader is experiencing, while the second half is made up of
random observations and linguistic games generated by Mahu him-
self. Le Renard et la boussole (The Fox and the Compass, 1953) has
a similar concern with textual processes and foregrounds its fiction-
ality through the use of a dislocated chronology that introduces fig-
ures such as Mary Magdelene, Don Quixote, and refugees from a
Nazi concentration camp into the narrative. L’Inquisitoire (The In-
quisitory, 1962) tells an absurdist story in the form of questions and
answers as a servant in a château responds with half-truths, evasions,
and unnecessary digressions to queries relating to an unspecified
crime. Quelqu’un (Someone, 1965) is a humorous variation on the
nouveau roman that follows the day in the life of an unreliable first-
person narrator as he searches for a manuscript on botany and fanta-
sizes encounters with the neighbor that he has never met. Other nov-
els in the sequence use musical ideas as compositional metaphors
such as Passacaille (Passacaglia, 1969), an ambiguously presented
fantasy in which dead bodies pile up, and Cette voix (That Voice,
1975) which uses the form of a musical composition through narra-
tive variations and the use of leitmotifs.

PINTER, HAROLD (1930– ). British playwright awarded the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 2005, who is best known for the absurdist dra-
mas he wrote between the end of the 1950s and the mid-1970s. In
these works, Pinter produced complex psychological dramas that,
however, involved forms of menace and unspoken threats as narra-
tive generators rather than as character-driven explorations of con-
sciousness. Very often the characters threaten each other by implica-
tion either through silences or through the nuances of the language
that they use, with the implication that words (even banal forms of
expression) hold a special signification beyond their ordinary mean-
ings. Much of Pinter’s dramatic work is based on a language of com-
monplace expressions and clichés whose banality leads to occasional
attempts to explore the meanings of language before a sense of un-
spoken terror ends the investigation, either out of fear that it will re-
veal unwanted meanings or even worse that it might reveal that lan-
guage has no system of reference and exists only as empty mouthings
of meaningless words.
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PINTER, HAROLD • 255

In form, Pinter’s dramas are often very flat in their representations,

gesturing toward concealed allegorical depths that however are never
revealed, even though the plays retain a sense that there are unrepre-
sentable ideas or forces at work. The texts’ refusal to uncover any
depths of meaning also involves a sense of self-consciousness about
narrative constructions of system or meaning that concomitantly sug-
gest an implicit self-consciousness about the plays’ own textual form.
However, the main concern in these configurations is to draw atten-
tion to the artificiality of the narrative in both its setting and its work-
ing out (often in meaningless squabbles over “stage” space) which
serve as metaphors for the meaninglessness of any system of order
that seeks to organize the mundanity of everyday existence. In Pin-
ter’s works the sheer banality of the setting and the curious events
that interrupt to create the narrative work to highlight the emptiness
of the structures created by the characters on stage as they seek to
create meaning and order in their “fictional” lives.
After working as an actor for several years, Pinter wrote The
Room (1957), a drama that plays with cause and effect and intro-
duces the struggles over space that came to typify Pinter’s work as
Rose’s room is invaded by different characters. The Room was fol-
lowed by one of Pinter’s best-known works, The Birthday Party
(1958), in which two shadowy figures called Goldberg and McCann
menace an ordinary man called Stanley for an unspecified reason,
although it may be to take possession of his identity or to discipline
him for trying to make language mean something (as represented by
his “shocking” use of the word “succulent”). Concerns with the
power of language are developed in The Dumb Waiter (1960) in
which Gus is stripped of his identity, punished, and set up to die for
his attempts to understand the meanings of words, a “crime” that
signifies an unwillingness to accept the fictions of everyday reality.
The Caretaker (1960) is one of Pinter’s most elusive plays and in-
volves a figure called Davies invading the space controlled by Aston
and seeking to make it his own. Such concerns are also developed in
The Dwarfs (1960), which hints at an unpresentable reality beneath
everyday life and which involves a character naming his room as a
sign of occupation, and in Night School (1960).
After these plays, Pinter wrote what might be referred to as “rela-
tionship” plays, although unsurprisingly they are distorted versions
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256 • POLYPHONY

as, for example, in The Lover (1963), which focuses on masquer-

ades of desire and love, and most notably in The Homecoming
(1965), in which a son’s return home leads to implications of un-
specified forms of domination and more open forms of sexual con-
trol. In the late 1960s and 1970s Pinter’s drama underwent a change
of direction, although Old Times (1970) and No Man’s Land (1975)
maintain concerns with the struggle for domination found in The
Homecoming. In short plays such as Landscape (1968) and Silence
(1969), and then later in Family Voices (1981), Pinter developed a
more lyrical style by focusing on personal and relational alienation
through the representation of characters who occupy the same space
and who talk to each other in overlapping dialogue, but who either
do not listen to or cannot hear what the other characters are saying.
Pinter’s next major work was not until 1984, when One for the
Road was performed, by which time he had developed a more po-
litical form of drama dealing with abuse of power, a concern that
can also be found in Moonlight Language (1988), although Ashes to
Ashes (1996) returns to the issues of sexual power, domination, and
masquerade found in earlier works.

POLYPHONY. Originally a term used in musicology, where it de-

scribes the creation of consonance out of the weaving together of
several different voices, polyphony has been adopted in literary
criticism to refer to texts that present a multitude of voices or dis-
courses. The Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin used the term in de-
veloping his theory of “dialogism” to describe the way in which
novels were created not by a controlling narratorial or ideological
voice (a “monologic” discourse that he primarily associated with
poetry), but by a “dialogue” between competing discourses and ide-
ologies. While Bakhtin argues that historically most novels are “di-
alogic” or “polyphonic” rather than “monologic,” the concept of
texts having many voices has become popular in academic circles
when discussing 20th-century experimental texts that have a frag-
mented or collage form and no unifying voice or ideology.
Polyphony has some relationships to pastiche and intertextuality,
where a text “speaks” with different voices that originate elsewhere
(and in the scholarly study of postmodernist poetry it is often used
as a substitute for the former term), but also refers to texts that ei-
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POSTMODERN • 257

ther have multiple narrative positions or incorporate a range of dif-

ferent discourses and narratives without any of these being privi-
leged as a “monologic” voice of authority. The former situation can
be seen, for example, in the novels of Milan Kundera, while the
latter construction of texts can be found in the poetry of John Ash-
bery or in the encyclopedic texts of postmodernist maximalism.

POSTMODERN. A critical or theoretical position, philosophy, politi-

cal viewpoint, or overall outlook that privileges decentralization, de-
construction, and the primacy of systems of signs (both linguistic
and visual) in the creation of social, cultural, economic, and politi-
cal reality. The term “postmodern” should be distinguished from
“postmodernism” (postmodernist aesthetic and textual approaches)
and “postmodernity” (the totality of postmodern and postmodernist
processes that constitute postmodern culture) to primarily describe a
viewpoint that is usually associated with the critical theory of post-
structuralism. Poststructuralism emphasizes the view that language,
in all its variations, is the same as reality. For poststructuralism, lan-
guage does not represent reality as a tool for communication or ex-
pression of something outside of itself because language constructs
“reality” through the ways in which the latter is organized, catego-
rized, and structured by the former. Nature has no language of its
own and any human, and therefore cultural, expression of nature
(even in the case of mathematics or physical sciences) is not an ex-
pression of the “real” thing, but the attribution of symbols or refer-
ents that determine its meaning and “reality” thereafter. Poststruc-
turalism is based on the principle that all forms of representation
(such as literature, philosophy, or science) reach a point (an “apo-
ria”) where they either deconstruct themselves because they lapse
into contradiction or reveal that their “reality” is actually a product
of the sign systems (or discourses) that they are using. In postmod-
ernist literature, “postmodern” refers to those texts that articulate
ideas which correspond with poststructuralist viewpoints, express-
ing a belief in the indeterminacy of knowledge or reality and in its
construction through language. Examples of such texts include nov-
els by the Tel Quel group, Language Poetry, or metafictional texts
such as William H. Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
and Walter Abish’s How German Is It?
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258 • POSTMODERN DETECTIVE FICTION

POSTMODERN DETECTIVE FICTION. The genre of detective

fiction has been very popular among postmodernist writers because
its focus on the interpretation of clues (signs of reality) in order to
solve a crime and so reveal the “truth” in the denouement have made
it a form of textuality that is particularly relevant for the investiga-
tion of the status of reality. The postmodern detective story, how-
ever, uses the forms of the genre to problematize the interpretation
of signs as a way of revealing truth. For example, the act of detec-
tion can be used to reveal that the signs of reality are ambiguous in
their meaning, leading to the view that the act of interpretation
forces signs into an artificial system that has no relation to reality.
Such a configuration is explored, for example, in the scientific de-
tective investigation of Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star. Equally, the in-
vestigation in postmodern detective fiction can be determined by the
preconceptions of the detective, a situation that leads to the creation
of a fiction of reality (as in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Death and the
Compass”) or to the presentation of a radically unknowable reality
that is constituted only by signs and where clues lead endlessly on
only to other clues in an internalized system of signifiers with no
“real” referents (Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49). Al-
though the postmodern detective story often takes this anti-detective
formula, focusing on the constructedness, indeterminacy, or unmap-
pability of reality and the provisional nature of truth, it can also take
other forms where some kind of “truth” is revealed. For example,
there are literary detections such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Um-
berto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) where the
detection leads to the discovery of truth in texts rather than in real-
ity (a principle also adopted in David Fincher’s cinematic fabula-
tion, Seven) or political detective narratives that investigate the ide-
ological fictions of culture in order to reveal the underlying power
structures, such as Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.

POSTMODERN IRONY. A term used to refer to the various ironiz-

ing strategies used by postmodernist poetry and prose works to
draw attention to their textual qualities. These include any textual
device that either foregrounds the literary constructedness of the
work or problematizes “reality effects” such as verisimilitude and
narrative cause and effect. Postmodern ironic strategies include: in-
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POSTMODERN THEATER • 259

tertextuality, metafiction, narcissism, pastiche, the use of fantasy

and fabulation, self-consciousness, and self-reflexivity. Postmod-
ern irony, therefore, refers to a text’s “knowing” qualities by which
it directs the reader or audience to its fictional status and then con-
gratulates them on being “knowing” enough to recognize the ironic
strategies being used.

POSTMODERN THEATER. Postmodern theater describes a wide

variety of forms, both written and performed. It has its origins in the
experiments with drama and theatrical space that were expounded
and developed by early 20th-century European dramatists, the most
important of whom, as far as postmodernism is concerned, were Al-
fred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello.
These writers, along with the disruptive aesthetics of Dadaism as
they fed through into Situationism in France and the Merry
Pranksters in the United States in the 1960s, have also influenced
contemporary forms of performance. Indeed, it can be argued that it
is in the areas of performance and direction where postmodernism is
most obvious in theater, where the focus on “performativity” has led
to a blurring of postmodern theater with avant-garde film, perform-
ance art, as well as contemporary experimental music and multime-
dia events. All of these areas are concerned with disrupting the fabric
of normality and everyday life in order to reveal the ideologies,
codes, rules, and conventions that are created by embedded social
and cultural structures and which seem to govern even apparently
“ordinary” or meaningless acts or forms of behavior. Important prac-
titioners of postmodern performance, performance art, and multime-
dia art include: Laurie Anderson, Gilbert and George, Karen Finlay,
Tim Miller, The Living Theater (whose practices derive principally
from the Artaud’s theory of the “Theater of Cruelty”), the Open The-
ater, and the Wooster Group (whose work focuses on assemblage and
dissonance in the performance of modern and classic plays), while
theater directors whose work has extended experimental forms in-
clude Peter Brook (under the influence of Artaud) and Peter Stein
(under the influence of Brecht).
Literary versions of postmodernist drama, where postmodernist de-
vices stem from the written text, have also focused on issues of per-
formance, but have also developed self-reflexive or metadramatic
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260 • POSTMODERN THEATER

conventions. The most important tendencies of postmodernist theater

have been absurdism (a term that developed out of Martin Esslin’s
study of postwar Drama which he dubbed “The Theater of the Ab-
surd”) and more politically motivated works. The former kinds of
drama can be found in the works of Samuel Beckett, Eugène
Ionesco, and Jean Genet in France, Harold Pinter, N.F. Simpson, and
Sarah Kane in the United Kingdom, Edward Albee and Arthur Kopit
in the United States, or Gert Jonke and Christoph Ransmayr in
Austria. Absurdism develops from experiments in the form and con-
tent of theater generated by Jarry, Pirandello, and Artaud and is par-
ticularly concerned with the deconstruction of the theatrical space and
textual form. Patrice Pavis (1992) has argued that postmodern theater
denies the “existence of rules and regulations governing dialogue,
character, dramatic structure, etc.” and such negations can be applied
to absurdist drama in the ways in which it introduces nonrealist and
nonlinear narratives, such as the nonnarratives of Beckett’s En atten-
dant Godot (Waiting for Godot) and Fin de partie (Endgame), neither
of which lead to any textual resolution, or in the perverse struggles for
domination in Pinter’s early dramas. Similarly, absurdist dramas pres-
ent dialogue that is not typically “dramatic” because it often takes the
form of fragments or nonsequiturs (most notably in the works of Pin-
ter), parodies of other kinds of discourse, or self-reflexive considera-
tions of language and meaning. Absurdist texts often also play with
what it is possible to show on the stage, as in Ionesco’s Les Chaises
(a stage filled with empty chairs representing guests at a speech) and
Rhinocèros, or in Sarah Kane’s “brutalist” dramas. One writer who
has developed concerns with performativity and theatrical space is
Tom Stoppard, whose works not only articulate adsurdist dilemmas
but also play with the possibilities (or impossibilities of) drama in or-
der to both revel in and demystify the artifice of theater as a form.
One key element of absurdist drama is also shared by the more po-
litically motivated postmodernist dramas that develop out of Brecht-
ian traditions and involves the way in which ideologies or cultural
“fictions” are demystified. Absurdism tends to focus on the way in
which any system of meaning is a fabulation or a fiction, however,
whereas politically motivated forms of postmodern theater focus
specifically on the deconstruction of social or political ideology. Pe-
ter Weiss, for example, in Marat/Sade uses an array of textual de-
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POSTMODERNIST SCIENCE FICTION • 261

vices and forms to create an alienating effect which comments meta-

dramatically on the play itself. Through this, the play draws attention
to the artifice involved in drama, not, however, merely to self-
consciously question itself, but in order to comment on the ways in
which political protest and revolution have been represented ideo-
logically. Other writers who use postmodernist forms of drama to de-
construct ideological ways of thinking include Elfriede Jelinek,
whose plays deal with a range of issues including sport and power,
the repression of women and fascism, Thomas Bernhard, who used
his dramas (most notably Heldenplatz) to satirize Austrian culture
and society, and Peter Handke. A number of writers who are not pri-
marily postmodernist in their creation of play texts have also used
some postmodernist devices in order to explore political concerns.
Edward Bond, in Bingo, plays with history and fiction in order to
draw attention to the disparities between the political ideas expressed
in Shakespeare’s plays and those Bond imagines him to live by, while
Caryl Churchill, in Top Girls, blurs time and space in order to explore
the roles and oppression of women throughout history.

POSTMODERNIST SCIENCE FICTION. The tropes of speculation

and imagined worlds have made science fiction a fruitful area for
postmodernist writers to explore. In particular the consonance be-
tween fabulation and SF’s fantasy elements has led to a number of
postmodernist writers drawing the two together in order to more fully
explore the fictional possibilities that SF allows in the creation of
possible or alternate realities. The malleability of fictional time also
allows writers to self-consciously project into the future in order to
reflect on the present. This is the case in Peter Ackroyd’s The Plato
Papers which uses an SF vision of the future to explore the fictions
of history, while Russell Hoban, in Fremder, uses the idea of
“phase” reality to imagine a fictional form of space travel, but does
so in order to reflect on existential and identity issues. Other writers
have more fully used the fantasy elements of fabulation to imagine
possible worlds that not only reflect on contemporary society, but
also question the status of reality itself. Christine Brooke-Rose of-
fers such a strategy in Out, while William S. Burroughs uses science
fiction ideas to investigate the way in which reality is constructed
ideologically in order to repress alternate realities, a configuration
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262 • POSTMODERNIST SCIENCE FICTION

also used by Thomas Pynchon who, in Gravity’s Rainbow, uses a

range of SF devices, including fantasies of space travel, a futuristic
city called Raketenstadt, as well as numerous references to SF films,
to investigate both the knowability of reality and the power systems
that conceal its operations. Other postmodernist writers have used SF
primarily as a textual form, as in Italo Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche
(Cosmicomics) where the premises of SF form a way of exploring the
fiction-making process and the creation of impossibilities that only
narrative and language allow.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw critical attention being fo-
cused on science fiction as a postmodern form itself (McCaffery,
1986; McHale, 1992), primarily because the use of fabulation
within the genre involved the projection of worlds distinct from ex-
isting reality. This criticism, however, tended to conflate the specu-
lative elements of the genre with postmodern fiction making with
the result that many SF writers were considered to be postmodernist
even though there were no self-conscious or metafictional ele-
ments within their works. Nevertheless, some SF writers have de-
veloped more overtly postmodernist tropes within their works, most
notably Doris Lessing, particularly in the Canopus in Argos series,
Stansilaw Lem, who has used fabulational and metafictional
forms, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr, whose works embed fantasy and
fabulation within each other so seamlessly that they can be consid-
ered to be SF and postmodernist simultaneously. The same can be
said of J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany (particularly in Dhalgren),
and Philip K. Dick, writers whose concerns with different types of
reality (cultural, cognitive, and psychological) lead to investiga-
tions of worlds of appearance and the creation of nonnormative re-
alities. New Wave science fiction also led to experimentation with
form, as in Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels, where
time and narrative are used imaginatively to defamiliarize accepted
notions of reality, a process also used by Richard Calder in his
“Dead” trilogy. Calder also utilizes pastiche and generic hybridity,
features shared by cyberpunk (a form that also generated the retro
SF subgenre of steampunk) which, in the works of Pat Cadigan,
William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, mixes genre and narrative
forms in order to investigate postmodern culture.
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POSTNOIR • 263

POSTMODERNITY. Where “postmodernism” is a term that is usually

used in order to refer to aesthetic practices (pastiche, nostalgia) and
cultural products (literature, film, television, art, architecture) and
“postmodern” more specifically designates a poststructuralist theo-
retical approach or philosophy, “postmodernity” describes the total-
ity of postmodern culture and society and the processes and ideas that
form its dominant features. Theorists have identified many different
phenomena (often in opposition to each other) as dominant cultural
configurations in postmodernity. Jean Baudrillard, for example,
identifies simulation and hyperreality (and the concurrent loss of
authenticity and the death of reality) as key principles, while Fredric
Jameson argues that the pervasive commodification of culture leads
to a range of other features (including nostalgia, the death of indi-
viduality, the perpetual present, and the recycling of the past). A
number of theorists have argued that fragmentation or decentraliza-
tion are the paradigmatic features of postmodernity, including Jean-
François Lyotard (the death of the grand narratives), Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari (schizophrenia and nonlinear “rhi-
zomatic” logic), and David Harvey (flexible accumulation). Still
others have argued that postmodernity is an extension of the princi-
ples of modernity, including Jürgen Habermas, Andreas Huyssen,
and Stephen Crook, Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, whether as a
philosophical project, a condition of mass culture, or as a perpetua-
tion of modernist forms of social organization.

POSTNOIR. A postmodern development of the crime conventions that

can be found in the morally compromised world of 1940s film noir
and in American hard-boiled detective fiction by writers such as Ray-
mond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Chester Himes. The conven-
tions of film noir and the hard-boiled detective novel that developed
in the 1930s and 1940s focused on a central individual (usually male)
through whom the events were focalized. Dominant concerns were:
the representation of a morally compromised society governed by the
acquisition of capital focusing around criminals and “aberrant” fem-
ininity; the problematization of masculinity as a result of the hero’s
corruption by “aberrant” femininity; a city that acts as a microcosm
of society in the representation of the creep of corruption caused by
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264 • POWERS, TIM

capitalism’s dissolution of traditional social hierarchies; and a reso-

lution in which the punishment of crime also entailed social policing.
Postnoir exaggerates and flattens out these concerns within a frame-
work of the postmodern collapse of boundaries through which social
structures disappear to be replaced by economic movements of
money. In postnoir criminality, corruption, and violence are endemic
and everyday rather than peculiar to a particular underworld. Cor-
ruption is all-pervasive because there are no binding structures, val-
ues, or ideologies to make people adhere to moral or legal authority.
As a consequence there are no internal moral debates and no mo-
ments of decision which push the characters over the edge, a situa-
tion that also applies to the hero of postnoir whose decisions are of-
ten the result of economic factors.
Postnoir very often has a retro aesthetic, setting its novels in the
past in order to demythologize official ideology and to reveal the
forms of oppression and corruption that have been ignored in main-
stream versions of history. This revisionism also extends to the de-
tective, very often utilizing this figure to enact the powerlessness of
the individual in contemporary society. This has led to the represen-
tation of a white male detective who articulates a continued obsession
with the crisis of masculinity, but also the creation of ethnic and fe-
male detectives who symbolize cultural and economic disempower-
ment. Key postnoir writers include: James Ellroy, whose novels both
focus on and satirize the crisis of white masculinity, Walter Mosley
and Gar Haywood, who focus attention on the endemic corruption of
white society from an African-American perspective, and Sara Paret-
sky who uses more conventional forms of the detective story to artic-
ulate issues around gender. Although primarily a term referring to
crime fictions, postnoir increasingly designates an overall outlook
that envisions a fragmented and corrupt society. The works of several
avant-pop writers (Mark Amerika, Cris Mazza, and Darius James),
as well as the novels of Kathy Acker, Steve Erickson, and Scott
Bradfield can all be seen to share such a postnoir perspective.

POWERS, TIM (1952– ). American writer of popular fiction pre-

dominantly working in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror gen-
res, whose novels sometimes use pastiche and fabular elements,
and who has produced one of the best-known novels within the
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PRYNNE, JEREMY HALVARD • 265

steampunk formula. His first novel was The Skies Discrowned

(1976) and this was followed by two postapocalyptic fantasies, Epi-
taph in Rust (1976) and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985), the lat-
ter of which imagines a medievalized Los Angeles and develops
mythic elements introduced in The Drawing of the Dark (1979), an
historical fantasy set during the Siege of Vienna that retells the
myths of King Arthur and the Fisher King. The Anubis Gates (1983)
has been retrospectively classified as a steampunk novel and pres-
ents a story about figures from Egyptian myth unleashed in 19th-
century England. The Stress of Her Regard (1989) follows a similar
vein and uses pastiche elements in its combination of retro horror
and historical fabulation to retell the story of John Keats, Lord By-
ron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. From this point on, Powers’ fiction
veered more toward horror, in Expiration Date (1995) and Earth-
quake Weather (1997), although Last Call (1992) uses the Fisher
King myth again in its supernatural story of aspirants gambling for
the Fisher King’s crown. Declare (2002) is a historiographic
metafiction that also mixes genres in its combination of espionage,
fantasy, the supernatural, and Cold War politics.

PRYNNE, JEREMY HALVARD (J.H.) (1936– ). English poet whose

work helped to reestablish experimental verse in United Kingdom in
the postwar period through the incorporation of influences drawn
from modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos
Williams, contemporary experimental writers such as William S.
Burroughs and John Ashbery, and ideas adopted from movements
in European philosophy. Prynne’s first collection, Force of Circum-
stance (1962), articulated concerns with poetic objectivity within a
traditional form, with subsequent collections developing more exper-
imental styles as well as political concerns. These include: Kitchen
Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969), Brass (1971), Down Where
Changed (1979), For the Monogram (1997), Triodes (2000), and Bit-
ing the Air (2003). Although there have been nuances within Prynne’s
poetry at different stages, such as an emphasis on politics in the
1970s, his poetry generally focuses on the distinctive patterns of sig-
nification created by what he describes as the “literary nature of the
literary text” which he develops through a self-consciousness about
the use of literary language.
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266 • THE PUBLIC BURNING

This aspect of his writing is found, for example, in the intertextual

and philosophical references within his work and in the particular
syntactic forms and diction of his poetry which often develop an aes-
thetic of dissonance that at times resembles the verse of Language
Poetry. Such concerns, however, are also placed within particular
historical contexts as well as within an awareness of poetic traditions,
with one of Prynne’s major concerns being the loss of value attached
to poetry in contemporary culture. This often leads to condensations
of ideas within formally dissonant patterns in which dense accumu-
lations of meaning are created through the accretion of different lin-
guistic and cultural discourses. At the same time, Prynne offers self-
conscious meditations on notions of literary and cultural value, as he
outlines in Brass: “Rubbish is / pertinent; essential; the / most intri-
cate presence in / our entire culture.” This is a complex sentiment that
can be interpreted as a comment either on culture as rubbish or on
culture’s view of poetry as rubbish—with, however, a further impli-
cation that inessential poetry is also “essential” because it is a para-
digm of culture’s detritus. Through such complex and ambiguous
forms, Prynne generates meanings out of doubled discourses that are
both mutually exclusive and mirrors of each other.

THE PUBLIC BURNING. Complex maximalist novel by American

novelist Robert Coover, written in the early 1970s but not published
until 1977 because publishers were unwilling to take on a novel that
dealt with the famous Rosenberg Spies case of the 1950s, which pre-
sented Richard Nixon negatively, and which included a scene in-
volving Nixon being sodomized by Uncle Sam. Even after Nixon’s
resignation from the presidency of the United States it was a further
two years before the novel was published. The Public Burning com-
bines political satire with metafictional and fabular textual configu-
rations. This is complicated by its double narrative where these ele-
ments intersect and diverge, with one plot written as a first person
narration from the perspective of Nixon as he plans his strategy to
take over as “Uncle Sam” (a fabulated personification of American
power as vested in the figure of the president), and the other written
as a mythic version of America which maps the ideologies and de-
sires that dominate American society through a pastiche of styles that
includes news reports rendered as Epic poetry. Coover uses this
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PUIG, MANUEL • 267

structure to parody American’s vision of itself as an Epic hero (in the

form of Uncle Sam) by introducing carnivalesque elements to show
how easily Epic can become farce, most notably in the actions of
Nixon, who is portrayed as an inept fool.
Within this frame, the novel presents alternative genres (historical
novel, spy story, romance, moral tale) to suggest possible ideologies
or narratives for American society to take, each of which Nixon tries
to appropriate (as warrior, Machiavil, lover, or fighting Quaker) in or-
der to create himself as the embodiment of individuality he believes
to be both the paradigm of American ideology and the expression of
the desires of the American public. He only finds himself taking cen-
ter stage, however, after his failure to seduce Ethel Rosenberg when
he is suddenly shifted spatially from Sing-Sing to the public burning
in Times Square, at which point he finally becomes what the public
wants. He finds himself with his pants around his ankles with the
words “I AM A SCAMP” lipsticked on his buttocks, presented to the
world as a clown to entertain the audience before the main event.
When chaos ensues, Nixon’s inability to control the random and vio-
lent actions of the crowd is used by Coover to imply that his ultimate
election in 1968 is symbolic of the way in which the “reds-under-the-
beds” and capitalist ideologies that unified America until the mid-
1960s have been displaced by an ideology of individuality that has
created an atomistic America that is tearing itself apart as a result of
both its suspicion of others and its assertion of individual rights.

PUIG, MANUEL (1932–1990). Argentine writer who emerged after

the Latin American Boom and whose novels engaged with the in-
creasing dominance of images in the creation of meaning in society
by focusing on popular culture, television, and cinema as forms of
remembrance, possibility, evasion, and alienation. This matrix of is-
sues was informed by Puig’s leftist politics and homosexuality
which led to concerns with politics and sexual identity, including a
particular focus on a duality in which the many voices of Latin
America can either be represented as a polyphony or channeled into
a one-dimensional discourse by the new forms of media, with his
texts mapping such processes in the formal structures they articulate.
His first novel, La traicíon de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hay-
worth, 1968), for example, presents the way in which cinematic
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268 • PUIG, MANUEL

fictions have entered everyday life as fables in its story about a

young boy who uses fantasies derived from the cinema and its myths
of star lifestyles to think outside the boredom of daily life. The novel
also apparently offers a textualization of cultural polyphony in its
presentation of the many voices of a multivocal culture, but suggests
that these have been “betrayed” by the world of images, not merely
in the disillusionment its lies create, but also in the way in which it
transforms oral culture through people’s adoption of the languages
of cinema and television as a way of engaging with their lives and
relationships. Boquitas Pintados (Heartbreak Tango, 1969) deals
with the failure of love in a small town in the 1930s and 1940s and
has a similar focus on everyday life. It is written in the melodramatic
style of soap opera, but also adopts more overtly postmodernist
strategies in presenting multivocality through the use of different
textual forms such as stream of consciousness, letters, public
records, chronicles, memos, reportage, and objective narration.
The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) is a postmodern detective fiction
that offers the same variety of styles as Heartbreak Tango including
cinematic scenarios, interior monologue, one-sided dialogue, and a
fragmented chapter taken from a shorthand account of a phone call.
Shortly after this novel, Puig moved to New York where he produced
his best-known work, El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider-
woman, 1976), which tells the story of two prisoners, one a middle-
class gay (Molina) and the other a left-wing activist (Valentín). Al-
though the prison authorities have bribed Molina to extract
incriminating evidence from Valentín, as the pair tell each other sto-
ries that initially involves Molina narrating plots of films (beginning
with Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People) before turning to more personal
narratives, the two develop an emotional and, finally, a sexual rela-
tionship. The novel is told almost entirely in dialogue (with occa-
sional interior monologues and lengthy footnotes that mainly present
psychoanalytic accounts of homosexuality), a paradoxical form that
allows the pair to become increasingly intimate while also mapping
the physical and social restrictions they are subjected to in its inter-
nalized structure. Of Puig’s later works, his most experimental is
Maldición eternal a quien lea estas páginas (Eternal Curse on the
Reader of These Pages, 1980) which develops out of the transcription
of conversations in English that Puig then arranged and translated
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PYNCHON, THOMAS • 269

into Spanish. Other works by Puig include the novels, Pubis angeli-
cal (1979), Sangre de amor correspondido (Blood of Requited Love,
1982), and Cae la noche tropical (Tropical Night Falling, 1988), as
well as a small number of plays and screenplays.

PYNCHON, THOMAS (1937– ). American novelist who is often

considered to be the most important figure in American postmod-
ernist literature and whose major works have not only led him to be
placed alongside major 20th-century writers such as James Joyce,
Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka, but also on a par with Amer-
ican authors such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and William Faulkner. Comparisons with the latter
group of writers have been reinforced by the fact that Pynchon’s
novels show an acute awareness of American literary and ideologi-
cal concerns such as Puritanism, discourses of Progress (technolog-
ical, social, and moral), the American landscape, and transcenden-
talism. His novels, however, are probably better understood in terms
of the political dimension they bring to postmodernist aesthetics.
This is the case, for example, in Pynchon’s most recent novel,
Against the Day (2006), which takes place between the 1893
Chicago World’s Fair and the years immediately following World
War I. The novel spins multiple narratives within a multiplicity of
genre forms (such as “boy’s own” adventure, science fiction, pica-
resque, comedy, and dime novel) in order both to consider a history
in which capitalism attempted to create a grand narrative (a “world
system”) and to articulate the resistances to such system building
(whether political, cultural, textual, or comic). Thus, although Pyn-
chon uses many of the strategies of metafiction, his novels use such
textual processes to engage referentially with history, politics, and
contemporary culture from a left-wing perspective. Understanding
Pynchon’s political views in this way is a product of textual inter-
pretation and subject to debate as to whether Pynchon’s ideas are
New Left or anarchist, because, despite his literary reputation (and
his cameos on the animated television program The Simpsons in
2004), Pynchon is probably still best known for his avoidance of
publicity. After the publication of his first novel, V. (1963), Pynchon
effectively disappeared from public life. Very little is known about
his life because he has never given an interview nor done any book
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270 • PYNCHON, THOMAS

signings and until recently there was only one photograph of him in
public circulation.
As a novelist, his works are complex responses to 20th-century cul-
ture (even in the case of Mason & Dixon, a novel set in the 18th cen-
tury) and use an array of discourses, including postmodernist aesthetic
forms such as fabulation, metafiction, and pastiche, as well as con-
spiracy theory, historical narratives, scientific ideas, political ideolo-
gies, and an array of popular cultural and literary references. His nov-
els veer between high literature and mass culture and make reference
to forms such as cartoons and vaudevillian slapstick as often as they
invoke canonical writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Joseph Con-
rad. Pynchon’s early works were short stories, most of which were
later collected in Slow Learner (1984), the most important of which
are “Entropy” and “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,” the former in-
troducing a key motif in Pynchon’s work, the ambiguous duality (or-
der and chaos in the case of “Entropy”) where two sides of a binary
are posited, but with neither of them being privileged because they are
both inadequate in either structuring or explaining reality. This motif
of doubling creates the structure of V., a conspiracy narrative that is or-
ganized around two alternating strands, one set in contemporary
America and the other at various points in the past and in which a di-
alogism of genres is utilized to narrate different stories uncovered dur-
ing Herbert Stencil’s quest for the mysterious figure of “V.” The novel
also offers a number of ambiguous dualities including “flip” and
“flop,” to express the jazz opposition between “hot” and “cool” and
the existentialist dichotomy of passion and affectlessness, but most
importantly the binary opposition of meaning and meaninglessness as
Stencil seeks to give order to 20th-century history.
Although V. was acclaimed critically it was the following two nov-
els, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), that
created Pynchon’s literary reputation. The former novel is a short
complex fiction about a secret organization called the “Tristero” (or
“Trystero”) which may be a network used by official power systems
to exercise control, an oppositional countercultural network, or sim-
ply a fiction imagined by the main character, Oedipa Maas. Gravity’s
Rainbow is set at the end of World War II and traces the creation of
postwar global power structures. After the publication of Gravity’s
Rainbow, it was 16 years until Pynchon’s next novel, Vineland (1990),
an underrated book that is more overtly political and less literary that
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PYNCHON, THOMAS • 271

Pynchon’s other novels. Its main frames of reference are the popular
cultural and political discourses of 1980s America which it uses to
map the pervasion of culture by commodities and images as the sign
of the resurgence of capitalism in its postmodern forms. The novel
also presents a genealogy of oppression and resistance in contempo-
rary America that looks back to Richard Nixon’s presidency and com-
pares his attempts to repress opposition with the successes of Ronald
Reagan. Vineland presents this double focus through two narrative
lines, one set in the 1960s, dealing with the attempt and failure of a
countercultural group to resist dominant ideology by challenging its
control of the Spectacle, and the other narrating a daughter’s search
for the mother who was involved with this group. The two strands
blur together through a focus on cultural recuperation within which
the mother, Frenesi, is shown to be a servant of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the daughter, Prairie, a product of an image-based
culture, which, despite the novel’s optimistic ending, seems to prevail.
Mason & Dixon (1997) returns to the historical concerns of Grav-
ity’s Rainbow and, although it includes many comic and fantastic
episodes, has generally been received more favorably than Vineland.
The novel is primarily set in prerevolutionary America and traces the
development of Enlightenment systems. The novel presents a cultural
interface that involves the death of the magical (such as Dixon’s abil-
ity to fly) and the creation of the new wonders that result from scien-
tific and mechanical developments (such as the Talking Duck). The
novel presents an ambiguous representation of a world in transition,
demonstrating nostalgia for the old (including England) and an ap-
parent dislike of the new as represented by both the America that is
coming into existence and the new hierarchies that are being created,
such as the Royal Society’s institutionalization of science and the
power structures that this engenders. One of the key aspects of the
novel is the death of old ideas as knowledge is organized and con-
nected to social instrumentality through forms of bureaucratization
and rationalization which create fixed parameters for knowledge, ide-
ology, and behavior. New systems create “enlightenment” and de-
velop knowledge, but do so only by closing off possibilities, with the
result that “truth” is created by the systems that are privileged and not
by the phenomena of reality. In this respect, the act of surveying the
“Mason-Dixon Line” becomes a metaphor for the creation of reality
by human action, in this case seeming to determine the future of
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272 • QUENEAU, RAYMOND

America and the division of the nation into slave-owning and non-
slave states. Mason & Dixon can therefore be interpreted as a novel
about the creation of grand narratives in which old power systems
that still allowed a degree of individual freedom (albeit in a nostalgic
vision of the pre-Enlightenment period) are replaced by social sys-
tems that increasingly organize everyday life.

–Q–

QUENEAU, RAYMOND (1903–1976). French poet and novelist who

was active in French avant-garde movements throughout his writing
career. His early writings are surrealist in form and style before devel-
oping more pataphysical concerns in the postwar period. Following a
colloquium on his work at Cerisy-la-salle, Queneau cofounded
OuLiPo with François Le Lionnais in 1960, for which he produced im-
portant theoretical pieces on potential literature. While Queneau’s texts
are highly innovative and philosophical in their concerns, they are also
very enjoyable because of their readable plots and emphasis on humor.
His writings are characterized by inventive wordplay in which puns,
clichés, nonsequiturs, neologisms, and idiomatic or colloquial French
are foremost. This latter aspect caused some outrage among literary
circles for its transgression of the formal conventions of literary
French, particularly his use of slang and written transcriptions of spo-
ken language. This is most notable in Zazie dans le métro (Zazie in the
Metro, 1959) which famously opens with the phrase “Doukipudonk-
tan?,” a transliteration of “D’où qu’ils puent donc tant?” (“How come
they stink so though?”). Queneau’s first novel was Le chiendent (The
Bark Tree, 1933), the story of a bank clerk who considers existential is-
sues in the everyday setting of the Paris suburbs and which introduces
the trope of blurring fantasy and mundanity that was to become char-
acteristic of Queneau’s writing in works such as Pierrot mon ami (Pier-
rot, 1942) and Loin de rueil (The Skin of Dreams, 1944), which fol-
lowed the autobiographical novels Les derniers jours (The Last Days,
1936), Odile (1937), and Un rude hiver (A Harsh Winter, 1939).
It was in his postwar writings that Queneau’s work moved closer
to postmodernist textual forms. Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style,
1947), in which the same scenario is retold in 99 different styles, is
an early example of the combinatory literature that was to be typi-
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QUIN, ANN • 273

cal of postmodernism in general and the OuLiPo group in particular.

The novels, Le dimanche de la vie (The Sunday of Life, 1952), Zazie
dans le métro, and Les fleurs bleues (The Blue Flowers, 1965) con-
tinue to focus on the extraordinary aspects of ordinary life, with the
latter utilizing fabulation in its story of a 13th-century nobleman and
a barge owner in the 20th century dreaming of each other until they
finally meet in the present. Queneau’s later works more clearly de-
velop postmodernist strategies, in the internalized form of Cent mille
milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Million Million Poems, 1961),
which turns 10 sonnets into the 100, 000, 000, 000, 000 of the title by
having each line bound separately as a single strip, and in his final
novel, the metafictional Le vol d’Icare (The Flight of Icarus, 1968),
in which various fictional authors (including Hubert Lubert, a refer-
ence to Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert from Lolita) mix
with their characters, one of whom (Icarus) has gone missing, lead-
ing Lubert to hire a private detective to find him.

QUIN, ANN (1936–1973). British writer who produced four experi-

mental novels before her death at the age of 37, and whose works
form important contributions to avant-garde literature in the United
Kingdom in the 1960s. Using similar techniques to those of the nou-
veau roman, Quin’s novels investigate and defamiliarize the fictions
of order and structure created in everyday life (for example, in Three)
and the way in which they create stereotypical forms of behavior. She
also, however, uses metafictional strategies to comment on the “fic-
tions” that are created by fiction, while her self-conscious use of in-
novative forms draws attention to the way in which modes of repre-
sentation create meaning rather than the events that are represented.
Her first novel, Berg (1964) is set in a seedy coastal town and replays
the Oedipal drama in telling the story of a son’s attempted murder of
his father. The narrative is resonant of the interiorized narrations of
the early forms of the nouveau roman, but also has disturbing, exag-
gerated and comic elements (a mutilated ventriloquist’s dummy, the
death of a budgerigar, and a chorus of tramps). Berg also has a formal
playfulness that rewrites the forms of Greek tragedy as an absurd par-
ody in which the novel’s representation of events and characters that
are both everyday and ludicrous emphasizes the purely textual nature
of tragic catharsis. The story of Three (1966) takes place after the
death of a woman (identified only as “S”) and is narrated within the
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274 • RANSMAYR, CHRISTOPH

memories of a couple as they look back over the time she spent liv-
ing with them. The narrative juxtaposes conversations and flashbacks
with the journal and tapes that “S” left behind, eschewing speech
marks, a strategy that creates indeterminacy in the narrative focus and
uncertainty as to the truth of the events as perceived by the couple.
Passages (1969) shares similarities with the works of Nathalie Sar-
raute in the use of two voices and a focus on the movement of time
as it traces an unfinished journey. The novel has two narrators and dif-
ferent narrative styles. The experiences of the female narrator (who is
searching for her lost or dead brother) are expressed in an inner nar-
ration that shifts between first and third person in order to signal her
disoriented perspective, while the male narrator expresses himself in
the form of a diary with annotations. The notes attached to the male
narration are particularly interesting because they create a complex
pattern of meaning in Passages. Not only do the notes comment on the
male narrator’s alienation from himself at the same time as they offer
a frame of reference for both narrators’ actions and desires through
their references to images of loss of control, monstrosity, and madness
in the Talmud and Greek myth, but they also interpose a mediating
structure that draws attention to both the fictions by which the narra-
tors live and the fiction that the novel is about reality rather than nar-
rated fictions. Quin’s final completed novel, Tripticks (1972), is set in
a surreal cartoonlike United States and follows the flight of a narrator
who is pursued by his “No.1 X-wife” and her new lover. Quin died be-
fore completing a further novel called The Unmapped Country.

–R–

RANSMAYR, CHRISTOPH (1954– ). Austrian novelist, playwright,

and journalist who has written in a number of different styles since
the publication of his first novel in 1984. Ransmayr is best known for
Die Letzte Welt (The Last World: A Novel with an Ovidian Repertory,
1988), but has produced two other important novels: Die Schrecken
des Eises und der Finsternis (The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, 1984)
and Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King, 1995). Each of these novels
has a different style, with Ransmayr’s first novel, The Terrors of Ice
and Darkness, taking the form of a historiographic metafiction in
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RANSMAYR, CHRISTOPH • 275

telling of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition of 1872–74 and its

contemporary reenactment. The novel ironically presents a wealth of
historical detail, using letters, the ship’s log, and diaries in order to
consider the relationship between history and fiction and to question
whether it is possible to interpret “facts” correctly. The Dog King is
a counterfactual novel that tells an alternate history in which Ger-
many is punished for its war crimes by being reduced to the condi-
tion of a medieval society without access to industrial technology.
The novel is set in the town of Moor and tells the story of three char-
acters who plan an escape from the dystopian world they find them-
selves in, making comment on the abuse of power in contemporary
society in so doing.
Ransmayr’s best-known work is The Last World, an alternate liter-
ary history that tells the story of a young Roman’s quest for Naso
(Ovid) in a town on the Black Sea. The novel reuses mythical figures
and narratives from the Metamorphoses (as well as historical figures
such as Pythagoras) by placing them into an everyday setting so that
Ovid’s Tereus becomes a village butcher, Dis becomes Thies the
grave digger, and Arachne a mute weaver, the characters only finally
metamorphosing into their fictional and mythical selves at the end of
the novel. The Last World also presents a fantastic and strange world
by reimagining the Roman Empire under Augustus and Tiberius as a
20th-century dictatorship complete with modern technological and
cultural forms such as cinema (in which films about Hector, Her-
cules, and Orpheus are shown), microphones, electricity, and news-
papers, along with a state apparatus that uses the rationalized bu-
reaucracy of modernity (the “Reason” of Rome) to control its
citizens. This imaginative trope leads to a postmodern critique of the
systems of modernity and their imposition of unjust power structures
through Ransmayr’s privileging of the strangeness and irrationality
of reality discovered outside rational systems, which he suggests is
the true significance of Ovid’s vision in the Metamorphoses. In addi-
tion to these works, Ransmayr has also published journalism and
written for the theater, including Die Unsichtbare: Tirade an drei
Stränden (The Invisible One: Tirade on Three Beaches, 2001), a play
about a theater prompter who has lost her text and who launches into
an attack on the irrelevance of the theater, a self-reflexive scenario
that denies and creates drama at the same time.
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RAWORTH, TOM (1938– ). British poet who has published more than
40 books since 1966 and whose important collections of poetry in-
clude: The Relation Ship (1966), The Big Green Day (1968), Lion
Lion (1970), Moving (1971), Act (1973), Ace (1974, rev. 1977), Writ-
ing (1982), Visible Shivers (1987), Eternal Sections (1993), and Clean
& Well-Lit (1996). Raworth’s poetry has varied in style over the years
from early chapbooks and lyric poetry through epigrams, love songs,
and sonnets, to more postmodernist forms such as found texts and
self-reflexive meditations. His poetry uses forms that share similari-
ties with the American Language Poets, including disjunctive formal
and syntactic structures in which dissonant or unconnected images are
juxtaposed, but his use of language is both more allusive and more fo-
cused on the everyday. In “These Are Not Catastrophes I Went Out of
My Way to Look For,” for example, he focuses on everyday thoughts
and moments from the perspective of sitting on the toilet while also
ironizing the poem itself through the disconnection between the
poem’s title and its content. The use of disjuncture between title and
verse is a common device in Raworth’s work and can also be found in
one of his best-known poems, “South America,” which offers discon-
nected and run-on sentences that articulate a set of thoughts and de-
scriptions, but which also resolves into a self-reflexive consideration
of art and forms of representation which it maps through the fractured
relationships between its signifiers. Similar self-reflexive devices can
be found in many of his poems, including “Horse Power” which
blends form and content in its fragmented columnar form and medita-
tions on linguistic meaning, while also developing political concerns
that can be found in many other poems, such as “Human Warmth” or
“Nothing.” In his later poetry, Raworth develops a contradictory form
that emphasizes both flow and dissonance and which leads to increas-
ingly complex verse as a result of these centripetal and centrifugal im-
pulses. In Ace, for example, the poetry adopts a columnar style in
which movement is stressed, but the lines often break apart from each
other even while they appear to be connected.

RAYUELA. See HOPSCOTCH.

RECYCLING THE PAST. Concept developed by Fredric Jameson

that refers to the sense that postmodern culture cannot produce any
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REED, ISHMAEL • 277

new cultural forms of its own as a result of the death of originality.

It thus constantly recycles cultural forms, genres, films, music, etc.
from the past such as, for example, the constant recycling of previous
styles of fashion. The recycling of the past is one of the reasons why
postmodernism is often referred to as a culture of reproduction be-
cause postmodernity simply reproduces or recirculates already exist-
ing images, texts, and products.

RÉDA, JACQUES (1929– ). French poet who has also written fiction,
but who is mainly known for his poetic and prose renderings of pres-
ence in relation to space. Réda’s works explore the search for meaning
in the fragments of modernity and his postmodern concerns can be
found in his attempts to create narratives out of ordinariness, through
which process conventional notions of meaning and value are collapsed
because of his redefinitions of significance and insignificance. Of par-
ticular interest to Réda are the Parisian suburbs through which he wan-
ders, both literally in the physical environment and as a textual flaneur,
charting location, objects, and signs in order to draw out the “astonish-
ing existence” that he finds in the world. In Recommendations aux
promeneurs (Recommendations for Strollers, 1988), Le Sens de la
marche (The Meaning of Walking, 1990), Aller aux mirabelles (Picking
Cherry Plums, 1991) and Accidents de la circulation (Accidents of Traf-
fic, 2001) he visits and records the space of contemporary culture med-
itating on authenticity and the creation of meaning out of the texts of
everyday life as he constructs his narratives. Réda also develops these
concerns in his poetry, as in the prose poems of Les Ruines de Paris (The
Ruins of Paris, 1977), although his earlier poetic works, Amen (1968),
Récitatif (1970), and La Tourne (1975), which have been collected to-
gether in a bilingual edition in Treading Lightly (2005), are more lyrical
in form and more concerned with notions of transcendence. In recent
years, Réda has also produced fiction, including L’Affaire du Ramsès III
(The Affair of Rameses III, 2004), a historical detective fiction that cre-
ates its narrative out of unsolved mysteries.

REED, ISHMAEL (1938– ). African-American writer whose fiction and

poetry are based on a principle that Reed refers to as a “scatter tech-
nique” or as “Neo-Hoodooism.” This aesthetic involves rapid jumps
from topic to topic and from scene to scene as a way of animating texts
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278 • REED, ISHMAEL

in order to prevent the narrative stasis that Reed associates with white
ideology. Reed’s early novels utilize this approach less frequently than
his later work, tending towards a metafictional perspective in which the
forms of realism are investigated though the foregrounding of textual
fictionality. The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) is a comic novel that
parodies the work of previous African-American writers such as Ralph
Ellison by turning its quest for identity into a hyperbolic shaggy-dog
story. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) is what Reed has referred
to as a “hoodoo” western which metafictionally uses the 19th-century
dime novel format, but mixes it with anachronisms in which, for exam-
ple, the Loop Garoo Kid is rescued by helicopter. The novel also skews
temporality in its narrative while there are also fantastic elements in the
use of Voodoo to combat the main villain of the piece. Reed’s technique
here is one that resonates through his work and focuses on an opposi-
tion between white and African-American cultures in terms of a binary
of rationality and irrationality, where the former creates stasis and steril-
ity in society (including power relations) and the latter transgression and
creativity. This duality generates a continual struggle by African-Amer-
ican culture to avoid having its creativity and imagination appropriated
by white society. Such a principle is also mapped at a textual level in
Reed’s works, most notably in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), one of the most
important novels in American postmodernist literature, where the oppo-
sition is between the white Wallflower Order and a cultural disease
called “Jes Grew” which causes people to ignore social constraints.
The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) has a similar narrative and
uses the main character from Mumbo Jumbo, Papa LaBas, to counter
the threat of “Louisiana Red,” a hot sauce that fosters conflict within
the African-American community. Flight to Canada (1976) has a
double narrative that is mapped through temporal disjunction, in
which the flight of black slaves in the 19th century is mapped on to
the flight of Vietnam draft dodgers to Canada in the 1960s. The Ter-
rible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989) are more overtly
satirical, presenting fantasy visions of America after the election of
an extremely right-wing president. The Terrible Twos adopts a con-
spiracy narrative with multiple strands, developing a scrapbook ap-
proach to highlight the paradox that the return to the repressive stasis
of white ideology that Reed sees in Ronald Reagan’s America creates
cultural and social fragmentation. Reckless Eyeballing (1986) is a lit-
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REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION • 279

erary satire in which conspiratorial thinking represents an alliance be-

tween white feminists and African-American women in opposition to
African-American men, and Japanese by Spring (1993) is a satire on
the failure of American economic power. Reed has also produced
several volumes of poetry, including Catechism of D Neoamerican
Hoodoo Church (1970) and Conjure (1972) which also use the scat-
tershot Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic, as well as collections of essays, in-
cluding Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978) and Airing Dirty
Laundry (1993).

RETRO-MODE. Where postmodern nostalgia can refer to both cul-

tural and textual forms, the retro-mode is specifically a textual
process in which history, or its facsimile, is evoked in film, televi-
sion, or fiction. The retro-mode operates, according to the princi-
ples Fredric Jameson identifies in the nostalgia-film, either to tex-
tualize history (as in historical novels or historiographic
metafiction) or to reproduce the past in the present by reusing old
generic forms or intertextual references. Examples of the former
version of the retro-mode include films such as the Coen Brothers’
The Hudsucker Proxy and George Lucas’ The Raiders of the Lost
Ark or novels such as Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary,
John Barth’s The Sotweed Factor, and Umberto Eco’s Baudolino.
The latter version of the retro-mode can either involve texts set in
the present (or future) which use old textual forms, such as films
like Blue Velvet and Blade Runner or a novel such as Angela
Carter’s Wise Children, or those set in the past, but which use their
historical basis to reflect on the present, such as Ishmael Reed’s
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, which replicates the form of the
cowboy dime novel within an historical setting in order to comment
on contemporary racism, or Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, which
veers between past, present, and future.

REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION. Academic journal first

published by the Dalkey Archive Press in 1981 that primarily fo-
cuses on experimental modernist or postmodernist writers. Rather
than publishing articles on a catch-all basis, each issue is themed
around one or two writers with the intentions of covering authors
whose work has not received substantial critical study elsewhere and
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280 • RICARDOU, JEAN

offering a summation of their work and ideas up to the point of the

publication. Although the journal primarily deals with the critical
study of contemporary authors, there have been issues partly given
over to writers no longer living, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
Blaise Cendrars, and Raymond Queneau while there have also been
special issues devoted to fictional pieces. The journal also tries to
keep abreast of global developments in the world of fiction with fur-
ther special issues on new Japanese, Finnish, and Danish writing.
Postmodernist writers who have received attention in the Review of
Contemporary Fiction include: Julio Cortázar, Joseph McElroy,
William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Nicholas Mosley, Italo
Calvino, Milorad Pavić, Stanley Elkin, and Angela Carter.

RICARDOU, JEAN (1932– ). French experimental writer initially as-

sociated with the nouveau roman but whose views on textuality
moved his ideas and practice closer to those of the Tel Quel group as
his works developed an aesthetic that focused on the dominance of
the linguistic sign over reality. Ricardou’s fiction is radically anti-
mimetic, adopting narcissistic intertextual strategies whereby his
texts refer either only to themselves or to other texts. For example,
several of his novels include a striptease sequence, each new exam-
ple reflecting back on the previous versions, while in one novel, Les
Lieux-dits (1969), the striptease involves the clothes being taken off
in alphabetical order, something that also suggests that the descrip-
tion has existence only as a linguistic event rather than as a represen-
tation of something in reality. Very few of Ricardou’s novels offer
any attempt to generate a relationship between language and reality,
preferring to play linguistic games that present puns and ambiguities
of meaning. These games imply that language is not only slippery in
its ability to represent reality, but also slippery within its own inter-
nal systems of meaning. La cathédrale de sons (The Cathedral of
Sounds, 1988), for example, has a different title on its spine, La
cathédrale de Sens, and offers a series of further substitutions within
the text in order to create a network of ambiguities that resonates with
the poststructuralist theory of différance: sans (without), seins
(breasts), sons (sounds), sens (meaning), as well as the town of Sens.
In the latter meanings the novel can be seen as a tribute to the power
of language because the real cathedral at Sens was only ever partially
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RIDDLEY WALKER • 281

built, whereas language can speak it fully as a sound (sons) and give
it meaning (sens).
Perhaps most typical of Ricardou’s works is La Prise de Constan-
tinople (The Taking of Constantinople, 1965), which is ostensibly
about the Fourth Crusade, but which offers very few references that
are external to the text. It also has as an alternative title La Prose de
Constantinople (The Writing of Constantinople) which suggests the
literary construction of its textual city. The novel also lacks page and
chapter numbers leaving the reader to float through its flows and
fragments of language as if they were the only reality available. Ri-
cardou is nowadays probably better known for his theories of the
novel than he is for the fiction he has produced. In the 1960s and
1970s, in books such as Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (1971)
and Nouveaux problèmes du roman (1978), he became increasingly
involved in debates on the role of language in fiction as he attempted
to shift the nouveau roman away from any referentiality whatsoever,
disdaining the hors-texte (any meaning that exists outside of the text)
in his view that a novel or story could only ever refer to itself through
the internal play of signifiers. Such ideas moved his position into
alignment with the Tel Quel group whose combination of Marxism,
semiotics, and psychoanalysis he embraced in adopting the view that
if a text was avant-garde in form, even if it had no political content
(or “content” of any kind in the traditional sense), it still had a radi-
cal political function by its very existence because it served as an af-
front or challenge to conventional bourgeois aesthetics.

RIDDLEY WALKER. Cult novel by Russell Hoban that was published

in 1980. Riddley Walker is set in a postapocalyptic world and deals
with attempts to revive scientific knowledge through the few texts
(Punch and Judy and the Eusa Story) that have been passed down to
future humanity. The narrative tells the story of the eponymous hero
as he travels around a regenerating countryside (the English county
of Kent) whose continued disfigurement by apocalypse, however, is
signaled in the debasement of place names (Cambry for Canterbury,
Horny Boy for Herne Bay, Widder’s Bell for Whitstable), a textual
device that Hoban uses in order to highlight the ways in which disas-
ter becomes inscribed on the landscape. The novel is written in an ex-
perimental form using a degenerated language that naturalizes the
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282 • RÍOS, JULIÁN

text within its setting (and which suggests that it is more modernist
than postmodernist), but which also enacts the impossibility of un-
derstanding what has been lost. The people of Riddley Walker have a
ritualized culture that attempts to articulate the sublime and ineffable
qualities of scientific knowledge (such as the Eusa myth and the rep-
resentation of the splitting of the atom in the form of the “Littl Shyn-
ing Man”), but the debased language displays its own inability to
come to terms with the mysteries with which it seeks to engage.

RÍOS, JULIÁN (1941– ). Spanish writer whose novels celebrate liter-

ature and language by presenting self-reflexive and intertextual
works that revel in their nonreferential status. After two early books,
Solo a dos voces (Solo for Two Voices, 1973) and Teatro de signos
(Theater of Signs, 1974), that were cowritten with Octavio Paz, Ríos
set to work on the “Larva” series, a postmodern experiment with
form and language whose first volume, Larva: Babel de una noche
de San Juan (Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel, 1983), has been ad-
mired by writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and
Severo Sarduy for its innovative reimagination of the Spanish lan-
guage. Larva is a novel that draws its inspiration from James Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake and uses language in its variety of forms to create
and derange “reality.” The plot, such as it is, involves two figures
who think they are characters called Milalias and Babelle taking on
the roles of Don Juan and Sleeping Beauty at a masquerade party in
London, but it is the “masks” or “doubles” that language takes on, in
the transformations embedded in puns, neologisms, intertextual al-
lusions (recorded in an index of names) and polylingual references,
that form the main narrative of the book. The novel also has an ac-
companying narrative in the notes presented by the “echommenta-
tor,” Herr Narrator (who adds references and puns that double those
in the text), which are also supplemented by further “Pillow Notes,”
written by Babelle and “translated” by Milalias, with a map and pho-
tographs of the area in London where the “events” occur.
Poundemónium: homenaje a Ezra Pound (Poundemonium, 1986)
has the same form, offering a main text, notes, and supplementary
stories expanding on details in the narrative, and once more includes
Milalias and Babelle, along with their mentor, X. Reis, who takes on
the role of Herr Narrator. The novel concerns a trip to London to pay
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ROBBE-GRILLET, ALAIN • 283

“Homage to Ezra Pound” which it develops through numerous tex-

tual references to Pound along with a jumbled pastiche of modernist
writing. Amores que atan (Loves That Bind, 1995) has a more struc-
tured form created through its focus on a narrator called Emil who
addresses 26 letters to the woman he loves in which he details his
previous love affairs. These letters are organized alphabetically by
the first name of the addressee, each of whom resembles a figure
from literature, such as Bonadea from Robert Musil’s Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), Celia from Samuel
Beckett’s Murphy, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Marcel Proust’s Al-
bertine, Raymond Queneau’s Zazie, and Joyce’s Molly Bloom, with
the letters taking on the pastiche forms of the novels that provide
Emil with his textual lovers. In Monstruario (Monstuary, 1999) Ríos
returns to the intertextual and punning inventiveness of his earlier
works in recounting the escapades of a painter called Victor Mons
and his encounters with a range of characters involved in the worlds
of art and literature. The novel draws on images of monstrosity and
devilry to create its fictional world, meditating on the derangements
and impossibilities allowable in fiction. Ríos has also written what he
calls a “meta-novel” about Joyce, Casa Ulises (Ulysses House, 2003)
and is working on the final volume of the “Larva” series, Auto de
Fénix (Auto-da-Phoenix).

ROBBE-GRILLET, ALAIN (1922– ). Major French novelist, film-

maker, and theorist of the nouveau roman, elected to the Académie
française in 2004, whose works have dominated experimental writ-
ing in France from the 1950s to the present. Robbe-Grillet’s fictions
are disorienting and skewed narrative excursions whose complex and
contradictory temporal structures, in which time and space often
change within the course of a sentence (with characters suddenly
shifting from the present to the narrative past or future) and in which
events are recycled, repeated, and varied in different contexts, ques-
tion the relationship of textual representation to external reality. His
works are primarily late-modernist in form, dispensing with charac-
ter, plot, and a stable point of view, even while fashioning a parodic
facsimile of such conventions (in the ironized use of tropes such as
mystery or suspense), in order to create internally self-referential fic-
tions that generate a reality of their own. This tendency leads to the
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284 • ROBBE-GRILLET, ALAIN

development of aesthetic strategies more in alignment with postmod-

ernist literature as Robbe-Grillet’s works begin to focus on an inves-
tigation of the fictionality of the text itself toward the end of the
1960s. The trajectory of Robbe-Grillet’s fiction can be seen to move
from a consideration of the “impossibility of reality” in his early
works, in which the narration uses exaggerated forms of realism to
suggest that reality is impossible to grasp, to the “impossibility of fic-
tion” itself in later works, in which the narrative moves through a se-
ries of repetitions, bifurcations, and jump-cut distortions to question
the ability of fiction to produce meaning even within its own self-
reflexive systems.
Robbe-Grillet’s first novel, Un Régicide (A Regicide), remained
unpublished until 1978 and his first published work was Les Gommes
(The Erasers, 1953), a novel that takes the form of a detective story
in which the detective’s uncertainty over the status of reality and nar-
rative events leads him to commit the crime he is investigating. The
novel thus initiates the motif of skewed cause and effect linearity that
was to become a key element in Robbe-Grillet’s fiction. Le Voyeur
(The Voyeur, 1955) develops textual uncertainty in relation to setting
with a narrator traveling to an island where he spent his childhood
(but which he does not remember) and conjuring it into life as a cog-
nitive construction as he moves around it. Although such a premise
can be seen as a metaphor for the creation of fiction, the novel also
naturalizes itself as a “reality effect” through its suggestion that real-
ity is created through sense perception. This latter concern is also
dealt with in La Jalousie (Jealousy, 1957) whose impossible narra-
tion is probably the most typical example of the early nouveau roman
style. Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959) ostensibly tells the
story of a soldier arriving in a town after a battle in order to deliver a
box (with unknown contents) to someone whose whereabouts he
does not precisely know. The narrative resolves into permutations of
a series of settings or phenomena, including a lamppost, footprints in
the snow, a meeting with a boy, a room with a picture, the picture it-
self, and a café scene. The novel creates a labyrinth for its protago-
nist but it is unclear whether the labyrinth is the town or the fiction
that the soldier inhabits.
In the Labyrinth was written during the period when Robbe-Grillet
was also writing essays on fictional aesthetics, collected in Pour un
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ROBBE-GRILLET, ALAIN • 285

nouveau roman (For a New Novel, 1963), and which focused on ob-
jective narration and the novel’s need to create its own significations
without recourse to external referents. La Maison de rendez-vous (The
House of Assignation, 1965) develops these ideas more thoroughly
than Robbe-Grillet’s early novels, moving his fiction toward post-
modernist internalization in the creation of a text that only has a fic-
tional reality. Its multiple points of view and the uncertain identities of
the characters focus attention on the novel’s textual reality, a process
explored more fully in Project pour une révolution à New York (Pro-
ject for a Revolution in New York, 1970). This novel is perhaps Robbe-
Grillet’s most important novel and establishes a radical self-reflexiv-
ity in which the narrative develops through the association of images:
a set of keys, a fire escape, a hand raised to a hat, the glass shards of
a broken window, an image of white tiles, phrases relating to people’s
lateness, or characters’ habitual actions (the ironing of a green silk
dress, for example, which at one point leads into a torture scene, di-
gressions on another character, and to a group of street punks on the
subway). Each shift in focus leads to a modification of the narrative,
often with a retelling of what has happened but with entirely different
events. This gives a sense of provisionality to the narrative of the
novel and its narration which shifts point of view, both externally,
from one character to another, and internally, as characters suddenly
become someone else entirely.
Topologie d’une cité fantôme (Topology of a Phantom City, 1976)
refines the strategies of Project for a Revolution in New York through
its use of a collagelike structure and its setting in an imaginary textual
reality while Souvenirs du triangle d’or (Recollections of the Golden
Triangle, 1978) highlights textual fragmentation to foreground the
way language becomes reality. Djinn (1981) returns to popular genre
fiction (the spy story) but maintains Robbe-Grillet’s focus on textual
uncertainty with a character remembering events that have not yet oc-
curred. La Reprise (Repetition, 2001) similarly uses the conventions
of the detective and spy genres in its story of a soldier trying to pre-
vent a murder in postwar Berlin, taking the form of footnoted reports
in order to create a sense of narrative objectivity which, however,
is questioned by the inclusion of a narrative double and the use of
first- and third-person narrations. Between Djinn and La Reprise
Robbe-Grillet primarily concentrated on texts he has referred to as
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286 • ROBERTS, MICHÈLE

“romanesques” (autobiographical works with the form of fiction): Le

Miroir qui revient (Ghosts in the Mirror, 1984), Angélique (Angelica,
1988), and Les derniers jours de Corinth (The Last Days of Corinth,
1994). He has also produced films as well as texts in the form of the
ciné-roman, the most famous of these being L’Année dernière à
Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), directed as a film by
Alain Resnais, and more recently C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle (It’s
Gradiva That Calls You, 2002) which combines romance and mystery
to provoke intrigue while also offering an interpretative commentary
on its own textual conventions.

ROBERTS, MICHÈLE (1949– ). British novelist and poet whose

feminist approach to writing develops concerns with ideologies of
gender. She often uses spirituality and religion in her novels and re-
works biblical stories, as in The Wild Girl (1984) and The Book of
Mrs Noah (1987), tells fictionalized versions of history, in the story
of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth in Fair Exchange
(1999), or alternates past and present, in A Piece of the Night (1978).
Collectively, these strategies offer an archaeology of gender through
which the hidden histories of femininity can be revealed. Roberts’
most experimental works are In the Red Kitchen (1990), a story about
Victorian spirituality told through multiple female voices with a con-
temporary narrative as a counterpoint, and The Looking Glass (2000),
a novel about female domesticity set in the past that uses multiple
perspectives to foreground the importance of telling stories as a way
for women to find a voice. Her best-known novel is Daughters of the
House (1992) which uses Gothic and fantasy modes to tell the story
of the impact of a family home on two cousins. Roberts’ other nov-
els include The Visitation (1983), Flesh & Blood (1994), Impossible
Saints (1997), and Reader, I Married Him (2005), while she has also
written poetry, which can be found in All the Selves I Was: New and
Selected Poems (1995).

ROCHE, MAURICE (1925–1997). French writer of fiction who came

to prominence late in life when the Tel Quel group published his first
novel Compact (which was written in the 1950s) in 1966. Roche’s
writing mixed avant-garde experimentation with a strongly politi-
cized left-wing approach that focused attention not only on social
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ROUBAUD, JACQUES • 287

concerns, but also on the ways in which representations such as fic-

tion map or challenge the ideological narratives in circulation in so-
ciety. Compact draws on images resonant of World War II in its
“story” about an old man selling his tattooed body to a Japanese doc-
tor and represents the way in which people are treated as things by
the power systems they live within. The novel has a complex discur-
sive structure that questions the idea of “story,” using multiple
voices, numerous narrative strands, and experimental typography to
develop an aesthetic practice outside of what Roche considers to be
ideological forms of representation. Circus (1972) continues Roche’s
questioning of the textual and social narratives that articulate cultural
ideology by developing a concern with forms of oppression in a col-
lage text that presents multiple perspectives and similar typographi-
cal experimentation to Compact, while CodeX (1974) deals with the
act of reading and interpretation. Roche’s subsequent texts alternated
between rigorously organized texts such as Opéra bouffe (1975) and
Maladie, mélodie (Sickness, Melody, 1980), which use the forms of
music for their structure, and fragmentary collections of writings like
the themed fictions of Mémoire (Memorial, 1976), the commentaries
on artistic representation in Camar(a)de (1981), the aphorisms of
Écritures (Writings, 1985), and the “short stories novel” Je ne vais
pas bien mais il faut que j’y aille (I’m Not Feeling Well but I Must
Go On Feeling, 1987).

ROUBAUD, JACQUES (1932– ). French poet and novelist who has

been a member of OuLiPo since 1966. Roubaud is a prolific and
learned writer whose love of books shows through in the pastiche
forms and intertextual reference of his works. His writing career be-
gan as a poet with the volume ∑ (1967), a collection of sonnets that
can be read linearly but which the reader is instructed to read ac-
cording to the moves in a game of Go. Subsequent volumes have in-
cluded: Trente et un au cube (Thirty-one in a Cube, 1973), Autobi-
ographie, chapitre dix (Autobiography, Chapter Ten, 1977), which
mixes poetry with prose, and Les animaux de tout le monde (All the
World’s Animals, 1983). After a 30-month period of writing silence
after the death of his wife in 1983, Roubaud produced a volume of
prose poems, Quelque chose noir (Something Black, 1986), a medi-
tation on his grief that shifted away from the constraints of his earlier
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288 • ROUBAUD, JACQUES

poetry, but which also developed concerns with language’s failure to

express anything but the traces of experience. La pluralité des mon-
des de Lewis (The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, 1991) develops these
themes, noting the disjuncture between expression and reality in the
line “Each time I think of you, you cease to be.” In recent years,
Roubaud’s poetry has returned to his earlier style with La forme
d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains (The
Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Hearts of People,
1999) which contains a wide variety of poetic techniques, including
children’s verse, inventories, logic poems and sonnets, and uses
Oulipian language games to direct attention to the ways in which
meaning is narcissistically created through form.
As a novelist, Roubaud has produced an equally wide variety of
works. His most important work is the multivolume Le grand in-
cendie de Londres (The Great Fire of London), the first “branch” of
which was published under the same name in 1989, although this vol-
ume is often referred to by its subtitle, Destruction, to distinguish it
from the other books in the cycle. So far, these comprise La Boucle
(The Loop, 1993), Mathématiques: récit (Mathematics: Story, 1997),
Poésie: récit (Poetry: Story, 2000), and La bibliothèque de Warburg
(The Warburg Library, 2002). The Great Fire of London is both a
work of autobiography and an experimental novel written under the
constraint of mathematical principles that generate the number of
chapters and inserts in the various volumes. Other works include the
prose trilogy made up of La Belle Hortense (Our Beautiful Heroine,
1985), L’Enlèvement d’Hortense (Hortense Is Abducted, 1987) and
L’Exil d’Hortense (Hortense in Exile, 1990). These novels are lightly
parodic in tone, presenting a pastiche of the English whodunit in a
self-conscious and retro style of writing, but they also use combina-
tory principles based on Oulipian constraints in which the mystery
becomes a textual puzzle worked out through the texts’ fictional
awareness of their structures rather than any compelling suspense
created by the narratives. These metafictional elements include, for
example, the narrator arguing with the author in La Belle Hortense
and deciding to continue the novel his own way. Roubaud has also
written a series of medieval fictions, including La princesse Hoppy
ou le conte du Labrador (The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of
Labrador, 1990), which is actually only the first part of the Fourth
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“Tale of Labrador,” an open-ended metafictional Arthurian romance

that includes mathematical puzzles, kings whose names keep on
changing, unexplained abductions, a philosophical squirrel, the ap-
pearance of the Oulilliputians, and a test to check how closely the
reader has been paying attention.

ROUSSEL, RAYMOND (1877–1933). French surrealist writer of the

modernist period whose fictional style of writing had an important
influence on the French nouveau roman and both the OuLiPo and
Tel Quel groups. Roussel produced fiction, poetry, and drama, with
his most important works being the two novels Impressions
d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa, 1910) and Locus Solus (1914).
The importance of Roussel’s work for later postmodernist writing is
the way in which he constructed his texts (set out in “How I Wrote
Certain of My Books,” 1932) utilizing puns and linguistic ambigu-
ities to generate the stories, events, and descriptions in his poetry
and prose. The narration of absurd and bizarre occurrences or de-
scriptions of strange machines, designs, and works of art occur as a
result of the combinatory possibilities of language. It is almost as if
his texts automatically write themselves once Roussel has decided
which combination of words will generate the description or narra-
tion of events. His narratives tend to have a static set-piece struc-
ture and lack a conventional plot as they narrate a series of unusual
events, scenes and mechanisms in an objective style that never
questions the credibility or reality of the phenomena being de-
scribed. The form of Roussel’s longer works differs, however, de-
pending on the overall conception he determines for each of his
texts. Impressions of Africa has some elements of plot, but it is pri-
marily based on the telling of stories and stories-within-stories. Lo-
cus Solus is the most static of Roussel’s texts, and the one that has
most resonance with the postmodernist fictional experiments of the
OuLiPo and Tel Quel group with its disconnected descriptions of
impossible objects, all of which are generated by linguistic word-
play with little or no reference to physical possibility at all.

RUSHDIE, SALMAN (1947– ). Indian writer born Ahmed Rushdie in

Mumbai (Bombay), who became a citizen of the United Kingdom
after studying in England at school and at Cambridge University.
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His writing style reflects the diverse cultural heritages at his disposal
and blends various genres including fantasy, myth, magic realism,
and oral culture with a literary matrix drawn from western, Indian,
and Islamic culture, as well as from American and Asian cinema. In
Imaginary Homelands (1991) Rushdie notes the state of between-
ness created by his position as a migrant by referring to it as a con-
dition that is “plural and partial.” His work has been both celebrated
and criticized for his embrace of a variety of forms and cultures,
with some critics praising its multiplicity while others, particularly
in India, arguing that while it adopts global perspectives it does so
at the expense of reflecting the diversity of Indian culture. In many
ways, both positions misread Rushdie as a kind of “realist” (partly
because his work directs attention toward cultural and political con-
cerns) when his fiction might be better understood in terms of its
creation of a kaleidoscopic reality that is both a textual and an alle-
gorical fabulation that foregrounds its own textuality while also re-
flecting on political concerns such as power, postcolonialism,
racism, and oppression. Thus, the polyphony of voices, genres, and
styles that can be found in his novels becomes a complex articula-
tion of both textual and cultural diversity that cannot be reduced to
either fictionality or realism.
Rushdie’s first novel was Grimus (1975), a science fiction novel
dealing with immortality that is set in a fabular reality between di-
mensions and which draws on references from western and eastern
myths to deal with epistemological and ontological issues relating to
identity. The novel has largely been ignored by readers primarily be-
cause it has been overshadowed by Rushdie’s second novel Mid-
night’s Children (1981). This work is a magic realist Epic that maps
the diversity of India and its history since independence whose title
refers to a group of children born at midnight on 15 August 1947,
when India came into existence, each of whom has a special power
within the novel and who collectively act as metaphors for both unity
and cultural fragmentation. The narrator, Saleem, originally has tele-
pathic abilities that allow him to contact the other children (later re-
placed by an enhanced sense of smell after an operation) and he be-
comes a radio that receives and transmits the variety of Indian culture
not only for the other children, but also for the reader. The novel is
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RUSHDIE, SALMAN • 291

also a narrative about genealogy, both of the family and of the nation,
that begins with Saleem’s grandfather and the 1926 Amritsar Mas-
sacre and which then traces entwined histories to consider Indo-
Pakistani relations and the rule of Indira Gandhi (who is portrayed as
an incarnation of Kali). While the novel uses a variety of styles in-
cluding magic realism, myth, and oral storytelling to map India’s size
and diversity, it also tells a story of political corruption and lost prom-
ise, albeit offering optimism when Saleem is given a son who he
hopes will change India’s future.
Rushdie’s next novel, Shame (1983) turned to Pakistan and offered
a similar mapping of family history alongside political history to
mount a critique of power, but within the framework of fable or a
fairy tale that the reader is told he or she should not take as “real.”
The novel therefore offers both a fictional and referential map of Pak-
istan that mingles fantasy and realism. Rushdie’s next novel, The Sa-
tanic Verses (1988), is arguably his most important, not only because
of the cultural impact resulting from the fatwa issued against Rushdie
by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and the responses to it, but also as a
literary and cultural work that maps the experience of migrancy in a
global culture. The novel is an Epic account, told in a number of nar-
ratives, of the “inside-outside” condition of diaspora that reflects on
both western and Asian ideologies and which has a particular concern
with postcolonial cultures and experiences in the UK and India.
After The Satanic Verses, Rushdie published Haroun and the Sea
of Stories (1990), a children’s book about storytelling, which was fol-
lowed by The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), a novel dealing with ethnic
and communal differences in India that has an historical dimension
similar to Midnight’s Children. The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999)
is an Epic alternative history focused on music that rewrites the story
of Orpheus and Eurydice within the world of rock music while also
juxtaposing Indian and global cultures and offering a defamiliarized
version of “reality” in which, for example, the British join the Amer-
icans in the Vietnam War. Fury (2001), written after Rushdie settled
in New York, also has a basis in classical mythology while his most
recent novel, Shalimar the Clown (2005), extends its historical, geo-
graphical, and cultural domain to include Kashmir, India, Pakistan,
Europe in World War II, and contemporary California.
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292 • RUSS, JOANNA

RUSS, JOANNA (1937– ). American writer of feminist science fiction

who began publishing in 1959. Russ’s works are not primarily post-
modernist in form, but use experimental devices to problematize of-
ficial or ideological versions of reality and to generate alternative
perspectives through which she can rethink possibilities for feminin-
ity and women’s identity. The Adventures of Alyx (1976), for exam-
ple, offers a set of related stories that in themselves are fragments of
a narrative, but which cumulatively build into a portrait of trans-
formed identity. The Female Man (1975) is Russ’ most famous work,
and has become a classic of feminist science fiction. It utilizes over-
lapping realities to question the determinacy of cultural notions of
truth, power, and knowledge and presents the perspectives of charac-
ters from four alternate worlds in order to demythologize the grand
narratives of contemporary society, in the process producing a set of
paralogic knowledges (through the creation of alternative narratives)
that begin to merge with each other. Russ’ fiction also offers metafic-
tional versions of science fiction conventions as, for example, in The
Two of Them (1978), but does so not as a playful act of self-conscious
fictionality, but in order to question the ideological underpinnings of
science-fictional fabulation. Russ has also produced a good deal of
short fiction which is collected in The Zanzibar Cat (1983), Extra(or-
dinary) People (1984) and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987).

–S–

SALVAYRE, LYDIE (1948– ). French novelist born to Spanish Re-

publican parents who writes politically engaged texts that use ironic
humor and parody in order to satirize the ideologies of progress and
prosperity in contemporary France and to direct attention to their
empty discourses and to the power structures and the culture of alien-
ation and inequality that they support. Salvayre’s works are generally
monologues that voice the thoughts or words of a narrator who is
alienated from society and have resonances with the works of
Thomas Bernhard; as is the case in La Vie commune (Ordinary Life,
1991), which is narrated by a character whose trivial concerns take
on the form of obsession. Other works are more politically engaged,
dealing with the everyday complicities, as in La Puissance des
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SANGUINETI, EDOARDO • 293

mouches (The Strength of Flies, 1995), a novel about a museum

guard held on a charge of murder, which deals with familial and in-
stitutional brutality, or La Compagnie des spectres (The Company of
Ghosts, 1997) and Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers
(Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Bailiffs, 1997), which form an
ironic dialogue between a woman about to be evicted and the bailiff
performing the eviction that deals with marginality and the rationali-
zations of those who perpetuate inequality in everyday life.
Salvayre’s works also deal with the importance of language in the
creation of reality as in La Médaille (The Award, 1993), a novel that
investigates the relationship between power and language in a series
of speeches in which company executives award prizes to the work-
ers, while La Conférence de Cintegabelle (The Lecture, 1999) offers
a more parodic view in its articulation of the empty clichés of lan-
guage and the rhetorical devices that replace content and meaning.
Salvayre also deals with wider cultural processes in Les Belles Âmes
(Generous Souls, 2000) which tells the story of a group of bourgeois
“reality tourists” who visit the slums of Europe in order to get in
touch with reality, but who find that they prefer the protected world
of their hotels; a comment not only on the postmodern preference for
facsimile “reality,” but also on the importance of having the wealth
to be able to afford its luxuries.

SANGUINETI, EDOARDO (1930– ). Italian poet and novelist who

helped to cofound the neoavanguardia movement Gruppo 63 and
whose work was included in the famous I novissimi collection. San-
guineti is also well known as a literary critic, having produced works
on Dante Alighieri, The Decameron, and Alberto Moravia, while he
has also served as a Communist senator in the Italian parliament rep-
resenting Genoa. Sanguineti initially adopted an intellectual avant-
garde poetics, but has gradually developed more playful forms of writ-
ing in recent years while maintaining an associative and intertextual
form overall in which he uses a variety of discourses including poetic
quotation, nonsense, and everyday language. Sanguineti’s first major
work was Laborintus (1956) and subsequent books have included:
Erotopaegnia (1960), Triperuno (Three for One, 1964), Postkarten
(Postcards, 1978), Quintine (Quintains, 1985), and Libretto (1995).
Sanguineti’s Laborintus poems are typical of his experimentalism,
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294 • SARAMAGO, JOSÉ

creating meaning out of associative juxtapositions and including quo-

tations from Dante, Ezra Pound, and the Bible. Such strategies can still
be seen in Sanguineti’s recent work, such as Libretto, which presents
similar configurations in its use of wordplay, puns, jokes, and disso-
nant juxtapositions. Sanguineti has also had works set to music by Lu-
ciano Berio, including Laborintus II (1965) and Passagio (1982), and
written libretti, including Aureliano Cattaneo’s Minotaurus, Dreaming
(2003). He also produced two anti-novels in the 1960s, Capriccio ital-
iano (Italian Caprice, 1963) and Il giuoco dell’oca (The Game of the
Goose, 1967), which rework contemporary cultural discourses.

SARAMAGO, JOSÉ (1922– ). Portuguese novelist who won the No-

bel Prize in 1998 and whose main body of writing appeared after the
end of the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Saramago’s
major works began with Manuel de pintura e calligraffia (Manual of
Painting and Calligraphy, 1976), a text dealing with art and ideals,
which was followed by Levantando do chão (Raised from the
Ground, 1980), a generational saga, and Memorial do convento
(Memories of the Convent; trans. as Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982),
which earned Saramago an international reputation. The novel is set
in 18th-century Portugal and offers a postmodern investigation of
binary oppositions such as rationality and religion and orthodoxy and
heterodoxy while also exploring histories of power structures
through the love story that takes place between Baltasar, a disabled
war veteran, and Blimunda, a visionary. In these novels Saramago
also developed his characteristic style which is based on long para-
graphs, often only one sentence long, in which alternating voices en-
gage in dialogue without identification. O ana da morte de Ricardo
Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984) is often consid-
ered to be Saramago’s most important novel and develops more ob-
viously postmodernist concerns in its story of the return to Portugal
of Ricardo Reis (one of the heteronyms of the poet Fernando Pessoa),
who is guided by the ghost of Pessoa himself. The novel presents a
consideration of art and reality and language and lies, and, in pre-
senting a heteronymic “character” as if he were a real person, plays
with notions of fiction and reality at the level of form.
In 1986 Saramago published A jangada de pedra (The Stone Raft),
a fantasy about the Iberian peninsula splitting off from Europe, which
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SARDUY, SEVERO • 295

deals with issues of national identity. A similar concern with national

identity can be found in the historiographic metafiction, Historía
do Cerco de Lisboa (The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 1989), in
which a proofreader’s addition of a word to a sentence prompts him
to rewrite the story of the 12th-century siege of Lisbon that led to the
creation of Portugal. In intertwined narratives the novel presents a
contemporary love story alongside a “fictional” version of history
that meditates on how history is as much a fiction as the rewritten
version of the siege of Lisbon, but which, despite its suggestion that
motives and causality are the ambiguous product of interpretation,
nevertheless maps the present as a necessary product of the past in all
its dissimulations and unknowable mysteries. O Evangelho Segundo
Jesus Cristo (The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, 1991) is a revi-
sionist version of the life of Christ that focuses on the creation of fic-
tions as truth and which uses real characters as fictions and fictional
characters as real. In Ensaio sobre a Ceguiero (Blindness: A Novel,
1995) Saramago returned to fantasy in a nightmarish form by telling
the story of a city whose inhabitants go blind (with one exception)
and by narrating the cruelties inflicted on people under the guise of
rationality. Todos os nomes (All the Names, 1997) offers a similar de-
construction of rational systems, with resonances of Franz Kafka, by
dealing with a search for order that leads to incomprehension and
chaos. Saramago’s most recent novels are O conto da ilha descon-
hecida (The Tale of the Unknown Island, 1998), a short fable, A cav-
erna (The Cave, 2000), which uses Plato’s allegory of the cave to in-
vestigate reality and illusion, and O homen duplicado (The Double,
2002), which explores ideas of individuality.

SARDUY, SEVERO (1937–1993). Cuban writer who became a mem-

ber of the Tel Quel group after leaving Cuba for France in 1960. Sar-
duy developed writings that were in alignment with the ideas of
structuralism and poststructuralism, particularly the theories found in
the works of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida.
Sarduy had a particular concern with the “artifice” of language, most
notably what he referred to as the “Baroque” forms of literary lan-
guage that he proposed had developed in Latin American Boom
writing of the 1960s and which he practiced in his own works. Sar-
duy argued that the various cultural discourses and languages that
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296 • SARRAUTE, NATHALIE

had come together in different ways in Latin America created a cul-

ture of constructedness that was dependent for its existence on the
complex interplay of “fictions.” In De donde son los cantantes
(From Cuba with a Song, 1967) he argues that Cuba, for example,
has been created out of three cultures (Spanish, African, and Chi-
nese), and these “three fictions,” which form three separate sections,
constitute the book he has written. Such a view suggests that there
is no authentic reality beneath the superimpositions of “fiction” (lit-
erary or cultural) because fictions constitute reality while further
implying that not only is culture fictional but also that attempts to
represent its fictions are fictions of fictions.
In From Cuba with a Song, as in other works, such principles are
addressed through the idea of transvestism which becomes a way for
Sarduy to explore several areas: the masks adopted by people and
cultures, the creation of reality out of constructed forms (which in-
clude the text’s fictional reality), and the ability to generate cultural
and linguistic transformation. The novel also uses configurations of
intertextuality in order to develop a play of fictions and discourses
that draws attention to its own artifice as language and to deconstruct
the form of the novel. Sarduy’s other texts share a similar interest in
artifice, presenting linguistic puzzles that generate texts that are
about themselves rather than the story’s “characters,” whose textual
incarnation is as nodes or clusters of language. Cobra (1972) can be
considered to be écriture, and was described by Roland Barthes, in
The Pleasure of the Text, as “a heterology of plenitude.” It displays a
concern with identity transformation which is mapped in the shifting
signifiers of the text as they generate unstable meanings that change
the nature of the text as it unfolds. Maitreya (1978) similarly deals
with metamorphosis in the story of a Cuban-Chinese cook and brings
together cultural discourses in juxtaposing two cultural “fictions” and
their discursive patterns. Other works by Sarduy include the novels,
Gestos (Gestures, 1963) and Colibrí (Hummingbird, 1982), El Cristo
de la rue Jacob (Christ on the Rue Jacob, 1987), a collection of
sketches and memories, and Escrito sobre un Cuerpo (Written on a
Body, 1989), a work of literary criticism.

SARRAUTE, NATHALIE (1900–1999). French author born in Russia

who worked as a lawyer until giving up her job to concentrate on
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SARRAUTE, NATHALIE • 297

writing after the publication of her first work, Tropismes (Tropisms,

1939; expanded, 1963), a collection of prose poems that articulate
condensations of sensations, emotions, thoughts, or unspoken coales-
cences of consciousness. Sarraute’s work is usually considered as
part the nouveau roman movement in postwar French literature and
her dissection of the minutiae of psychology certainly correspond
with the “scientific” techniques adopted by other authors of the nou-
veau roman in the textual exploration of areas not previously consid-
ered or represented in fiction. However, Sarraute’s fictions, in their
concern with inner consciousness, also resonate with the influences
of modernist literary experiments, most notably those of Virginia
Woolf, and her novels articulate the flows of consciousness focalized
from inside the characters’ minds (even where the narration is in the
third person). These flows of thought, however, are often pushed to
the limits of representation, either through the use of metaphors that
act as linguistic substitutes for feelings and ideas or through the col-
lapse of the narrative as a result of its apparent inability to represent
the thoughts or logic of people’s minds except through fragments or
repetitions, as in her final work, Ici (Here, 1995).
Although Sarraute is not a metafictional writer she is conscious
that her novels are textualizations of experience, noting in the “Fore-
word” to Tropisms that the “movements,” as she refers to her con-
densations of sensation, do not mimic real time but have a slow-
motion quality designed to amplify the present moment. Such a con-
cern with how texts can articulate experience by substitution is evi-
dent in her novels. Sarraute’s interest in the abstract patterns of con-
sciousness means that characters are either unidentified or blur
together, thus leading to an uncertainty over which character is think-
ing or speaking at any given time as, for example, in Le Planétarium
(The Planetarium, 1959), where characters remain unidentified by
name for a substantial part of the novel. Sarraute is also less inter-
ested in plot than in creating narrative movement through the devel-
opment of thoughts and feelings and the resonances, metaphors, or
memories that these loop into. Sarraute offers a nonrealist formal ap-
proach in order to capture the immediacy of sensation and thought, to
strip away the “fictions” of social convention and to expose the
“games” or “fights,” as social relations are referred to in Martereau
(1953), that constitute everyday life. Thus, in Martereau the narrative
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298 • THE SATANIC VERSES

passes through the narrator’s experience, the resonances and memo-

ries these set off, and his speculations on what other people are think-
ing. The result, however, is the creation of a fiction of experience
where the characters’ personalities are created by the movements of
the text according to the way in which the narration takes them.
Sarraute’s textual strategies became more extreme after The Plan-
etarium with the effective abandonment of all plot and character, a
strategy that also entailed the development of more self-reflexive ap-
proaches to composition in her assault on the novel in its traditional
forms. Her writing moved closer to the principles of the Tel Quel
group (although she distanced herself from their theories in the
1970s) through its articulation of the thoughts of characters as a
“pure” flow of consciousness that does not require external referents
to provide a context for their musings because the contexts that cre-
ate meaning are generated within the texts. Les Fruits d’or (The
Golden Fruits, 1963) has a number of characters who are unidentified
and no linear cause and effect plot and Entre la vie et la mort (Be-
tween Life and Death, 1968) becomes an extended narrative of “tro-
pisms” or “movements.” “Disent les imbéciles” (“Fools Say,” 1976)
has no plot and no names and offers a series of narratives that focus
on how people seem to perceive the “character” who is focalizing the
narrative at a particular point, with the speech marks in the title im-
plying that its “action” takes place only within the internalized world
of the text. The same is the case with Tu ne t’aimes pas (You Don’t
Love Yourself, 1989), a conversation between disembodied voices.

THE SATANIC VERSES. Novel by Salman Rushdie published in

1988 that deals with postcolonial experiences and migrant identities
in the United Kingdom and India, whose cultural and literary signif-
icance has been overshadowed not only by the uproar it caused, but
also by critical preference for Rushdie’s earlier more reader-friendly
novel, Midnight’s Children. The Satanic Verses has several narrative
configurations focused on the relationship between two Muslims
who have lost their faith, Saladin Chamcha and Gabriel Farishta, who
start the novel falling out of the sky after the destruction of an aircraft
and whose “fall” entails their incarnation as Shaitan (the Devil) and
the Archangel Gibreel respectively. From this premise, the novel ar-
ticulates a range of forms (realism, magic realism, fantasy, filmic
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THE SATANIC VERSES • 299

narratives, fabulation, and metafictional strategies), using Farishta’s

dreams, in which he takes on the form of the archangel, to alternate
stories dealing with ideology and religion (the Prophet Mahound and
the “Satanic Verses” alongside a contemporary retelling of the cre-
ation of a “prophet” in the form of Ayesha) with the narratives of
Chamcha and Farishta in London which reflect on the postcolonial
migrant experience and the racism of British culture under Margaret
Thatcher. In this latter narrative, the novel focuses on the stereotyp-
ing of Asians and West Indians in Britain, with one section using
magic realist devices to imagine a group of immigrants as “monsters”
in order to articulate the way in which minorities are represented in
both media and popular culture. The novel, however, challenges this
ideological view as it progresses by associating “chimeras” or
“freaks” with cultural hybridity, a condition the novel suggests is a
common experience that also describes Great Britain.
The Satanic Verses is very concerned with hybridity, an issue it also
applies to notions of reality and truth. The “dream” narratives of Far-
ishta focus on this area and were the cause of the accusations of blas-
phemy in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa which condemned
the book and called for the assassination of Rushdie. In these sections,
Farishta’s visions call into doubt the idea of the truth of God and sug-
gest that religion is constructed either out of convenience or as an ide-
ology that serves a purpose. Rushdie’s aim here is to question any ide-
ology that claims to be the truth by revealing it as a fiction, although
with a particular focus on religion, a feature that is compounded by
his authorial and metafictional intrusions into the narrative as “God”
of his own fiction to expose any arrangement of words as a con-
structed “fiction.” This postmodern approach to notions of truth and
reality, that are also mapped in the fabular elements of the novel, is
also a product of Rushdie’s account of a contemporary culture of di-
aspora in which notions of “purity” (both ethnic and religious) are
challenged by discourses of hybridity in which diversity and multi-
plicity become significant. The city of London as a focus for mi-
grancy becomes important in this respect, not only in Farishta’s fan-
tasy of “tropicalizing” or “othering” the city, but also in the many
names it takes (including Ellowen Deeowen, Vilayet, Mahagonny, Al-
phaville, Proper London, Airstrip One, and Babylondon) which sug-
gest that its status depends on cultural perspective (allowing it to be
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300 • SAUNDERS, GEORGE

simultaneously the Thatcherite dystopia of Airstrip One and Cham-

cha’s fantasy city of Ellowen Deeowen) and that it belongs and exists
meaningfully in many languages and cultures. This latter element also
suggests that it is already an “othered” city whether it knows it or not,
because it has already been turned “inside out,” as Farishta fantasizes,
by being turned “outside in” as a result of having become home to
Britain’s ex-colonial subjects.

SAUNDERS, GEORGE (1958– ). American writer who has published

a novella and three collections of short stories that primarily deal with
the postmodernization of contemporary America through their use of
fantastic, magic realist, and speculative elements. These anti-realist
tropes, such as the ghosts in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” are not
used as metafictional devices, however, because they become part of
the action rather than a way of investigating the formal status of the
text as a fiction. Through the use of fantasy, fractured perspectives,
and fictional near-future speculations, Saunders reflects on the simu-
lated state of the contemporary United States (particularly in his most
recent collection, In Persuasion Nation, 2006), and the empty sign
systems that it uses as personal and cultural forms of communication.
The latter aspect can be seen in “Bounty,” for example, a novella-
length story from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), in which the
inhabitants of a postapocalyptic America persist in communicating in
the discourses of contemporary business jargon (where male prosti-
tutes are referred to as “Personal Pleasure Associates”) while also us-
ing the language of self-esteem and personal actualization even
though these discourses are unable to represent or deal with the
Hobbesian brutality that the characters experience. The concern with
simulation is pervasive in Saunders’ work and ramshackle theme
parks (a metaphor for the shoddy fakery of America’s hyperreal cul-
ture) form the focus of several of his stories, such as the title stories
of both CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia (2000) as well
as “Bounty” from the former collection. Saunders has also written a
novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), an absur-
dist allegory about an imaginary micronation called Inner Horner.

SCHISMATRIX. Cyberpunk novel by Bruce Sterling published in

1985 that articulates a number of postmodern concerns. Schismatrix
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SCHIZOPHRENIA • 301

imagines the possible posthuman futures that seem to be made avail-

able by current scientific knowledge and ideological frameworks in
mapping the conflict between the Shapers, who base their develop-
ment and ideology on genetic engineering, and the Mechanists, who
favor cybernetic enhancement. The novel articulates a fragmented
off-planet existence (on moons, asteroids, and satellites) for the new
groups who are referred to as “clades” to highlight both the plurality
offered by posthumanism and the shifting social structures that Ster-
ling imagines in the clusters and splinters of the Schismatrix. Future
society is characterized by the death of the grand narratives and
has a radically decentered form as new groups come into existence
and displace the dialectical master narrative provided by the Shaper-
Mechanist opposition. In this respect, the novel can be seen as an
imagination of a post–Cold War society. Formally, the novel has an
extended but interrupted narrative with sudden narrative cataclysms
or “catastrophes” (based on Ilya Prigogine’s theory of complex sys-
tems) and creates a sense of fragmentation within its collage format.
The novel also utilizes the technique of addition d’effet and an un-
certain narratorial perspective to create a jump-cut narrative that
dramatizes the sudden shifts in political or cultural alignments.

SCHIZOPHRENIA. A term first used in its postmodern meanings by

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but subsequently adopted by
Fredric Jameson, to describe the typical form of identity or con-
sciousness associated with postmodernity. According to Deleuze and
Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, contemporary society “produces schizos
the same way that it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars.” The
meaning of postmodern schizophrenia is not the same as clinical
schizophrenia, not least because Deleuze and Guattari rejected ex-
isting versions of psychology. Postmodern schizophrenia is not a
pathological condition that only a few people experience but is the-
orized as a common cultural condition shared by all, at least within
nations that have an advanced consumerist economy. It is often
therefore used as a metaphor to delineate a contemporary form of
subjectivity that is both a mirror and a product of postmodern cul-
ture. Thus, in Jameson’s account, the postmodern schizophrenic
lives in a psychotic state where he or she is unable to distinguish be-
tween real and false because simulations have created a hyperreal
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302 • SCHOLES, ROBERT

culture that collapses such distinctions. The postmodern schizo-

phrenic is also unable to make meaningful connections between the
mass of signs and images on display, living a fragmented existence
among disconnected signifiers (simulations) that have no relation-
ship with reality. Contemporary culture cannot be experienced as a
totality because there are too many meaning systems (often contra-
dictory) in circulation for contemporary subjectivity to be able to as-
similate them meaningfully. Finally, the postmodern schizophrenic
cannot make connections over time because there is no sense of a re-
lationship between past, present, and future, a situation expressed
culturally by the perpetual present.

SCHOLES, ROBERT (1929– ). American academic who originated

the term fabulation in The Fabulators (1967), a book that was later
revised and reissued as Fabulation and Metafiction (1979). Scholes’
definition of fabulation focuses on the creation of “ethically con-
strained fantasy” in which texts self-consciously display an awareness
of the artifice of the fictional world that they present. For Scholes,
such fabulations are a departure from naturalistic convention, but re-
main “reality effects” because they are used to more accurately render
the cognitive experiences of reality. Subsequent accounts of fabula-
tion have modified this view by foregrounding artifice at the expense
of Scholes’ sense of fabulation as a version of realism. Scholes is also
known for his work on narrative theory, with The Nature of Narrative
(1966) providing an account that is paradigmatic of American ap-
proaches to narratology.

SE UNA NOTTE D’INVERNO UN VIAGGIATORE. See IF ON A

WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. An important aspect of postmodernist

metafiction is the way in which texts self-consciously draw attention
to their constructed or unreal qualities. Self-consciousness describes
the “knowingness” of a text and is expressed in the strategies it
adopts to break the frame of the illusion that the text exists as a “life-
like” representation of an external reality. The main way that a text
does this is to focus on the lack of verisimilitude in any text by fore-
grounding the fictional constructions of narrative, language, or tex-
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tual convention that have gone into its production. Self-conscious-

ness as a device displays the text’s awareness that it is a fiction and
leads to the expectation that the reader or audience will treat it in such
a way, often by inviting them to adopt the same kind of “knowing-
ness” about what they are consuming. One of the most famous ex-
amples of self-consciousness in postmodernist literature occurs in a
story by John Barth called “Title” (from Lost in the Funhouse) in
the sentence: “Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness.” In mak-
ing visible the “invisible” conventions of written language, through
the inclusion of punctuation in lexical form, Barth not only draws at-
tention to the fictionality of the text in which this sentence appears,
but also enunciates a self-conscious comment on self-consciousness
that in its negation of self-consciousness also sustains it in an end-
lessly self-conscious loop of affirmation and denial.
Such strategies have the effect of both ironically distancing the
writer from the conventions of fiction (while also showing their
awareness of the artificiality of literary forms) and expressing the im-
possibility of avoiding these very constructions. There is also an ev-
ident pleasure in both the artifice of the text and in the knowingness
with which it is undermined so that, although self-consciousness de-
mystifies the “reality effects” of literature, it is primarily a literary
game whose main purpose is the expression of a knowing self-
consciousness. Because self-consciousness is characterized by an
empty ironic stance—that is ultimately more about its own playful-
ness than anything else—it has often been seen as a key element in
the dissolution of meaning in postmodernist texts and the epitome of
the way postmodernism turns writing into a depoliticized and trivial
exercise in self-absorption.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY. A textual strategy that is similar to narcissism

and which is also referred to as “self-referentiality.” Self-reflexivity
is an important process in late-modernist and postmodernist texts
and designates the way in which a text reflects itself as opposed to re-
flecting an external reality. Although historically there have been
many exceptions to the view that a text is a mirror held up to reflect
the reality of the world, this position was quite central in literary aes-
thetics until the period of modernism and in literary criticism until the
1950s. The development of modernism in the arts and semiotics and
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304 • SHIRLEY, JOHN

poststructuralism in literary theory led to alternative viewpoints in

which literary texts were considered in terms of their language use
rather than their referentiality. Although some modernist texts inter-
nally reflect on themselves, it can be argued that self-reflexivity is
one of the defining features of postmodernist literature, although this
does not necessarily mean that all postmodernist texts partake of the
radical interiority of surfiction or metafiction. Nevertheless, most
postmodernist texts display some element of self-reflexivity, even if
they merely ironize their relationship to what they represent. A vari-
ety of techniques can be used to produce self-reflexivity, whether it
is the pastiche reuse of old forms and genres, ironic mimesis, fabu-
lations that reflect on the fictionality of both text and world, magic
realist use of impossible realities, intertextual reference to other
texts, or exaggerated linguistic narcissism.

SHIRLEY, JOHN (1953– ). American writer who was initially part of

the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s before being associated with
the avant-pop movement in the early 1990s. Shirley’s fiction has
adopted different styles and forms throughout his writing career, in-
cluding science fiction, postnoir, and, more recently, horror fiction.
His A Song Called Youth trilogy (Eclipse, 1985; Eclipse Penumbra,
1988; Eclipse Corona, 1990) became a classic within the cyberpunk
movement for its articulation of the subcultural aspects of the move-
ment in the representation of a “punk” aesthetic involving rebels in
leather jackets and mirrorshades fighting against a repressive military-
industrial complex. New Noir (1993), a collection of short stories, is
Shirley’s most interesting piece of work with regard to postmod-
ernism. The stories combine an avant-pop aesthetic with a postnoir vi-
sion of a fractured, corrupt, and violent society dominated by simula-
tions. The story “Jody and Annie on TV” is an accomplished story
about the postmodern waning of affect, in which the main characters
are only able to achieve sexual satisfaction during news reports about
the crimes that they have committed. The story ends with the police
surrounding the house and Jody and Annie taking pleasure in watch-
ing themselves being watched on television, an image that aptly ex-
presses the involuted mirrors of postmodern simulation. Shirley’s re-
cent fiction has become less interesting over the course of time and
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SILLIMAN, RON • 305

has increasingly turned to the mining of different genres in order to

avoid repetition of ideas.

SILLIMAN, RON (1946– ). American Language Poet whose work is

particularly concerned with the articulation of language within social
and historical contexts. Silliman’s work is informed by a left-wing
political perspective and in both his poetics and his poetry he mounts
an assault on conventional forms of meaning by exploring the syn-
tactic and signifying forms of language. Like other Language Poets
Silliman’s work focuses on the ways in which language generates
meaning through its arrangements within texts rather than as a result
of preexisting referential structures, but his primary interest is in the
ways in which the construction of meaning occurs within the form of
the sentence. His first collection of poetry, Crow (1971), displays the
influence of William Carlos Williams and was followed by Mohawk
(1973), a work composed according to a structure derived from play-
ing cards. There then followed a series of book-length prose poems,
Ketjak (1978), which uses structures of repetition and variation based
on the musical forms used by the composer Steve Reich, Sitting Up,
Standing, Taking Steps (1978) and Tjanting (1981), which uses the
Fibonacci number system to determine the number of sentences in
each paragraph and which has similarities to the combinatory liter-
ature of the OuLiPo group. In this period, Silliman also developed
collaborations with other Language Poets which led to the publica-
tion of an anthology of its poetry edited by Silliman, In the American
Tree, in 1986. Silliman also produced his most important work at this
time, The Age of Huts (1986), which was followed by other works
such as: Manifest (1990), N/O (1994), and Xing (1996)
It was also during the 1980s, in The New Sentence (1987), that Sil-
liman developed a poetics based on a theorization of the sentence.
Here, Silliman applied Marxist theory to structures of syntax to pres-
ent an assault on what he perceived as the capitalist mode of referen-
tiality in which the sentence creates ideological fictions of continuity.
In response, he offers a form of the sentence that is related to the para-
graph or total work in which the sentence becomes a unit of quantity
(not a mode of arranging logic) based on polysemy or ambiguity that
is arranged as a fragment within a totality organized either by the
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306 • SIMON, CLAUDE

paragraph or the work as a whole. Such principles lead to a sense of

the word as a construct that is always in transition within his poetry
and which is shaped by the disjunctures both within sentences and
between them. For example, Silliman’s use of disjunctive sentences
that reformulate the function of words as grammatical devices can
be seen in these lines from “Rhizome”: “Meaning is a this/ The per-
sonal in universe of the really.” Here, words are presented according
to context and not because they find a “natural” place in the sentence
as derived from their referential meanings. Such organizations of
words also draw attention to the ideological and cultural forces that
shape discourses and lead to an emphasis on the way in which codes
of meaning create reality through their encoding of it. Explorations
of these issues can be found in “Invasion of the Stalinoids” and The
Chinese Notebook (both also from The Age of Huts) with the latter
developing aphoristic meditations on both its own form as a “poem”
and its use of language, particularly with regard to the relationship
between production, text, and context and the way in which syntax
organizes reality.

SIMON, CLAUDE (1913–2005). French novelist born in Madagascar

who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985. Although
Simon’s writing has often been associated with the nouveau roman
because of its experimentation with textual reflexivity and fictional-
ity, his novels also frequently have a referential concern with history
and autobiography. Of particular importance in this respect are Si-
mon’s experiences fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil
War and for the French army during the 1940 defeat of France, with
autobiography often appearing in his texts framed and mediated by
narrative and historical contexts. Simon’s novels generally tend to ar-
ticulate multivocal narratives that either present events from different
perspectives or offer several narrative lines that are intercut or blur
together. The narratives are often motivated by reference to visual
texts which operate both through the mapping of cinematic cuts and
edits within the written medium and through the use of visual images
to generate events and narrative movement. These occur in the form,
for example, of postcards, posters, and most famously, a painting that
moves from a sketch to narrative “life” at the beginning of Les
Géorgiques (The Georgics, 1981). Simon’s novels can perhaps be
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SIMON, CLAUDE • 307

best understood, however, as experiments in pure narrative and pure

temporality, articulating history and story as processes of transfor-
mation in which events are both accumulated and erased, often by
transferring across several narratives or perspectives within a few
sentences to create a sense of constant movement within his works.
Simon’s early novels, from Le Tricheur (The Cheat, 1945) to Le
Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1954) were quite conven-
tional in form, but with Le Vent (The Wind, 1957), he began to ex-
periment with both textual perspective and the narrative construction
of reality, which he developed in relation to history in L’Herbe (The
Grass, 1958) where visual representation also became an important
element within his novels. Concerns with consciousness, history, and
the narration of stories is developed in La Route des Flandres (The
Flanders Road, 1960), which concerns the French retreat in 1940 and
shifts between first and third person in its reconstitution of events,
and in Le Palace (The Palace, 1962), which involves a Republican’s
return to a Spanish city after the civil war. The double meaning of the
title of Histoire (Histoire, 1967) indicates its more apparent concern
with story and history as it follows a day in the life of the narrator
who discovers a mass of postcards from his family and pieces to-
gether stories and memories that seem to write a history of Europe
and its colonial past. History does not resolve into a unity for the nar-
rator, however, and the narrative dissolves into fragments in order to
imply that stories simply accumulate around people without creating
any meaningful totality. La Bataille de Pharsale (The Battle of
Pharsalus, 1969) presents a similar concern with the recoverability
of the past by presenting several narratives, dealing with war in gen-
eral and the Battle of Pharsalus in particular, that create a self-
reflexive set of histories rather than reference to “real” history.
Simon’s next works developed a fully internalized textual logic as,
for example, in Les Corps conducteurs (Conducting Bodies, 1971)
which is a collage about a journey to the United States that develops
out of textualizations of found texts. This logic becomes more overt
in Triptyque (Triptych, 1973) in the creation of three narratives that
run across each other from sentence to sentence and through various
embedded fictions portraying scenes from film, a novel (which is be-
ing read during the shooting of a scene from a film), or posters. The
different stories melt into each other, spiral off alternatives, and move
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308 • SIMULATION

through different forms of representation so that characters from the

“objective” narrative reality of the novel enter or leave the reality of
embedded fictions, the result of which is the loss of any clear sense
of where the novel’s fictional reality is located. The Georgics, pub-
lished in 1981, is probably Simon’s most important achievement and
returns to concerns with history while retaining the blurred narrative
focalization of Triptych. The novel has three narratives dealing with
war that are set in the Napoleonic era (a materialist account through
the eyes of a general), the 1940 Battle of France (a more autobio-
graphical account based on impressions), and the Spanish Civil War
(an intertextual account focalized through an English volunteer re-
ferred to as “O” who resembles George Orwell), and creates a vision
of war that is both a unity and a set of fragments. Simon’s final works
were L’Acacia (The Acacia Tree, 1989), Le Jardin des Plantes (The
Jardin des Plantes, 1997), which experiments with self-contained
blocks of text, and Le Tramway (The Trolley, 2001), which presented
an autobiographical narrative.

SIMULATION. Theorized by Jean Baudrillard, simulation (also re-

ferred to as the simulacrum) is a much contested concept, but it is
also arguably the most important feature of postmodern culture.
Simulation refers to the view that contemporary culture exists only
as a world of images or copies created by media and film culture
where nothing is original or new because everything is a copy of
something else. These copies, however, are not copies of “reality”
because, according to Baudrillard, “reality” disappeared a long time
ago. The simulation is a copy without an original (a copy of a copy)
because there is no reference in “reality” to which it corresponds.
For example, in film, when someone looks through a pair of binoc-
ulars, the image on screen shows two interlocking circles even
though an actual pair of binoculars produces one circle created by
the focal alignment of two lenses. The former image, however, has
become the universally accepted sign of “someone looking through
a pair of binoculars,” to the extent that a person who has never used
a pair of binoculars might believe that this is how the world appears
when viewed through a real pair of binoculars. It is this aspect that
characterizes Baudrillard’s theory of simulation: the death of real-
ity in the face of simulation.
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SIMULATION • 309

Baudrillard argues that the simulation affects all areas of contem-

porary culture, not just the domain of a distant world of images on
television or in the cinema. All aspects of contemporary behavior
have been generated by a relationship to images, whether this is peo-
ple learning how to kiss based on what they have seen on film, buy-
ing products as a result of the images they attach to a commodity, in-
habiting themed houses (which create an idealized facsimile of, for
example, Tudor or Spanish-Colonial architecture with all mod cons
included), or visiting themed shops, bars, and restaurants where the
“experience” is designed to evoke a sense of “Italianness” or “me-
dievalness,” for example, by using any image or object associated
with these ideas in contemporary popular culture. The simulation
even enters consciousness because, in Baudrillard’s view, the “real-
ity” of the world is judged by how far it corresponds with manufac-
tured simulations. Effectively, the simulation creates a fantasy real-
ity (hyperreality) where images have entered everyday life because
the “fake” is preferred to the “real.” Simulation, in Baudrillard’s ac-
count, therefore denotes a wider cultural psychosis in which it is no
longer possible to distinguish between “fake” and “real,” with the
result that neither are meaningful terms any more. The “real” has
disappeared and contemporary culture is constructed by facsimiles
of “reality” as people think it exists, a circular logic that confirms
the simulation’s “reality” because the simulation looks the way that
people think “reality” looks.
In Baudrillard’s theory, simulations are not, however, deliberate
distortions of the “real.” They are images that have become accepted
as “reality” because (as with the example of the binoculars) they have
been circulated so often that their “reality” is taken for granted. Sim-
ulations can therefore often be inadvertent. For example, in films set
in the past, characters have perfectly straight white teeth simply be-
cause the contemporary actors who play them have access to modern
orthodontic techniques. Similarly, for Baudrillard, simulations that
have an ideological element are more about narrative or simulational
convention than they are about imposing a political viewpoint on
people. In this way of thinking, the use of contemporary western lib-
eral values or clichés of the maverick anti-hero in films and on tele-
vision, for example, are simply narrative conventions to identify
someone as “good” and have no meaning beyond their narrative
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310 • SINCLAIR, IAIN

function. It is on this aspect of his theory of simulation, however, that

Baudrillard has been strongly criticized by many academics who ar-
gue that the use of ideological representations (for example, western
liberal values) in films or on television is not empty of meaning. In-
stead, these representations involve not only an articulation of an ide-
ological view that audiences are meant to find “right and proper,” but
also entail the exclusion of alternative ideas that are either dismissed
because of their absence or consciously represented in the simulation
as negative signs. The simulation is not the empty internalized sign-
system that Baudrillard proposes, therefore, but a means by which
cultural values, politics, and ideas are created and reinforced.

SINCLAIR, IAIN (1943– ). British poet and novelist who takes London
as the main subject and territory of his writing. Sinclair initially pro-
duced verse in Black Garden Poems (1970), which was followed by
Muscat’s Würm (1972), Birth Rug (1973), and his two most important
collections, Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979). Sinclair’s po-
etry is influenced by a variety of sources, with concerns drawn from
William Blake and forms based on Beat literature and the “open field”
aesthetics of projective verse that was theorized by Charles Olson
and developed by the Black Mountain Poets. Many of his poems
combine narrative forms of expression with a poetic style focused on
disjunctive images, a process that is developed structurally in Lud
Heat and Suicide Bridge in order to create a mythic story about Lon-
don. In these works, Sinclair focuses on the multiplicity of alternative
cultural economies that London has generated (including the criminal
underworld and the occult) in opposition to official histories by using
disparate meditations, considerations of history, fragmented narra-
tives, and a web of references that includes William Blake, T.S. Eliot,
the filmmaker Nicolas Roeg, and Howard Hughes. The texts adopt a
mythic and poetic approach to the creation of knowledge by privileg-
ing mysticism over rationality and reinventing poetic form to incor-
porate other types of imaginative creativity, such as the line drawings,
prints, and photographs that appear in Lud Heat.
Sinclair’s first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987),
takes the form of a literary thriller that combines fantasy with realism
in drawing together the search for a book in the present with imagin-
ings of the Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper in the past. Downriver
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SOLLERS, PHILIPPE • 311

(1991), Sinclair’s most important novel so far, is a demythologization

of the Great Britain created by Margaret Thatcher (“The Widow”).
The novel has an episodic form and follows the narrator as he chron-
icles 12 interlinked journeys around a grotesque fantasy version of
London. In each of the different sections, Sinclair blurs fact with fic-
tion and offers an archaeology of specific areas of London in order to
understand contemporary society in relation to the past. The overall
effect of these strategies, along with the text’s digressions and inter-
textual references, is to create a novel that is fractured both as a to-
tality and within its individual episodes, a combination of elements
that Sinclair configures in order to map a culture of disconnection.
After Radon’s Daughter (1994), which continues the mapping of a
Gothic fictional world, Sinclair edited an anthology of experimental
British poetry, Conductors of Chaos (1996), and published another
collection of his own poetry in The Ebbing of the Kraft (1997). Dur-
ing this period Sinclair increasingly turned to filmmaking and non-
fictional work, including London Orbital in 2002, but he has recently
produced the novels, Landor’s Tower (2001), which is set in the
Welsh borders, and Dining on Stones (2004), a “collection” of three
works by the fictional author, Andrew Norton.

SOLLERS, PHILIPPE (1936– ). French novelist and theorist of

avant-garde anti-mimetic and semiotic approaches to literature (born
Philippe Joyaux) who has gone through many different styles of writ-
ing during his career, but who is still primarily associated with the Tel
Quel group and the development of the nonreferential form of writ-
ing called écriture. Sollers produced two early works, Le Défi (The
Challenge, 1957) and Une Curieuse solitude (A Strange Solitude,
1958), that displayed the influence of surrealism, but his founding of
the journal Tel Quel in 1960 signaled a radical change of direction
that led him to reject referential forms of writing and to propagate the
creation of “pure writing,” of which écriture was to become the dom-
inant form. His first novel in this style was Le Parc (The Park, 1961)
which investigates the diverse relationships between everyday life,
experiences of time, the imagination, and the mediating process of
the act of writing in its composition of each of the former elements.
Through a series of narrative disjunctions the text shifts focus
abruptly from various focalizing points to include a repeated
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312 • SORRENTINO, GILBERT

striptease, observations of street life, childhood memories, and

imagined scenarios such as a dead body in a forest, scenes of war,
historical fantasy, and science-fictional possibilities. Through these
textual movements Sollers blurs the difference between reality and
the fiction-making process to elaborate ways in which the real be-
comes fiction and fiction becomes real in its composition as the
words of the text. Drame (Event, 1965) continues this focus on the
act of writing, alternating between two points of view (“he” and
“I”) and two settings (a city by the sea and a library) and using char-
acters from another book.
In 1968 Sollers produced two books that summed up his aesthetic
project. In the essays of Logiques (Logics) he presented his theories
of écriture and in the novel Nombres (Numbers) he created a text out
of a rigorous formal structure comprising 25 sections of four se-
quences that, with its accompanying diagrams and intertextual allu-
sions, focused attention on the materiality of the writing rather than
on its content. After Lois (Laws, 1972), a humorous novel full of ne-
ologisms and slang, Sollers published H (1973), a novel without
punctuation or paragraphs that is full of puns and wordplay. The text
generates a flow of language that foregrounds the polyvalency of tex-
tual meanings, something that is symbolized by the ambiguity of
what the “H” of the title represents. Paradis (1981) and Paradis II
(1986) continued in the same vein while also extending the intertex-
tual practices of Nombres. Between the two volumes of Paradis
Sollers also produced fiction in a more realist vein, including Femmes
(Women, 1983) which began a shift to more conventional forms of
character and plot-driven writing that continues to the present. In
novels such as Le Cœur absolu (The Absolute Heart, 1987), Le Lys
d’or (The Gilded Lily, 1989), and L’Étoile des amants (The Lover’s
Star, 2002), Sollers has continued to use language games and inter-
textual patterns of allusion, but has developed story-based investiga-
tions of culture and relationships with mythic and erotic themes.

SORRENTINO, GILBERT (1929–2006). American writer of

metafictional novels who was associated with the surfiction move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s. His first novel The Sky Changes was
published in 1966 and was followed by Steelwork (1970), a novel set
in 1950s Brooklyn, after which Sorrentino developed a more experi-
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SORRENTINO, GILBERT • 313

mental style. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) is a self-

conscious novel about a group of New York intellectuals in the 1950s
and 1960s that also satirizes their artistic world, while Splendide-
Hôtel (1973) offers a meditation on language using the alphabet as a
structuring device, with each chapter presenting thoughts and ideas
on a particular letter. These two works were succeeded by Sor-
rentino’s major work, the encyclopedic novel Mulligan Stew (1979),
which charts the attempts by the fictional author Antony Lamont (a
figure taken from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds) to write an
experimental novel. Lamont loses control of his text and his charac-
ters begin to “live” lives of their own outside of the novel. Alongside
this narrative is a pastiche “stew” that questions the novel as a form
of writing by presenting a superabundance of literary forms and sub-
plots which displace the main narrative. These include scrapbooks of
advertisements, letters and notebooks, fragments of Lamont’s other
novels, other people’s writings (the poems of Lorna Flambeaux and
a play called Flawless Play Restored), publishers’ catalogs, a mathe-
matical treatise, interviews with other writers, and various lists.
Sorrentino’s later works continued to problematize the form of the
novel. Aberration of Starlight (1980) is a novel set in a New Jersey
boardinghouse that uses different styles to weave a complex narrative
out of a series of vignettes that tell the same story from different per-
spectives. Blue Pastoral (1983) is less extreme, presenting a series of
puns, parodies, and popular cultural clichés, but the Pack of Lies tril-
ogy, containing Odd Number (1985), Rose Theatre (1987), and Mis-
terioso (1989), uses its form to push verisimilitude to the limits. The
trilogy focuses on the indeterminacy of empirical reality through its
accumulation of information and its rereadings of what has already
been revealed. This leads to the encyclopedic review of the final
novel which, however, only produces more ambiguity and uncer-
tainty. Sorrentino has produced a further five novels, the most inter-
esting of which are Gold Fools (2001), a parody of boy’s adventure
stories, and Lunar Follies (2005), which presents fictional reviews of
imaginary galleries, museums, and art exhibitions. He has also pro-
duced a collection of essays, Something Said (1984; rev. edn., 2001),
which focuses on 20th-century experimental writing, and a number
of collections of prose and poetry, including The Orangery (1978),
Under the Shadow (1991), and The Moon in Its Flight (2004).
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314 • SPICER, JACK

SPICER, JACK (1925–1965). American poet born in Los Angeles

who lived in San Francisco for most of his writing life. He was part
of the emerging Beat poetry movement that developed in the 1950s,
founding the Six Gallery where the West Coast Beat Movement be-
gan in 1955. Spicer’s poetry can be split into distinct phases, the
earlier Beat writing up to about 1956 and his later poetry (“poetry
as dictation”) that is more concerned with the mechanics of the po-
etic text. This poetry, which can be found in The Collected Books of
Jack Spicer (1975), is very often concerned with the sound, rhythm,
and the contexts of the words being used in the poetry, something
typical of Beat poetry, but in Spicer’s work becoming foregrounded
as part of the content of the poem as he meditates on the process by
which words are arranged into certain sequences. For Spicer, the
sound of words and their rhythm is often as important to the mean-
ing of the poem as the ideas or images signified by them. Thus,
Spicer often curtails a sentence within a poem without completing
a sentiment because the line as it stand creates a meaning through a
combination of the referents of the words, the foreshortened syntax
of the line, its context within the lines around it, and the overall
rhythm, such as the line: “The past around us is deeper than” from
“Six Poems for Poetry Chicago.”
His poetry also meditates self-referentially on language in terms
of the sounds of words and their linguistic structures, as in the fol-
lowing lines from “Phonemics”: “Your voice / consisted of sounds
that I had / To route to phonemes, then to bound / and free mor-
phemes, then to syntactic / structures.” The development of this
idea in the poem ultimately leads to the conclusion that it is the con-
texts within which the sounds of words are enunciated that creates
meaning as much as what the words signify: “A ground-rules dou-
ble. / You recognize the pattern. Try. / Hello shouted down a canyon
becomes / huhluh.” Such a concern with the enunciation of the text,
rather than with what is enunciated, locates Spicer within an exper-
imental poetics that relates to self-reflexive strains of postmod-
ernist writing. In “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises,” for ex-
ample, he considers the role of the poet in relation to the object
world that forms the content of poetry, offering the view that they
both create sounds, but problematizing whether in themselves ei-
ther has any meaning (“No one listens to poetry. The ocean / Does
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STEPHENSON, NEAL • 315

not mean to be listened to”), suggesting both a rupture and an ho-

mology between language and the world of objects.

STEAMPUNK. Retro version of cyberpunk that imagines alternate

histories in which contemporary technologies (particularly comput-
ing and biotechnology) have been discovered far earlier than in re-
ality, with steampunk novels usually setting their narratives in the
19th century. Steampunk fiction presents a mixed pastiche form of
writing that either combines a generic archaic style or a conscious
imitation of a past author, such as Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan-
Doyle, or Mary Shelley, with more contemporary genres, often from
popular culture, such as techno-thriller, horror, or neo-noir. Such
novels also offer a metafictional approach to imply that history it-
self is a fictional construct, articulating a postmodern perspective
that considers truth and reality to be provisional or artificial. The
texts of steampunk are most notable for their revision of history
within which 19th-century values are replaced by contemporary at-
titudes, implying the superiority of the latter. The nostalgia of the
novels is therefore primarily textual, focusing on the pleasures of old
novels and stories, rather than a cultural yearning for a past that is
better than the present. Steampunk, in this respect, is part of an En-
lightenment ideology that privileges social and technological
progress, although there are more postmodern elements which occur
in the rewriting of the past in order to reflect on what are perceived
as the neofeudal social structures of contemporary society. Impor-
tant steampunk texts include: Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates
(1983), The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling, and Paul di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy
(1995), while Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), al-
though set in the near future, utilizes a steampunk perspective.

STEPHENSON, NEAL (1959– ). American novelist who has so far

written eight novels in his own right and coauthored two (in con-
junction with J. Frederick George) under the name of Stephen Bury.
Stephenson was initially known as a science fiction writer and gained
acclaim with the publication of Snow Crash in 1992, a novel that acts
as a compendium of cyberpunk concerns while also focusing atten-
tion on an exaggerated near-future version of postmodern culture.
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316 • STEPHENSON, NEAL

The novel deals with the release of a supervirus into the information
networks (the Metaverse), but is more important for its vision of
America, where balkanization has fragmented the nation into
“Generica,” a culture of franchised “burbclaves” (such as Uptown,
Nova Sicilia, and New Hong Kong) and privatized services (Meta-
cops, Worldbeat, General Jim’s Defense System), and where the na-
tion state has been replaced by brands and corporations (including the
Mafia, who have recruitment points at school careers fairs). The
novel’s postmodernist elements can be seen not only in its focus on
the facsimile signs of postmodernity, but also in its mixing of codes
(comedy, apocalyptic plot, suspense, science fiction) and pastiche of
discourses, while its suggestion (through the use of Sumerian
mythology, cybernetic theories of viral codes, and meme theory) that
the fiction-making culture of postmodernity is the logical conclusion
of sign-based societies is itself a postmodern outlook.
Stephenson’s next two novels are more traditional in form. The Di-
amond Age (1995) is a science fiction novel dealing with nanotech-
nology (although it has been seen as a version of steampunk in spite
of its near-future setting) while Cryptonomicon (1999) is a suspense
novel concerning the founding of a Data Bank. Both, however, de-
velop Stephenson’s concern with language, codes, memes, and the
viral nature of information and suggest that there are patterns within
sign systems, computer programs, or memes that determine the shape
of culture, a process enacted in Cryptonomicon by a flashback narra-
tive to World War II which deals with codes that, it is suggested, have
caused contemporary events. Stephenson’s most recent project has
been The Baroque Cycle which contains Quicksilver (2003), The
Confusion (2004), and The System of the World (2004). The trilogy
explores global events and ideas from the reign of Charles II of Eng-
land and Louis the Sun King of France to the accession of the House
of Hanover to the British throne. The novels in the sequence also uti-
lize an archaic form of writing, mixing different 18th-century styles
and genres to meditate on the transformation of cultural conscious-
ness, global economics, science, and philosophy in the Age of En-
lightenment. They also mix high and popular cultural forms to artic-
ulate a postmodernist rereading of the 18th century that makes its
attitudes and ideas look increasingly like those of postmodern cul-
ture. This is primarily articulated through the privileging of G.W.
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STERLING, BRUCE • 317

Leibniz’s theory of monads over Newtonian determinism in which

monadology is reinterpreted as a theory of memes.

STERLING, BRUCE (1952– ). American writer who came to promi-

nence in the 1980s through his involvement in the development of
cyberpunk, but who has since gone on to write satires on contem-
porary postmodern culture. Sterling’s earliest novels, Involution
Ocean (1977) and The Artificial Kid (1980), were mainstream sci-
ence fiction, but his writing shifted to cyberpunk concerns while
also developing more experimental features with the publication of
Schismatrix (1985) and related stories (later included in Crystal Ex-
press, 1990; and Schismatrix Plus, 1996). He also edited the cyber-
punk collection, Mirrorshades (1986), for which he wrote the “Pref-
ace,” where he argued that cyberpunk was a product of both literary
and cultural influences, with the latter including areas that were con-
currently being theorized as postmodern such as the collapse of high
and popular culture, media culture, and the pervasion of the com-
modity. Schismatrix and Islands in the Net (1988) are where Sterling
is most obviously working within the confines of cyberpunk. The
former novel represents a posthuman future in which humanity has
split into factions while Islands in the Net is a more traditional sus-
pense novel with a conspiracy element that takes place in a frag-
mented near future where nation-states have effectively disappeared
and where communities gather either locally or virtually through the
information networks.
Sterling also helped to create the cyberpunk subgenre of steam-
punk in The Difference Engine (1990), a novel coauthored with
William Gibson that imagines an alternative version of Victorian so-
ciety where Charles Babbage initiates the information age in the
19th century and creates a retro-postmodern culture. The novel
mixes codes by combining cyberpunk with a pastiche of Charles
Dickens to dramatize a confusing hybrid culture that is both indus-
trial and postindustrial. Sterling’s postmodernist tendencies are best
expressed, however, in his global perspectives (Globalhead, 1994)
and by the sentiments expressed in the title of his short story collec-
tion, A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999). Here, and in Heavy
Weather (1994), a novel dealing with climate change, Sterling pres-
ents stories that envision a disoriented contemporary global culture
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318 • STOPPARD, TOM

where traditional structures such as the nation-state have become at-

tenuated and where culture has become a middle ground that is both
nostalgic and futuristic. The present, as a moment to be lived in, be-
comes effectively meaningless as people look forward, backward, or
both. Holy Fire (1996) encapsulates all of these tendencies in its
story of a woman who, after rejuvenation therapy, rejects her past,
memories, and identity, but who in searching for something new
finds only a vacuous culture in which there is no direction because
the arrival of the future in the present has created nothing meaning-
ful. Sterling’s recent novels, Distraction (1998) and Zeitgeist (2000)
have shifted to satirical accounts of contemporary culture by imag-
ining an exaggerated form of postmodernity in the near future.

STOPPARD, TOM (1937– ). British playwright born Tomáš Straüssler

in what is now the Czech Republic who arrived in the United King-
dom in 1946. Stoppard’s plays are highly literary works that display
their theatricality in erudite dramatic language, self-reflexive use and
parody of theatrical conventions, and self-conscious explorations of
theater space as a “stage” for performance. These postmodernist tex-
tual configurations are most obvious in Stoppard’s early plays which
deal humorously with philosophical issues, but his most recent work
has returned to questions of epistemology that resonate with post-
modern ideas after a period in which political concerns formed the
basis of his drama. Stoppard’s first works were a television play, A
Walk on the Water (1963), which that was later reworked for the the-
ater as Enter a Free Man (1968), and a novel, Lord Malquist and Mr
Moon (1966). He made his name with his best-known work, Rosen-
crantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which was first performed in
1966 before being revised for the London stage in 1967. The play
takes its inspiration from Hamlet and makes “heroes” of two “bit-
part” characters whose narrative is already “written” for them despite
their attempts to create their own narrative and break free of the play-
within-a-play (Hamlet) that has created them and whose own play-
within-a-play becomes part of their own text. Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead deals with chance and fate and questions of
acting and reality before sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
their predestined textual deaths once again.
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STOPPARD, TOM • 319

The Real Inspector Hound (1968) similarly plays with theatrical

texts by offering a pastiche of the country-house mystery as seen by
two critics who become involved in the play-within-a-play, which is
turned inside out when the “real” mystery is revealed to have devel-
oped “off-stage” among the watching critics. After Magritte (1970)
also plays with the whodunit by rewriting it as an absurdist farce
while Jumpers (1972), a play set in an alternate Great Britain, paro-
dies the murder mystery form through a focus on philosophical rela-
tivism and moral absolutes by creating a drama in which logic and
philosophy simply become empty language and acrobatic entertain-
ment and the “mystery” is revealed as an irrelevant textual device to
set the plot in motion. Travesties (1974) is Stoppard’s most metatex-
tual play and presents a farce that involves a production of Oscar
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest by James Joyce in Zurich
in 1917, as remembered by a British consular official. The drama
plays with ideas of fiction, history, and art, includes historical figures
(Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Tristan Tzara, in addition to Joyce), and
presents a range of pastiches and literary allusions to create a drama
in which all discourses (including reality and history) are reduced to
fictional “travesties.”
In the late 1970s Stoppard’s work developed a more political di-
mension and in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) and Pro-
fessional Foul (1977) he offered criticism of totalitarianism in East-
ern Europe, while in Night and Day (1978) he dealt with journalism
and colonialism. At the same time, he also began to adapt works by
other dramatists (including Arthur Schnitzler and Johann Nestroy) in
Undiscovered Country (1979) and On the Razzle (1981). The Real
Thing (1982) is a comedy of ideas that returns to concerns with writ-
ing and texts while representing a love story, after which Stoppard
developed a series of “science” plays beginning with Hapgood
(1988), an espionage thriller dealing with the politics of surveillance
that uses subatomic physics as a metaphor for the creation of reality
in the act of observation. Arcadia (1993) develops these postmodern
concerns in considering chaos theory and thermodynamics within the
frame of a number of textual mysteries including a literary mystery
relating to the poet Byron that meditates on the relationship between
past and present. The Invention of Love (1997) is a dramatic treatment
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320 • SUKENICK, RONALD

of love focused on A.E. Housman and the fracturing of identity

caused by his desire for and rejection by Moses Jackson. The Coast
of Utopia (2002) is a trilogy of plays set in Tzarist Russia, compris-
ing Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, that deals with revolution and
notions of utopia.

SUKENICK, RONALD (1932–2004). American countercultural

writer associated with surfiction in the 1960s and 1970s and with the
avant-pop movement in the 1990s who became prominent as one of
the founders of the Fiction Collective. Sukenick’s fiction is anti-
realist in form, although it is not as anti-mimetic as many critics
have argued. In a range of theoretical writings, that include essays in
Raymond Federman’s edited collection, Surfiction: Fiction Now
and Tomorrow (1975), In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction
(1985), as well as the hybrid fiction-essays in The Death of the Novel
and Other Stories (1969) and Narralogues: Truth in Fiction (2000),
Sukenick has argued that the release of fiction from the illusions and
conventions of realism (and its obsessions with plot and character) al-
low it to develop new parameters that are more “real” or “truthful.”
Although Sukenick’s texts appear to be internally self-reflexive, he
has generally used textual innovation to develop forms of writing that
avoid replicating what he perceives as the reactionary ideology of re-
alism in its support of existing power systems. His writing seeks the
death of the novel in its existing forms and the renewal of fiction
through the creation of a form that will more accurately map the con-
tradictions of society as it exists while also projecting a form that can
act as a metaphor for alternative societies that may come into exis-
tence. His first novel, Up (1968) is a more conventional metafic-
tional work that uses narcissistic devices such as a fictional author
called “Ronald Sukenick,” experiments with typography, an inserted
story called “The Adventures of Strop Banally,” and ironic comments
on the illusions of the text.
With The Death of the Novel and Other Stories Sukenick devel-
oped more obviously surfictional strategies through the combination
of fictional theory and practice. This work was followed by Out
(1973) which deals with a resistance group planning a revolutionary
act within a textual framework which defies and inverts traditional
linear narratives of cause and effect by letting narrative transforma-
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SURFICTION • 321

tion and digression run wild. The dominant metaphors of Out are the
“countdown,” as the narrative reduces the length of paragraphs from
10 lines to one (and implicitly zero when the novel ends), and “fis-
sion,” as the narrative maps the characters’ textual and cultural dis-
solution in their constant change of identity as they move through di-
verging narratives across America. A similar fragmentation is at work
in Sukenick’s next novel, 98.6 (1975), but within a more formalized
structure. In 98.6 Sukenick presents the United States (allegorized as
a country called “Frankenstein”) as a culture of domination where
neither transcendence (“up”) nor escape (“out”) is possible. Long
Talking Bad Condition Blues (1979) is an unpunctuated typographic
experiment that develops these concerns, but focuses on a group of
characters facing up to life after the failure of the counterculture.
Sukenick’s subsequent fictions tended to focus on literary parody, in
Blown Away (1986), a novel about Hollywood’s creation of an image
reality, in The Endless Short Story (1986), which involves the defa-
miliarization of narrative forms, and in Narralogues, where the form
of the essay-fiction is developed. Two later works, Doggy Bag (1994)
and Mosaic Man (1999), do return to politics and culture, most no-
tably in the former which presents a critique of the culture of “zom-
bies” created by media and commodity cultures.

SURFICTION. An experimental form of fiction theorized in the 1970s

by Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick, among others,
whose ideas on the theory of the novel were collected in a volume ed-
ited by Federman, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, in 1975.
Surfiction developed a concern with the innovation of new narrative
and formal strategies as a result of a feeling that the traditional novel
had become a clichéd form that was unable to map contemporary so-
ciety. The surfictionists, who also included Clarence Major and
William H. Gass, were part of the avant-garde tendency, alongside
John Barth and the Tel Quel authors, that announced the death of the
novel in the 1970s and which demanded an attention to the fiction-
making process and internal language play as a replacement for tex-
tual referentiality. Federman, for example, used surfictional ap-
proaches in order to create textual collages that foregrounded
typography and language as a material form. Other strategies were de-
veloped by Sukenick, who concentrated on developing new forms of
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322 • SÜSKIND, PATRICK

narrative in creating multiple and bifurcating plotlines as a way of

questioning the perceived one-dimensional linearity of the realist
novel, and by Major, who experimented with metafictional forms and
collage structures in order to develop the idea of diversity and possi-
bility. Surfiction is often included within the larger category of
parafiction, and its influence can be seen in the development of hy-
perfiction in the 1990s and early 21st century.

SÜSKIND, PATRICK (1949– ). German novelist and playwright who

changes style and genre from one work to another in charting the
alienation and waning of affect generated by postmodern culture.
Süskind first came to public attention with Der Kontrabass (The
Double Bass, 1981), a play about a musician who, as a bass player,
has no solo parts (a situation that acts as a metaphor for the death of
individuality) and who creates revenge fantasies against an indiffer-
ent world as a form of compensation. Süskind’s best-known work is
Das Parfüm (Perfume, 1985), a novel that became an international
bestseller and which tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an
18th-century serial killer whose olfactory powers lead him on a quest
for the ideal scent in which he places aesthetic above moral concerns
when he begins to kill people for their odors. The novel uses as a
metaphor Grenouille’s use of scents from the bodies of his victims to
self-reflexively meditate on postmodernist intertextual quotation
from “dead” texts while also using this trope itself in its pastiche of
other literary forms. The most significant of these is the Künstlerro-
man (Artist novel), which is used to question notions of art and value
in the novel’s suggestion that the privileging of aesthetics leads to a
postvalue culture. Die Taube (The Pigeon, 1987) also has a social
outcast as its protagonist and deals with the ways in which the rou-
tinization of everyday life and the loss of social contact in contem-
porary culture lead to a failure to face up to disruptions in the social
order. Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer (The Story of Mr Sommer,
1991) is a more playful novel written in the style of a children’s fa-
ble (with illustrations by the French artist Sempe) about a man who
can never stop moving. Süskind’s most recent publication is a reissue
of his early writings in Drei Geschichten und eine Betrachtung
(Three Stories and a Reflection, 1995).
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TABUCCHI, ANTONIO • 323

SWIFT, GRAHAM (1949– ). British writer whose novels focus on the

importance of history in contemporary society while also demon-
strating the problems of achieving either historical knowledge or a
place within history. Swift’s fiction is realist in form, but its concerns
with the problems of establishing meaning, structure, and truth give
his work a postmodernist quality. In Swift’s novels, history is a story
that his characters are a part of and their attempts to locate them-
selves within history ultimately results only in their location within
stories that are provisional or temporary. In Waterland (1983), Swift
uses the metaphor of sedimentation to suggest that history is a series
of layers made out of stories and myths about the Fens rather than a
determinate absolute truth. What is recovered in the present, there-
fore, is not “truth,” but textual versions of history, a self-reflexive
meditation that brings Swift’s fiction into alignment with historio-
graphic metafiction. Such concerns are developed in other novels
such as Shuttlecock (1981), Ever After (1992), in which different sto-
ries and periods merge and interact as stories, and The Sweet Shop
Owner (1980), where history is presented as a way of organizing
truth that is important for its symbolic function as a structure of
meaning. Last Orders (1996) offers a consideration of history in the
form of memory but also develops pastiche elements in its use of Ge-
offrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a reference point.

–T–

TABUCCHI, ANTONIO (1943– ). Italian writer who is also Professor

of Portuguese Language and Literature at Genoa University. Several
of his novels have been set in Portugal, including the political thriller
Sostiene Pereira: una testimonianza (Pereira Declares: A Testimony,
1994) and Testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro (The Missing Head
of Damasceno Monteiro, 1997), while Requiem (1991) was written
and published in Portuguese before the Italian version appeared.
Tabucchi’s novels concern the line where reality and its expression in
language meet and where phenomena seem to offer up a deeper
meaning than their appearance suggests. Tabucchi offers two possi-
bilities in this regard: firstly, that the significance displayed by the
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324 • TANNER, TONY

phenomena of reality may simply be a product of language itself

rather than the reality being observed; or, secondly, that these phe-
nomena may speak in a language that can never be understood or in-
terpreted correctly, a situation that is very similar to Ludwig Wittgen-
stein’s lions in Philosophical Investigations who, if they could talk,
would speak a language that was utterly incomprehensible to humans
because its value systems would be so alien. Filo dell’orizzonte (The
Edge of the Horizon, 1986; aka Vanishing Point) deals with this issue
and offers a postmodern perspective that not only questions whether
the world can be understood, but also mediates on whether it even has
any meaning. The novel’s detective novel format also has elements of
magic realism and uses its ambiguous apprehension of reality to cre-
ate a story that also articulates problems with understanding identity
before resolving into a detection of selfhood.
This concern with the indeterminacy of reality was foreshadowed
in Tabucchi’s earliest works, Donna di Porto Pim (Woman of Porto
Pim, 1983) and Notturno indiano (Indian Nocturne, 1984), with the
former creating the world out of fragments while also suggesting that
the “real,” once it has been discovered under its dissimulations, may
still retain an air of mystery. Such concerns are less problematic in
other works by Tabucchi, although Piccoli equivoci senza impor-
tanza (Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, 1985), a short
story collection with a fabular dimension, deals with the ambiguity of
reality and the difficulties of finding words to express it. Requiem,
however, is more content to explore the ways in which reality fades
into falsity and uses the framework of fantasy in its story of a narra-
tor waiting in a dreamlike version of Lisbon for a meeting with the
ghost of a writer (the unnamed Fernando Pessoa). The novel is a se-
ries of digressions made up of recipes, philosophical meditations,
conversations (with the living and the dead), which also includes a
discussion of postmodernism. Similarly, Sogni di sogni (Dreams of
Dreams, 1992) makes use of the freedoms provided when reality is
viewed as merely one mode of perception in order to imagine the
dreams of various historical and mythic figures, including Sigmund
Freud, Michelangelo Caravaggio, Arthur Rimbaud, and Daedalus.

TANNER, TONY (1935–1998). British academic and author of City of

Words (1971), an influential critical account of postwar American fic-
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TEL QUEL • 325

tion which studied a range of texts in terms of their linguistic and fic-
tionalizing tendencies. Although Tanner does not directly focus on the
postmodernist literary practices of writers such as Thomas Pynchon,
John Hawkes, William Burroughs, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (and, in-
deed, many of the writers he considers are not postmodernist), his the-
sis that postwar American writers are all engaged in constructing
America out of language foregrounded the self-conscious and fabu-
lational tendencies typical of postmodernist aesthetics. In articulating
his ideas Tanner also directed attention to culture and society (or the
lived experience of “reality”) as a construction of language, some-
thing he suggested was not specifically a concern of writers of the late
20th-century United States, but a major feature of many American
writers prior to this period. Tanner subsequently revisited these ideas
in Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (1987) and The American Mystery
(2000) in which he offered discussions of a range of American writers
from the 18th century to the present, albeit entirely white and male,
something that problematizes his argument and suggests that he has
constructed a masculine narrative for the United States and for its con-
temporary fiction which represses minority or feminine perspectives.

TEL QUEL. An avant-garde group that formed around the journal Tel
Quel, which was published in Paris by Éditions de Seuil between
1960 and 1982 under the control of Philippe Sollers. In addition to
Sollers, the group included Jean-Louis Baudry, Severo Sarduy,
and Maurice Roche, with other writers of the nouveau roman such
as Jean Ricardou and Alain Robbe-Grillet also being associated
with the Tel Quel group’s aesthetic practices at certain points. “Tel
quel” can be translated into English either as “as is” or “as it stands,”
and the Tel Quel group’s philosophy of writing was to mount an as-
sault on all categories of literature, whether these were literary move-
ments, genres, styles of writing, or textual tropes—all of which were
considered to be historically determined or power-inflected products
of critical discourses with no relevance to the practice of writers
themselves—to create parafictions that went beyond generic or dis-
cursive boundaries. The resulting aesthetic practice was referred to as
écriture, a form of language use that was meant to be “pure” writing
that was completely independent of any context that existed outside
of the text (the hors-texte).
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326 • TERRA NOSTRA

For the Tel Quel group this became more than an aesthetic practice
in the context of the civil protests of late 1960s France and an in-
creasingly left-wing and Maoist position was adopted, with écriture
coming to be seen as a form of writing that existed outside political
definition by official capitalist ideology and State power. An exam-
ple of écriture can be seen in Ricardou’s La Prise de Constantinople
(The Taking of Constantinople), which refers only to a language ver-
sion of the city, as suggested in its alternative title: La Prose de Con-
stantinople. While principally associated with the nouveau roman,
some of Nathalie Sarraute’s later works, including Les Fruits d’or
(The Golden Fruits) and “Disent les imbéciles” (“Fools Say”) also
have a style stripped of contexts in the articulation of the “pure” con-
sciousness of her characters’ thoughts. Alongside the literary aesthet-
ics of Sollers et al, Tel Quel also formed the focus for theoretical writ-
ings generated by the development of semiotic, psychoanalytic, and
poststructuralist philosophy in France during the 1960s and 1970s,
for which it is now best known. Tel Quel was open to any kind of
writing that was felt to be epochal or avant-garde and published ma-
terial by theorists, philosophers, writers, and filmmakers such as
Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva,
Umberto Eco, and Jean-Luc Godard.

TERRA NOSTRA. Encyclopedic novel by Carlos Fuentes, published

in 1975, that adopts an Epic maximalist approach to its exploration
of the relationship between Latin America and Europe by reference
to history, culture, politics, literature, and economics. The novel is
one of the paradigmatic texts of postmodernist literature because of
the range of textual experiments it uses, its imagination of textual
possibilities and realities, and its investigation of the relationship
between history and fiction, which has led Linda Hutcheon to see
it as a prime example of historiographic metafiction. The novel,
however, is as much a consideration of colonial and political issues
and it uses its postmodernist textual experiments to referentially
map both the history of Latin America and to defamiliarize the ide-
ologies, myths, and the power structures that have created its culture
in the contemporary period. Terra Nostra investigates the conflict-
ing narratives that have created Latin America, using its fragmented
and entwined narrative configurations and multiple time frames
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THOMAS, DONALD MICHAEL • 327

(which include Imperial Rome at the time of Tiberius, Hapsburg

Spain, Tenochtitlán at the time of the Spanish conquest, Paris in
1999, and a Mexico of the future) to reflect on both the imperialist
principles that led to its cultural configuration and to the “con-
structedness” of the culture such principles generated. This latter as-
pect is also enacted in the metafictional discourses of the novel (in-
cluding fantasy, the use of characters from other texts, and the
self-conscious fictionalization of history in which the monarchs of
the Renaissance’s leading imperial powers, Elizabeth I of England
and Philip II of Spain, are married to each other) to show how the
region was created as a “text” or “fiction” upon which Europe could
write its desires, ideologies, and power structures, and for which
Philip II’s construction of the Escorial necropolis acts as a metaphor
to suggest that the birth of a new culture in Latin America is a prod-
uct of the deathly culture of Europe.

THEATER. See POSTMODERN THEATER.

THOMAS, DONALD MICHAEL (D.M.) (1935– ). British novelist

who began his writing career publishing poetry while he was a lec-
turer at Hereford College of Education, with collections including
Two Voices (1968), Logan Stone (1971), and Love and Other Deaths
(1975), before turning to writing fiction in the 1970s, for which he is
best known. Thomas’ novels are influenced by Freudian psycho-
analysis, Russian literature and culture, and theories of aesthetics and
deal with problematic notions of the self, the role of Art, creativity,
history, and textuality. His early novels abandon the form of the con-
ventional novel to foreground symbol, image, and character types as
generators of narrative discourse, albeit within a form closer to mod-
ernism. The Flute-Player (1979) is an allegorical fabulation set in
Soviet East Europe that deals with the relationship between repres-
sion and creativity, while Birthstone (1980) is a first-person narration
by a clinical schizophrenic that blends realism with fantasy in an un-
conventional narrative structure. Thomas’ best-known novel, The
White Hotel (1981), is more postmodernist in its textual strategies,
using a pastiche of styles (the epistolary novel, poetry, fantasy, and
Freudian case study) in telling a story about a woman’s meeting with
Sigmund Freud and her death in the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine.
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328 • THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH

Through its various styles the novel deals with the relationship be-
tween desire and the death instinct in the 20th century, both in the de-
structiveness symbolized by war and in the perverse sexual forma-
tions that develop out of masculine sadistic gratification and female
masochism; the latter aspect of which led to the novel being criticized
by feminist critics.
After The White Hotel Thomas embarked on the Russian Nights
quintet which consists of Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx
(1986), Summit (1987), and Lying Together (1990). The series devel-
ops concerns with artistic creativity and totalitarianism using forms
of experimentation and literary allusion that play with this dichotomy
at the formal level in considering how texts emerge out of existing
cultural, political, and aesthetic configurations. Within this structure
Thomas considers the role of the fiction-making process in metafic-
tional ways so that, for example, in Ararat, there is a consideration
of the art of improvisation and its variety while in Swallow he plays
with intertextual allusion to question distinctions between plagia-
rism and originality and between fact and fiction. After this series,
Thomas produced Flying in to Love (1992), a fictionalized account of
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and returned to concerns with
psychoanalysis and holocaust in Pictures at an Exhibition (1993) and
to his interest in Freud in Eating Pavlova (1996), a pastiche written
in a highly symbolic language that professes to be Freud’s diary.
Thomas’ most recent works are Lady with a Laptop (1996) and Char-
lotte (2000), a novel that rewrites the ending of Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre. Thomas has also published an autobiography called Mem-
ories and Hallucinations (1988).

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH. A science fic-

tion novel by Philip K. Dick, published in 1965, which presents a
version of postmodern schizophrenia that arises out of its uncer-
tainty over the parameters of determinate reality. The novel tells of
the return of Palmer Eldritch from a distant galaxy with a new psy-
chotropic drug (Chew-Z) to replace the existing drug (Can-D) that
makes life in the colonies on Mars more bearable. The plot involves
attempts to discredit or murder Eldritch, but during the course of the
narratives several of the characters take Chew-Z, a drug that disori-
ents their perception of reality. The novel concludes with several of
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TOURNIER, MICHEL • 329

the characters not only uncertain whether they have returned to the
“real” world or whether they are still in the drug-induced fantasy, but
also uncertain whether they will ever return to “reality” or simply
continue to loop inside the multiple worlds Chew-Z creates. The
novel develops issues relating to simulation by suggesting that “re-
ality” may not be identifiably “real” and that its determinacy depends
on the ability to judge falsity accurately. If “reality” becomes prob-
lematized by simulations that appear to be the same as or better than
the “real” then “reality” is no longer knowable. This also has signif-
icance for configurations of identity. If “reality” is indeterminate then
so too is identity because of the fact that consciousness is governed
by the “reality” it perceives. Thus, if reality becomes problematic
then individuals can no longer tell whether their perceptions and de-
cisions are genuine or whether they are simply a product of the real-
ity that they inhabit. Such a configuration is very resonant of Jean
Baudrillard’s later theory of simulation and the way in which the
simulacrum displaces the “real” in postmodernity. It also relates to
cyberpunk’s concern with the creation of a virtual reality that is in-
distinguishable from physical reality itself, something that is most
clearly expressed in the works of Pat Cadigan.

TOURNIER, MICHEL (1924– ). French writer who worked in radio

and television before publishing his first novel at the age of 43. His
writing is radically different from the nouveau roman style that was
dominant when he published Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique
(Friday, or the Other Island, aka Friday) in 1967 because of its em-
phasis on fabulation, myth, philosophy, and parodic forms, all of
which lead to a focus on writing as an act of reinterpretation. Many
of his works entail the retelling of existing stories, including Friday,
or the Other Island which reworks Robinsoe Crusoe by reference to
mystical ideas in its represention of Crusoe’s rejection of civilization.
A similar mechanism can be found in Tournier’s use of mythic and
religious ideas which become important generators of narrative
through their retelling and revision within modern contexts. Le Roi
des aulnes (The Erl-King; aka The Ogre in the U.S., 1970), for ex-
ample, relocates the stories of St. Christopher and the Erl King to the
Third Reich while also dealing with duality and the question of
whether reality is a meaningful system of signs.
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330 • TOUSSAINT, JEAN-PHILIPPE

Les Météores (Gemini, 1975) similarly returns to myth in a pas-

tiche portrayal of the story of Castor and Pollux, while Gaspard,
Melchior et Balthazar (Four Wise Men, 1980) retells the story of the
Magi. The novel uses fabulation and personal narration to revivify
the story of the Magi while also demythologizing its mystical aspects
through the attention to everyday detail and by adding the narrative
of a fourth wise man. After a retelling of the story of Jeanne d’Arc in
Gilles et Jeanne (Gilles and Jeanne, 1983), Tournier wrote La Goutte
d’or (The Golden Droplet, 1986), a story dealing with racism in
France that also comments on the ways in which the mystical quali-
ties of writing have been displaced by a contemporary culture of im-
ages that produces only alienation and reification. Le Médianoche
amoureux (The Midnight Love Feast, 1989) is a collection of stories
linked by a framing device which offers mysteries, realism, fables,
tales based on memory and myth, and a retelling of the Pierrot story.
Tournier has also written a number of books for children and young
readers, including a rewriting of Friday, or the Other Island, as well
as an autobiography, Le Vent Paraclet (The Wind Spirit, 1977), and a
collection of essays, Le Miroir des idées (The Mirror of Ideas, 1994).

TOUSSAINT, JEAN-PHILIPPE (1957– ). Belgian-born novelist who

lives in France and who has been included among the nouvelle
génération de Minuit writers. Toussaint’s novels focus on passive
affectless characters who either refuse to engage with everyday life
or who are unable to deal with contemporary society. His novels tend
to have narratives where very little happens and chart the inertia of
identity and everyday life in postmodern culture. In his first novel,
for example, Le Salle de bain (The Bathroom, 1985), the main char-
acter decides to live in his bath, an absurdist premise that, however,
is no more unusual than his other activities, such as organizing an
imaginary international darts contest or jumping up and down on the
paths of Venice in order to make the city sink faster. Toussaint’s other
novels present similar figures whose passivity is mapped by narrative
inertia. These include Monsieur (1986), a nonstory about an unnamed
nonhero who drifts aimlessly through the narrative, L’Appareil-photo
(The Camera, 1988), and Faire l’amour (Making Love, 2002), a novel
about the end of a relationship. Some of Toussaint’s novels do focus
on characters attempting to find meaning so that they can bring order
to their lethargic lives, such as La réticence (Reticence, 1991), which
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UGREŠIĆ, DUBRAVKA • 331

has the form of a detective novel, albeit concerning a mystery with

no meaning that involves the narrator constructing a conspiracy out
of the lack of events in the town where he is staying; and La Télévi-
sion (Television, 1997), a novel about an academic who gives up
watching television but who discovers that he cannot escape the per-
vasiveness of images as he wanders aimlessly through his own tele-
visionless world.

TUTEN, FREDERIC (1935– ). American writer who has written a

small number of highly crafted novels beginning with The Adven-
tures of Mao on the Long March in 1971. This novel presents a his-
toriographic metafiction written in the form of a fictionalized biog-
raphy of Chairman Mao Zedong, and has a deadpan style and a
collage format that includes, for example, a fictional interview with
Mao. A similar metafictional approach to both biography and history
is offered in Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988) which is set during the
French Revolution. TinTin in the New World is more obviously
metafictional with its use of the characters Naptha and Settembrini
from Thomas Mann’s Die Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), but
blurs reality and fiction by imagining how Hergé’s TinTin would
cope if he existed in the real world rather than within the confines of
a comic book. Thus, in a novel that begins with a typical Hergé-style
adventure, but develops into a complex thriller, TinTin steps out of
the timeless world of the comic book, advances into puberty, loses his
virginity, and learns how to dream. As with most of Tuten’s work its
main concern is with the incongruities created by juxtaposing reality
with fiction, a theme developed in Van Gogh’s Bad Café: A Love
Story (1997), which returns to the imagined biography of his earlier
work but with time travel elements extending the metafictional con-
cerns. Tuten’s most recent novel, The Green Hour (2002) is a novel
of ideas that reflects on the countercultural politics of the 1960s in the
course of narrating a more conventional novel of relationships.

–U–

UGREŠIĆ, DUBRAVKA (1949– ). Croatian by nationality but Yu-

goslavian by disposition, Ugrešić is a novelist who currently lives in
the Netherlands. Her early works are playfully postmodernist in style,
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332 • UGREŠIĆ, DUBRAVKA

as is the case with For siranje romana-reke (Fording the Stream of

Consciousness, 1988), a novel set at a literary conference which an-
alyzes the difference between the ideologies of Eastern Europe and
western capitalism. The novel uses the form of the chronology as
well as including sections written in an epistolary style. It also intro-
duces intertextuality in its allusions to literature, film, and popular
genres, a strategy that was to become typical of Ugrešić’s work. The
novel develops such textual relationships to suggest that life is a nar-
rative construction and that reality is patterned according to fiction, a
motif that recurs throughout Ugrešić’s writing. Ugrešić also pro-
duced early stories dealing with this issue, including the novella
“Stefica Cvek u Raljama Zivota” (“Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life,”
collected in The Jaws of Life and Other Stories, 1992), which details
how the main character becomes trapped in the illusions of textual ro-
mances as well as including metafictional intrusions by the author.
The collection also includes “Metaterxies” (“Life is a Fairy Tale”)
which uses the form of pastiche.
Ugrešić’s most important work, Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The
Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 1996), was written between
1991 and 1996, during the period in which she left Yugoslavia as
war spread from Croatia to Bosnia. It is both highly experimental
and grounded in contemporary reality, adopting a collage form in
which each section unfolds according to a different narrative dis-
course. These include the form of a language primer, stories using
the metaphor of an angel, a diary, and a section on the war in Yu-
goslavia using the Tarot as an organizing principle. All of these con-
figurations are intertwined with chapters of short numbered sections
focusing on certain themes, a narrative form that maps the most im-
portant textual motif: the principle of accumulation. The text uses
the metaphor of the collection (such as the random acquisition of
personal photographs, experiences from life, or museum collections)
as a principle to understand the way in which narratives or stories
are created out of the arbitrary accretion of memories, experiences,
the material of everyday life, and stories themselves. A key image is
the notion of “threading” in which patterns are woven to form a per-
sonal, historical, or ideological structure (implicitly a “fiction”) that
either makes sense of reality or justifies a political position. At the
same time, Ugrešić also developed her nonfictional writing, in Kul-
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VALENZUELA, LUISA • 333

tura lazi (The Culture of Lies, 1996) and the later Zabranjeno citanje
(Thank You for Not Reading, 2000), collections of essays which deal
with the politics of Eastern Europe, western “fictions” of the
Balkans, and issues relating to art, literature, and publishing.
Ugrešić has also published stories collected in English under the ti-
tle Lend Me Your Character (2005) and produced a further novel,
Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004), which uses different
genres to express the dislocation of the exile.

ULTRA-MODERNISM. A term proposed by Linda Hutcheon to de-

scribe a form of experimental writing that radically questions the
ability of any poetic or fictional text to represent reality or to have
any system of reference other than the internal codes and structures
of language itself. Ultra-modernist texts are radically anti-mimetic
and usually focus on the systems of language and narrative, investi-
gating these structures in terms of either the signifier-signified rela-
tionship or the conventions of fictionality, and they suggest that a text
only creates structure and meaning internally through its flows of
words. For Hutcheon, texts that display these features are not truly
postmodernist, because they complete the aestheticization of lan-
guage and narrative that the modernists only began. Examples in con-
temporary literature, which many critics would consider to be post-
modernist, include Language Poetry, surfiction, the writings of the
Tel Quel group, or metafictional writings by authors such as Walter
Abish, William H. Gass, and B.S. Johnson.

–V–

VALENZUELA, LUISA (1938– ). Argentine novelist and short story

writer whose works combine political concerns with experimental,
surrealist, and magic realist forms of writing. After working in Eu-
rope as a journalist, Valenzuela began writing fiction in the 1960s
and, after early works in a more conventional style, developed inno-
vative techniques in the 1970s that incorporated fantastic elements,
parody, irony, and wordplay. Valenzuela’s works primarily explore
areas such as eroticism, exile, language, and identity through the fil-
ter of feminist and political concerns to develop deconstructions of
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334 • VARGAS LLOSA, MARIO

gender relations, patriarchal and political language, power structures,

and militarism. Como en la Guerra (He Who Searches, 1977), for ex-
ample, follows the story of a professor of semiotics and moves be-
tween Europe and Latin America within an intricate narrative that
uses different literary tropes alongside concerns with eroticism and
sexual disguise, while also directing attention to the political realities
of militarism in Argentina.
After Cambio de armas (Other Weapons, 1982), a collection of
stories dealing with gender relations and forms of repression, Valen-
zuela produced her most important novel so far, Cola de lagaritija
(The Lizard’s Tail, 1983), a novel that focuses on a fictional minister
in Argentina who effectively runs the country. The novel deconstructs
the sadism of arbitrary government but also includes writerly com-
ments on the narrative that explore the question of whether writing
has any political function. In 1990, Valenzuela published two novels,
Novela negra con argentinos (Black Novel with Argentines, 1990), a
suspense thriller set among Argentine exiles in New York, and Real-
idad Nacional desde la Cama (Bedside Manners, 1990), an allegori-
cal fabulation about militarism in which a woman’s room at a coun-
try club retreat becomes the focus for political and military affairs as
her life is invaded by the realities from which she is trying to escape.
Valenzuela has also published short story collections, including Aquí
Pasan Cosas Raras (Strange Things Happen Here: Twenty-six Stories
and a Novel, 1979), Cambio de armas (Other Weapons, 1982), and
Simetrías (Symmetries, 1993), which includes monologues, playful
metafictions, and reworkings of fairy tales.

VARGAS LLOSA, MARIO (1936– ). Peruvian novelist who was one

of the major figures in the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. Var-
gas Llosa’s novels are predominantly realist or historical in style, but
also utilize discontinuous narratives and parodic genre forms of writ-
ing. His major concerns are with concepts of nation and society and
these are developed through explorations of social and economic
conditions and critiques of political and institutional corruption. Var-
gas Llosa is one of the most political of the Boom writers and in 1990
he stood as a conservative candidate for the Peruvian presidency. His
first important work was La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the
Hero, 1963), a novel set in a military academy that deals with honor
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VARGAS LLOSA, MARIO • 335

and oppressive codes of behavior, both enforced and voluntary. His

second novel, La casa verde (The Green House, 1966), is his most
important and innovative work and presents an attempt to create a
“total novel” through an Epic structure that counterpoints narratives
(the stories of a brothel called “The Green House” and a prostitute
called Bonifacia) and settings (the jungle and a provincial town) in
order to present a complete vision of Peruvian society. The novel also
uses textual innovations in its use of alternating stories and stories-
within-stories, while also articulating different narrative modes (in-
cluding a parodic version of 19th-century realism and stream of con-
sciousness forms) to map the different versions of reality experienced
by the characters.
Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969)
returns to the realist mode and offers a panoramic vision of Peruvian
urban society through an exploration of its squalor, injustices, and
power structures. Panteleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and
the Special Service, 1973) is a comic novel about bureaucracy, while
La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977) is
a vaguely metafictional work in which “Vargas Llosa” woos the wife
of his dead uncle in chapters that alternate between the main narra-
tive and sections that present episodes from soap operas. In La
Guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981)
Vargas Llosa turned to historical fiction by recounting a 19th-century
revolt against the Brazilian government, a story that also involves a
struggle between rationality and religion. Historia de Mayta (The
Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1984) also has a historical dimension
even while it reflects on contemporary concerns in telling the story of
an aging Trotskyist, but reveals self-reflexive elements when the
reader is made aware that the narrator has invented the story in order
to question the distinction between fiction and history. Vargas Llosa
followed this work with two mystery novels: ¿Quién mató a
Palomino Molero? (Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1986), which ex-
plores notions of justice, and Lituma en los Andes (Death in the An-
des, 1993), which uses its detective story frame to deal with political
and social concerns and to meditate on Peruvian identity in relation
to modernity and the culture of Peruvian Indians. Los cuadernos de
Don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1997) is a novel
about sexual fantasy, while La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat,
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336 • VIAN, BORIS

2000) returns to the historical novel in dealing with the Dominican

dictator Rafael Trujillo.

VIAN, BORIS (1920–1959). Prolific French writer who produced

novels, stories, plays, poems, and songs. Vian also translated the
works of Raymond Chandler into French and wrote hard-boiled
thrillers under the pseudonym of Vernon Sullivan. His works draw
on a range of styles including absurdism, surrealism, and the pata-
physical art of imagining the impossible. Although his works are not
fully within the domain of postmodernism, they do involve related
aesthetic strategies, particularly in their intertextuality and use of
language games, and his linguistic invention has had an important in-
fluence on writers of the OuLiPo group. Vian’s best-known works
are the novels L’Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream; aka Mood
Indigo and Foam of the Daze, 1947) and L’Arrache-coeur (Heart-
snatcher, 1953) and his absurdist drama Les batisseurs d’empire
(The Empire-Builders, 1959). Froth on a Daydream is a surrealist
novel about two intersecting relationships that is most notable for the
burlesque defamiliarization of everyday reality that is found in its
imagination of fantasies such as a piano that makes cocktails ac-
cording to the song, rhythm, and number of notes played on it.
Heartsnatcher and The Empire-Builders are both absurdist fantasies,
the former set in a fictional reality and the latter in a placeless house
occupied by a family moving from one room to another who are fol-
lowed around by a figure referred to as “The Schmürz” as one by one
they disappear. Amongst Vian’s other works are: L’Automne à Pékin
(Autumn in Peking, 1947), a slapstick story about the building of a
train station with tracks that go nowhere; L’Herge Rouge (The Red
Grass, 1950), a psychological drama with science-fictional elements;
and, as Vernon Sullivan, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I will spit on
your graves, 1946), which was made into a film, during a screening
of which Vian suffered the heart attack that killed him.

LA VIE MODE D’EMPLOI. See LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL.

VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T. (1959– ). Prolific American novelist and

short story writer who has been associated with the avant-pop move-
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VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T. • 337

ment because his works often combine postmodernist aesthetic de-

vices with an engagement with everyday or marginal experiences
within America; as for example in The Rainbow Stories (1989) which
deals with the underside of American culture. Vollmann’s first novel
was the political fabulation You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
which details an ideological war between a reactionary group called
the Society of Daniel and a group of revolutionary insects over who
controls the means to construct “reality.” The novel uses Josef
Stalin’s electrification of the Soviet Union as the basis for its story,
blurring the distinction between left and right, and utilizes metafic-
tional forms by explaining what characters might make of events in
future chapters and by including a table of contents for an imaginary
second volume.
After The Rainbow Stories, Vollmann published The Ice Shirt
(1990), the first volume of his Seven Dreams cycle, a series of post-
modern historical novels about the discovery and settlement of North
America. The Ice Shirt uses magic realist and experimental devices
(including sections written as myth along with maps, illustrations,
and chronicles) to tell the story of the Norse discovery of America.
Three further volumes in the series have so far been completed: Vol-
ume Two, Fathers and Crows (1992), which concerns the French set-
tlement of Canada; Volume Three, Argall: The True Story of Poca-
hontas and Captain John Smith (2001), which fictionalizes the
settling of Virginia using a pastiche of colonial English; and Volume
Six, The Rifles (1993), which focuses on Inuit and European explo-
ration using a hallucinatory narrative in which a contemporary narra-
tor imagines himself into the past as a 19th-century explorer. Voll-
mann has also written several urban fictions in addition to The
Rainbow Stories, including Whores for Gloria (1991), Thirteen Sto-
ries and Thirteen Epitaphs (1991), The Butterfly Stories (1993), and
The Royal Family (2000), exploring drug taking and prostitution in
urban wastelands. His most recent novel, Europe Central (2005),
which won the National Book Award, is set during World War II and
has a more experimental form in its configuration of a fabulational
nonlinear narrative that mixes history and myth. Vollmann has also
produced a seven-volume study of violence and force, Rising Up and
Rising Down (2004), put together from writings produced over the
course of 20 years.
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338 • VONNEGUT, KURT, JR.

VONNEGUT, KURT, JR. (1922– ). American writer of postmodernist

science fiction whose works often focus on dystopian situations using
fabulational and absurdist elements in order to highlight the per-
ceived lack of meaning in contemporary reality. Vonnegut’s works are
lightly ironized and humorous versions of postmodernism that use
some metafictional elements (including the fictional author, Kilgore
Trout, who reappears throughout Vonnegut’s works) to present a be-
mused sense of disbelief at the foolishness of both human activity and
the “fictions” (or grand narratives) that humanity creates in order to
justify its actions. Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952) is quite
conventional in form and presents an anti-technological science fiction
novel about the triumph of mechanization. This was followed by The
Sirens of Titan (1959), a postmodern critique of grand narratives, in
which the planet Tralfamadore is first mentioned in the revelation that
the history of Earth has been manipulated by a traveler from this planet
who has been shipwrecked on Titan. Events such as the building of the
Great Wall of China or the Thirty Years War have no meaning in hu-
man terms, but have been orchestrated so that the traveler can get a
spare part for his spaceship and continue on his journey to a distant
galaxy where he will present a message that simply says: “Greetings.”
After Mother Night (1961), a novel about a double agent in Nazi Ger-
many whose deceptions are taken for reality, Vonnegut continued his
parody of the delusions that humanity constructs about itself in Cat’s
Cradle (1963), a dystopian novel that questions the notion of progress
through the unleashing of a substance that freezes everything on Earth.
Vonnegut’s most important novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), is
also his most postmodernist, using metafictional forms such as the in-
sertion of Vonnegut into his own novel, the blurring of reality and fic-
tion in Billy Pilgrim’s reading of the novels of Kilgore Trout, and a
skewed narrative temporality. The novel concerns the 1945 Dresden
firestorm (an event Vonnegut survived) and tells the story of Billy,
whose mantra “So it goes” expresses a sense of postmodern nihilism
in the face of the failure of Enlightenment principles to prevent the
horrific violence of World War II. Breakfast of Champions (1973)
presents a critique of instrumentalist culture that focuses on the ways
in which people have been turned into machines and language has
been reduced to a discourse of advertising slogans. The novel also ex-
tends the use of metafictional forms by more fully incorporating Von-
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WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER • 339

negut within the text to problematize the nature of the fictional text
itself, a strategy that is also explored in Timequake (1997), which
uses a mix of styles and a fragmented narrative structure. In between
these works, Vonnegut published a series of apocalyptic or dystopian
novels, Slapstick (1976), Galápagos (1985), a novel that considers
how the Earth might look without the human race, and Hocus Pocus
(1990), which uses the Vietnam War and countercultural concerns to
question the “hocus pocus” ideas created by humanity.

–W–

WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER (1962– ). American novelist and short

story writer whose works use parody and fabulation to present ab-
surd and self-consciously fictional worlds. Although not overtly self-
reflexive, Wallace’s texts are often characterized by playful fantasy
in which postmodern cultural concerns are refracted and exaggerated,
as in his Epic novel Infinite Jest (1996), which bases its narrative on
a world in which tennis is one of the dominant forms of cultural
meaning. Although the novel can be interpreted as a satire on con-
temporary culture’s obsession with sport, the narratives that develop
from this premise create a complex self-referential logic of their own
that displaces the initial referential telos. Wallace’s first work was
The Broom of the System (1987), a novel set in Cleveland in a mar-
ginally different near-future landscape where the city has the same
shape as Jayne Mansfield and is bordered by the Great Ohio Desert.
The main focus of the novel is less its fictional reality than the bur-
lesque stories and digressions that develop out of Lenore Beadsman’s
concern over the disappearance of her grandmother. The narratives
focus on self-consciously fictional characters (as well as a cockatiel
called Vlad the Impaler) and generates an episodic multiplot form
that is primarily made up of dialogue, stories within stories, and oc-
casional inserts such as transcripts of meetings or an article from Ad-
vertising Age. Wallace’s next work was a collection of short stories,
Girl with Curious Hair (1990), which continued to use playful forms
of writing as well as including a consideration of postmodernism.
The maximalist novel Infinite Jest is Wallace’s major work to date
and provides an encyclopedic vision of a near-future world in which
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340 • WANING OF AFFECT

years are named after corporate sponsors (such as “Year of the Whop-
per” and “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment) as part of the cre-
ation of “revenue-enhancing subsidized time.” The narrative focuses
on the Incandenza family and the Enfield Tennis Academy and takes
in filmmaking, terrorism, economics, science, and language in creat-
ing a vision of a future society (where part of the North American
continent is a giant toxic dump) that is a refraction of contemporary
culture. The narrative is primarily driven by the suicide of James In-
candenza (aka “Himself”) and the search for the film he has made
(called “Infinite Jest”) that is so addictive and entertaining it creates
neural breakdown in viewers. Like The Broom of the System the
novel is a complex episodic collection of story lines that incorporates
absurd and burlesque forms, but presents a greater variety of styles,
including parody, interior monologue, fantasy, and inserted material.
The most important supplementary materials are the endnotes, in-
cluding one which details James Incandenza’s filmography that is
also a condensed catalog of most of the novel’s main narratives. This
provides a self-reflexive frame for the internalized system of the
novel that is supplemented by metafictional investigations of narra-
tive in the form of considerations of the “anticonfluential narrative”
that “Himself” developed in his filmmaking. Since Infinite Jest Wal-
lace has primarily produced story collections, in Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion: Stories (2004), as well as collec-
tions of nonfiction, such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do
Again (1997) and Everything and More (2003), an exploration of the
history of infinity.

WANING OF AFFECT. A concept theorized by Fredric Jameson that

refers to the loss of emotion experienced in a postmodern culture that
provides a surfeit of commodities and an overload of images and in-
formation. Jameson argues that as a result of the commodification of
everyday life people have become distanced from each other and be-
gin to have more significant relationships with commodities and im-
ages than they do with their family, friends, or partners. Specifics of
the waning of affect include: the channeling of desire and conscious-
ness by images (celebrity culture, for example, and the desire to be-
come part of its image world), the desensitization of people’s emo-
tions as a result of seeing violence and death on the screen (whether
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WEISS, PETER • 341

real or simulated), and the question of whether people can tell the dif-
ference between the real and simulated any longer.

WATTEN, BARRETT (1948– ). American poet who played an impor-

tant role in the development of Language Poetry when he cofounded
the journal This with Robert Grenier in 1971. Watten has also been
one of the important theorists of Language Poetry as well as writing
literary and cultural theory dealing with the avant-garde and post-
modern poetics. His theoretical works include The Constructivist Mo-
ment (2003) which theorizes the linguistic turn and self-reflexivity in
avant-garde writing by tracing forms of cultural aesthetics such as So-
viet constructivism and American modernist and postmodern poetics.
Watten’s poetry collections include Decay (1977), Progress (1985),
Under Erasure (1991), and Bad History (1998), while Frame,
1971–1990 (1997) brings together poetry from his first two decades of
writing. Watten’s poetry is anti-mimetic and focuses on the entropic
decay of language through a concern with its alienated and alienating
forms within which signifiers are divorced from signifieds. His verse
is often mannered in style with a focus on banality that he uses to draw
attention to the arbitrary and self-reflexive structures of meaning cre-
ated in language, although this process is also part of a deconstruction
of modernity and its systems that can be found in the way his verse
models itself on the forms of mechanical reproduction. In this respect,
Watten is closer to modernist aesthetics, but postmodern concerns are
displayed in his self-referential comments on language and forms of
representation, through which Watten defamiliarizes all forms of dis-
course by treating areas such as speech, science, and philosophy as
equivalent in value. Such a concern is mapped in lines from Under
Erasure, “A transmission, / signified by breaks / Interrupted due to lo-
cal amnesia,” where Watten self-reflexively comments on the words’
own form while also describing the disconnection of language and its
fractured structures of signification.

WEISS, PETER (1916–1982). German playwright and novelist of

Czech-Jewish descent whose family emigrated to Sweden after the
Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, where Weiss lived until
his death, initially writing in Swedish before producing works in his na-
tive German from the mid-1950s. Weiss’ work was both experimental
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342 • WEISS, PETER

and politically engaged and refuses simple categorization because al-

though he used self-reflexive devices these can be seen to be both post-
modernist, through the attention they focus on the constructedness of
the text, and avant-garde because their articulation is to stimulate con-
sideration of textual forms in relation to history and social reality.
Weiss’ early novels in Swedish, Från ö till ö (From Island to Island,
1947) and De Besegrade (The Vanquished, 1948), as well as his first
novel in German, Der Fremde (The Stranger, 1948) are Kafkaesque
considerations of social strictures. In 1952 he wrote a novella in an in-
novative objective style, Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers (The
Shadow of the Body of the Coachman), but had difficulty placing it for
publication and, until it appeared in 1960, he devoted his time to pro-
ducing surrealist films. The 1960s saw Weiss’ rise to prominence as a
writer, beginning with the autobiographical texts, Abschied von der El-
tern (Leavetaking, 1962) and Fluchtpunkt (Vanishing Point, 1963),
which were followed by Marat/Sade (1963), the drama that established
his international reputation.
Marat/Sade is an exercise in total theater and uses its textual struc-
tures to defamiliarize the naturalistic frame of dramatic performance
through the use of an embedded narrative (which is the play itself) in
which the Marquis de Sade directs a group of inmates at the Charen-
ton asylum in a drama depicting the assassination of Marat by Char-
lotte Corday. The play-within-a-play device is used here as part of a
Brechtian alienation technique, but also draws attention to the fic-
tions on stage and their representation of “reality” by presenting a
“staged” version of the repression of revolutionary unrest through the
use of nonnaturalistic tableaux and orchestrated interruptions. Die
Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965) is an even more overtly politi-
cal play and presents in 11 cantos a documentary-drama about the
Auschwitz trials held between 1963 and 1965 that uses transcripts of
the trial proceedings to emphasize the horrors of Nazi war crimes
while also making connections between these events and postwar
colonialism in Asia and Africa. Such concerns were also developed
in Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz (Song of the Lusitanian Bogey,
1966) which deals with colonialism in Angola, and Viet Nam Diskurs
(Vietnam Discourse, 1968). Weiss increasingly became involved in
anti-colonial movements and embraced socialism in this period, but
the hostile reception of the drama Trotski im Exil (Trotsky in Exile) in
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WINTERSON, JEANETTE • 343

1970 led to political disillusionment. In the 1970s Weiss primarily

concentrated on producing autobiographical and nonfiction works
while also working on his most important novel, the epic three-part
work Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance,
1975–81) which focuses on forms of resistance and political activity.
The work is a complex fusion of history, politics, and fiction that fo-
cuses on anti-fascist resistance between the late 1930s and 1947 and
uses Dante’s Inferno as an informing principle. Within this frame-
work the novel ranges across Greek myth, histories of Spain and
Sweden and incorporates essays as a mode of expression.

WINTERSON, JEANETTE (1959– ). British novelist whose texts

have developed different forms of writing following the publication of
her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). This novel is a
semiautobiographical account of a young girl’s liberation from a strict
religious upbringing as she awakens to the stirrings of sexuality. The
novel mimics the structure of the first eight books of the Bible while
also incorporating fairy tale and quest narratives. Subsequently, Win-
terson has focused more on forms of writing that foreground textual
fictionality, including Boating for Beginners (1985), a playful comic
novel that rewrites the book of Genesis by highlighting myth and fan-
tasy. Her next two novels, The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry
(1989), use fabulation to explore the capacity of stories to create
transformations, using narrative metamorphoses to generate unstable
fictional worlds such as the fantasy version of Venice found in the for-
mer. The Passion is set during the Napoleonic Wars and blurs history
with fantasy in its story of Henri and Villanelle. “I’m telling you sto-
ries. Trust me” is a recurring refrain in the novel and presents an am-
biguous set of possibilities about the relationship between fiction and
reality, including the suggestion that fictions are more reliable than
history. Sexing the Cherry offers a fabular version of the 16th century
where there are fantasy cities like those of Italo Calvino’s Le città in-
visibili (Invisible Cities), including a flying city similar to Laputa from
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Until the final section moves into
the present the narrative alternates between the perspectives of Dog
Woman and her adopted son, Jordan (who is searching time and space
for a woman who he may have imagined into reality), and, in offering
the view that matter is “empty space and light,” implies that stories are
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344 • WOLF, CHRISTA

a way of imagining reality that have as much validity as scientific, ge-

ographical, or ideological versions of the world.
After these two works Winterson’s writing began to take on more
modernist textual forms by focusing on concepts as generators of nar-
rative frameworks. Written on the Body (1992) presents a love affair
that is interrupted when the narrator’s lover is diagnosed as having
leukemia after which it becomes a form of écriture that offers textu-
alizations of the lover’s body as a way of rethinking love, material-
ity, and writing. Art & Lies (1994) has an abstract form and consid-
ers the transmutations of reality (“lies”) into Art through the voices
of characters called Handel, Picasso, and Sappho, the latter of whom
is based on the historical poet who transcends time to enter the nar-
rative. Gut Symmetries (1997) has a similar conceptual form and uses
an opposition between emotion (“gut feeling”) and science (“Grand
Unification Theory”) along with chapters based on Tarot cards as the
motivation and structure for a story that explores different versions of
reality. The PowerBook (2000) tells of Alix (or Ali), who produces
stories for people that she delivers by e-mail, and returns to the no-
tion of story as an important generator of reality and identity by ex-
ploring the ways in which the organization of “reality” into narrative
shapes and invents it. Winterson’s most recent novel, Lighthouse-
keeping (2004), similarly focuses on the power of storytelling in pre-
senting the tale of a young girl apprenticed to a lighthouse keeper.
The novel uses stories as both its content and its form in order to pat-
tern its shifting temporality, while also locating itself within a tradi-
tion of storytelling in its intertextual allusions to, for example,
Robert Louis Stevenson and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

WOLF, CHRISTA (1929– ). German writer born Christa Ihlenfeld in

Landsberg an der Warthe, a town now in Poland, who is one of the
best-known writers to have come out of the former German Demo-
cratic Republic. Although critical of the leadership of East Germany,
Wolf retained an investment in Marxism, and her fiction’s concern
with the achievement of an authentic subjectivity in an alienated
world is as much a response to industrial modernity as to the version
of socialism propounded by the East German State. Wolf’s first
novel, Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963), written in line
with the forms of socialist realism, was followed by Nachdenken
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WRIGHT, STEPHEN • 345

über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968), which deals with the
dichotomy between social conformity and individual fulfillment. The
novel uses the form of the interior monologue to articulate the narra-
tor’s reflections on and reconstructions of the life and lost hopes of a
friend who has died an untimely death. In Kindheitsmuster (Patterns
of Childhood, 1976) the narrative generates multiple perspectives to
connect the 1930s of Nazi Germany with contemporary East Ger-
many. Wolf’s next two novels developed contemporary concerns
through the retelling of the past. Kein Ort: Nirgends (No Place on
Earth, 1979) offered a story about a fictionalized encounter between
the German poets Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderode
and dealt with issues of alienation and writing. Her best-known
novel, Kassandra (Cassandra, 1983), uses the story of the Trojan
War to reflect on contemporary society and offers a critique of mas-
culine ideologies and forms of domination which, Wolf suggests,
leads to the logic of self-destruction made possible by nuclear
weapons. Wolf’s most important novels since the reunification of
Germany are Medea: Stimmen (Medea, 1996), a feminist revision of
the myth of Medea, and Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002), which re-
turns to stream of consciousness in telling the story of a woman ly-
ing in hospital.

WRIGHT, STEPHEN (1946– ). American author of three novels whose

fiction has been associated with the avant-pop movement because his
texts address contemporary cultural concerns through the use of dis-
torted narrative structures. Wright’s first novel, Meditations in Green
(1978), is a Vietnam novel with a flashback structure that alternates a
realist style with free-form prose in order to capture the dissociated
consciousness of a Vietnam veteran. M31: A Family Romance (1988)
is loosely based on the lives of the leaders of the Heaven’s Gate UFO
cult, written before the mass suicide in 1997, and tells the story of Dot
and Dash, who believe they are descendents of aliens. The novel was
one of the first in recent years to tap into the alternate belief systems
that began to enter mainstream American culture in the 1980s and is
written in a fractured episodic form with short sections within chapters
that do not always connect in a cause and effect manner. This strategy
is developed in Going Native (1994), Wright’s most important novel,
which deals with a suburbanite, Wylie Jones, whose story is told at a
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346 • WURLITZER, RUDOLPH

distance after he simply disappears from his home one day. Only the
first chapter directly focuses on Wylie as a named character with the
remaining chapters directing attention to other figures until Wylie (by
now a criminal and possibly a serial killer) either appears at the end of
the chapter or is revealed to have been one of the background figures
going under an alias in another person’s narrative. Through this tech-
nique of dissociation, the novel creates a paradoxical narrative that is
both fragmented and linear, enacting a fractured postmodern culture
that is both everyday and incomprehensible.

WURLITZER, RUDOLPH (RUDY) (1937– ). American novelist and

screenwriter who produced four minimalist fictions much admired
by other experimental authors, including Thomas Pynchon. Wurl-
itzer’s novels are informed by a countercultural perspective that com-
bines elements of Beat literature with existentialist themes of alien-
ation. Of key importance to his fiction is the motif of the absence or
disintegration of “forms.” His characters move through realities and
narratives that lose their sense of structure in novels whose attenua-
tion of the plot works to express Wurlitzer’s sense that the world is
becoming abstract. For example, Wurlitzer’s first novel, Nog (aka
The Octopus, 1969), creates relationships between space, reality, lan-
guage, and narrative, and adopts a Beat narrative form as it follows a
group of characters “moving on,” but simply ends when the form of
the narrative seems unable to create any further realities for them. The
relationship between narrative and reality creates in Wurlitzer’s texts
an irreal quality where space becomes an alien landscape constructed
out of the words that make it, a situation most obvious in Flats
(1970), a postapocalyptic fiction set in a strictly delimited textual re-
ality very similar to Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie (Endgame) in
which the characters take the form of place-names. Quake (1972) is a
postapocalyptic fiction that develops a more realistic mode in its story
of the breakdown of cultural and social “forms” in a Los Angeles that
has been hit by an earthquake. Slow Fade (1984) returns to the notion
of narrative as the generator of reality, adopting an internal story-
within-story structure. Wurlitzer has also produced a memoir, Hard
Travel to Sacred Places (1994), as well as scripts for the cinema.
These include Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid (1973), Little Buddha (1993), and the screenplay to Alex Cox’s
postmodernist historical film Walker (1987).
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Bibliography

CONTENTS

Introduction 348
General 350
Reference Works and Readers 350
Theories of Postmodernism 351
Postmodern and Poststructuralist Theory 352
Postmodernity and Postmodern Culture 354
Postmodernity, Globalization, and Cyberculture 355
Postmodernist Art, Film, and Media 356
Postmodernist Aesthetics 357
Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Avant-Garde 357
Literary Aesthetics: Theories and Poetics 357
Literary Aesthetics: Critical Works 359
Anthologies and Collections 359
Interviews 360
Postmodernist Literature (Fiction, Drama, and Poetry) 361
African, Asian, and Australasian Authors 361
European Authors 362
Latin American Authors 371
North American Authors 373
Postmodernist Literature (Critical Works) 378
General Contemporary Literature 378
General Studies of Postmodernist Literature 380
Thematic Studies of Postmodernist Literature 382
Nations and Regions 384
Author Studies and Biographies 387
Journals 402
Websites 403

347
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348 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The growth in recent years of reference works (Section A) on postmodernism has

meant that there are now a number of books that present guides, companions, or
introductions to the area when even only a few years ago, readers new to post-
modernism were reliant on works produced in the 1980s, such as Appignanesi
(1986), Foster (1983), and McCaffery (1986). These works are still interesting for
those who wish to explore the history of criticism of postmodernism, not least be-
cause in their respective ways they represent the three major trends that have
come to dominate the study of the area: postmodernism as a postmodern or post-
structuralist philosophy (Taylor and Winquist, 2001), postmodernism as a cul-
tural dominant that incorporates various areas including literature and philosophy
(Bertens and Natoli, 2002; Sim, 2005; and Connor, 2004), and more specific dis-
ciplinary studies of, for example, literature. The latter area has been less well
served by reference works, although Sim is useful and readers such as Nicol
(2002), as well as those edited by Brooker (1992), Waugh (1992), and Wheale
(1995), provide relevant essays. Other readers either present surveys of post-
modernism (Docherty, 1993; Lee and Carmichael, 2000) or cover specific areas
such as postmodern culture (Berger, 1998), postmodern philosophy (Malpas,
2001), modernism and postmodernism (Brooker, 1992), and feminism and post-
modernism (Nicholson, 1990). The most useful introductory studies for post-
modernism are those by Connor (1997) and Woods (1999), both of which cover
different aspects of the area, while Madsen (1995) presents a bibliography of all
secondary material relating to postmodernism published up until 1994.
Within the areas noted above, diverse approaches to postmodernism can be
found and these are covered in the remainder of Section A. Most important to
note are the theorizations of postmodernism, both as a philosophy and as a cul-
tural logic, that can be found in works by Jameson, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and
Derrida. Works dealing with related areas can be found in succeeding subsec-
tions, including sociocultural and historical accounts of postmodernity, for
which Harvey (1989) and Crook, Pakulski, and Waters (1992) are still excellent
introductions, as well as studies and readers dealing with globalization, cyber-
culture, and related areas in art, film, and media culture. Section B deals more
fully with postmodernist aesthetics, initially by listing critical works that con-
cern debates over postmodernism’s relationship to modernism as a literary and
artistic form, as well as considerations of the persistence of avant-garde prac-
tices. More specific literary theorizations by postmodernist writers themselves
and related critical works are also to be found here along with anthologies, col-
lections, and interviews with authors.
Section C is a bibliography of primary materials by region, listing fictional,
poetic, and dramatic works produced by postmodernist writers. This section
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 349

does not attempt to catalog every postmodernist literary text that has been writ-
ten, not least because such an enterprise would require a bibliographical refer-
ence work of its own. The intention in this section has been to include the ma-
jor writers covered in the Dictionary and to include their most important or most
typically postmodernist works. The section is therefore selective in which works
have been listed and has been designed to provide readers who are either new to
postmodernist literature or who are seeking to extend their reading within the
area a sense of which authors and which works by those authors would allow an
understanding of the range of forms generated by postmodernist writing.
Critical understandings of postmodernist literature form the basis of Section
D. Criticism of postmodernist literature has followed distinct phases and these
are reflected in this section. The 1960s saw the emergence of new forms of ex-
perimental writing and criticism of the time approached such literature either
thematically in terms of dominant textual forms such as narcissism or fabula-
tion, without naming it as postmodernist, or in terms of national literatures by
investigating how the nouveau roman or magic realism, for example, differed
from previous French or Latin American literature. The 1970s and early 1980s
made links across different national borders and began to see postmodernism
as an international phenomenon, defining it as postmodernist in terms of its lit-
erary history through its relationship to modernism while also incorporating
perspectives gleaned from poststructuralism.
In the mid-1980s the study of postmodernism developed a more cultural ap-
proach as a result of Jameson’s work, and postmodernist literature began to be
understood not only in relation to wider social, economic, and cultural
processes, but also as part of a larger movement in the arts generally and in pop-
ular culture. This led to the main period of critical study of postmodernist liter-
ature, during which it was considered as a textual expression of postmodern
ideas and postmodern cultural processes. Between approximately 1985 and
1995 was the period of greatest critical output as postmodernism became one
of the areas that dominated the study of arts and social sciences in the academy,
before postmodernism as a cultural and literary phenomenon became subsumed
into other approaches such as cyberculture, globalization, and cultural politics.
Since the mid-1990s postmodernism has become a widely used term in me-
dia and popular culture because of the perception that it has pervaded contem-
porary culture. At the same time, its study as a distinct phenomenon in the acad-
emy has waned. This is not to say that postmodernism as a cultural, literary, or
theoretical manifestation has disappeared in the academic study of late 20th- and
early 21st-century literature although, as a contested account of contemporary
culture, aesthetics, and politics, many critics have challenged or ignored it in
foregrounding other approaches based in feminism, queer theory, postcolonial-
ism, and cultural politics and identity. Postmodernism has in many ways become
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350 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

accepted as something of a “given” as a cultural phenomenon, with the result

that studies of literature have either often simply taken it for granted and directed
attention elsewhere—in author studies or in comparative and thematic critical
approaches—mentioning postmodernist aesthetics as one amongst many textual
concerns or have referred to postmodernism only in passing.
The final section lists journals where the study of postmodernist literature,
philosophy, and culture can be found as well as detailing websites in operation
at the time of publication that can be used to explore the area of literature. In
both cases, the study of literature is often focused on contemporary writing as
a whole, but relevant authors and movements, as well as specific considerations
of postmodernism, form important areas of study nevertheless. Much of the
critical material in the bibliography refers to books written in English. In part,
this is because much criticism of postmodernism has originally been published
in this language (with even important European publishers, such as Peter Lang
in Germany and Rodopi in the Netherlands, following this form), but also be-
cause the majority of readers of this book are most likely to be in the English-
speaking world and the choice of texts has been determined by what is acces-
sible to such readers.

GENERAL

Reference Works and Readers

Anderson, Walter Truett, ed. The Fontana Post-modernism Reader. London:
Fontana, 1996.
Appignanesi, Lisa, ed. Postmodernism. London: Institute of Contemporary
Arts, 1986.
Berger, Arthur Asa, ed. The Postmodern Presence: Readings on Postmodernism
in American Culture and Society. Walnut Creek, Cal.: Altamira, 1998.
Bertens, Hans, and Joseph Natoli, eds. Postmodernism: The Key Figures. Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 2002.
Bové, Paul A., ed. Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1995.
Brooker, Peter, ed. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992.
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004.
Docherty, Thomas. Postmodernism: A Reader. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Har-
vester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 351

Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940–1980: A Comprehensive History

and Evaluation. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Lee, Alison, and Thomas Carmichael, eds. Postmodern Times: A Critical Guide
to the Contemporary. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. New
York: Greenwood, 1986.
Madsen, Deborah L. Postmodernism: A Bibliography, 1926–1994. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1995.
Malpas, Simon, ed. Postmodern Debates. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001.
Nicol, Bran, ed. Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.
Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1990.
Sim, Stuart. The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought. Cambridge:
Icon Books, 1998.
———, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 2d ed. London: Rout-
ledge, 2005.
Taylor, Victor E., and Charles Winquist, eds. Encyclopedia of Postmodernism.
London: Routledge, 2001
Waugh, Patricia, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader. London: Arnold, 1992.
Wheale, Nigel, ed. Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader. London: Rout-
ledge, 1995.
Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1999.

Theories of Postmodernism
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. St. Louis, Mo.: Telos, 1981.
———. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, Mo.: Te-
los, 1981.
———. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New
York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
———. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.
———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interroga-
tions. London: Macmillan, 1991.
Callinicos, Alex. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge:
Polity, 1989.
Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism.” New Left Re-
view 152 (1985): 60–73.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. Trans. William Weaver. London: Pic-
ador, 1987.
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352 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gottdiener, M.M. Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of

Postmodern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Helmling, Steven. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the
Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-
modernism. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92.
———. The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986: Volume I, Situations of
Theory. London: Routledge, 1988.
———. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988:
347–57.
———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London:
Verso, 1991.
———. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on Postmodernism, 1983–1998.
London: Verso, 1998.
Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? 3d ed. London: Academy Editions,
1989.
———. The Language of Post-modern Architecture. 5th ed. London: Academy
Editions, 1987.
Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Postmodernism and Its Discontents. London: Routledge,
1988.
Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Be-
yond. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984.
———. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985.
Trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. London: Turnaround, 1992.
Poster, Mark, ed. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Polity, 1988.
Ryle, Martin, and Kate Soper. To Relish the Sublime?: Culture and Self-reali-
sation in Postmodern Times. London: Verso, 2002.
Stratton, Jon. Writing Sites : A Genealogy of the Postmodern World. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Postmodern and Poststructuralist Theory

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.
———. Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.
———. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. London:
Cape, 1984.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 353

Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992.

———. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University
Press, 1997.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Anne Smock. Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone,
1984.
———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Bal-
timore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1978.
———. “The Law of Genre.” On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1981: 51–77.
Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
———. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith.
London: Tavistock, 1972.
———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977.
New York: Pantheon, 1980.
———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Tavistock, 1970.
Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Ed-
inburgh University Press, 1996.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique
22 (Winter, 1981): 3–14.
———. The Theory of Communicatve Action. Vol. 1. Reason and Rationaliza-
tion of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
———. The Theory of Communicatve Action. Vol. 2. Lifeworld and System: A
Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1987.
Heller, Agnes, and Ferenc Fehér. The Postmodern Political Condition. Cam-
bridge: Polity, 1988.
Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1992.
Kroker, Arthur. The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity. Bas-
ingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1992.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Lon-
don: Athlone, 1993.
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354 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Postmodern Fables. Trans. Robert Harbey. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1997.
Norris, Christopher. The Truth about Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. New York: Routledge,
1991.
Ross, Andrew, ed. Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-
modern Culture. Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1988.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizotti. New York: Semio-
text(e), 1983.

Postmodernity and Postmodern Culture

Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998.
Angus, Ian, and Sut Jhally, eds. Cultural Politics in Contemporary America.
New York: Routledge, 1989.
Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic
Books, 1976.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York: Guilford,
1997.
Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth
Century in Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Crook, Stephen, Jan Pakulski, and Malcolm Waters. Postmodernization:
Change in Advanced Society. London: Sage, 1992.
Dickstein, Morris. The Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New
York: Basic Books, 1977.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage 1990.
Frow, John. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Post-
modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics be-
tween the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge, 1994.
Kroker, Arthur, and David Cook. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture
and Hyper-Aesthetics. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988.
McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge,
1994.
Maltby, Paul. The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique. Albany, N.Y.:
SUNY Press, 2002.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 355

Pfeil, Fred. Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture.
London: Verso, 1990.
Rose, Margaret A. The Post-modern and the Post-industrial: A Critical Analy-
sis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Readings, Bill, and Bennet Schaber, eds. Postmodernism Across the Ages: Es-
says for a Postmodernity That Wasn’t Born Yesterday. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syra-
cuse University Press, 1993.
Smart, Barry. Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies. London: Rout-
ledge, 1992.
———. Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1993.
Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Theory. London: Verso, 1989.
Wakefield, Neville. Postmodernism: The Twilight of the Real. London: Pluto,
1990.

Postmodernity, Globalization, and Cyberculture

Aronowitz, Stanley, et al., ed. Technoscience and Cyberculture. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Bender, Gretchen, and Timothy Druckrey, eds. Culture on the Brink: Ideologies
of Technology. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994.
Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.
Dery, Mark, ed. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1994.
———. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York:
Grove, 1996.
Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. Mapping Cyberspace. London: Routledge,
2001.
Featherstone, Mike, and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyber-
punk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage, 1995.
Gray, Chris Hables, ed. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991: 149–81.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernet-
ics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Post-
modern and Science Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2002.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 356

356 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jameson, Fredric, and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.
Markley, Robert, ed. Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Mitchell, William. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. Culture and Technology. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Robins, Kevin, and Frank Webster. Times of the Technoculture: From the In-
formation Society to the Virtual Life. London: Routledge, 1999.
Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age
of Limits. London: Verso, 1991.
Sassower, Raphael. Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience. New
York: Routledge, 1995.
Shields, Rob, ed. Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Liv-
ing Bodies. London: Sage, 1996.
Waters, Malcolm. Globalization. 2d ed. London: Routledge, 2001.
Wolmark, Jenny, ed. Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs
and Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Postmodernist Art, Film, and Media

Barr, Marleen S. Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987.
Barr, Marleen. Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1992.
Bignell, Jonathan. Postmodern Media Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2000.
Brooker, Peter, and Will Brooker, eds. Postmodern After-Images. London:
Arnold, 1997.
Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1989.
Denzin, Norman K. Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Con-
temporary Cinema. London: Sage, 1991.
Lochhead, Judy, and Joseph Auner, eds. Postmodern Music/Postmodern
Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Wolmark, Jenny. Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmod-
ernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 357

POSTMODERNIST AESTHETICS

Modernism, Postmodernism and the Avant-Garde

Auslander, Philip. From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and
Postmodernism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Benjamin, Andrew. Art, Mimesis, and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philoso-
phy of Difference. London: Routledge, 1991.
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995.
Butler, Christopher. After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-
Garde. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Deca-
dence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987.
Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle: Bay Press,
1985.
———. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Kearney, Richard. The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1994.
Murphy, Richard. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and
the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The New Poetics. Malden, UK:
Blackwell, 2001.
Russell, Charles. Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-
Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-
Garde. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Waugh, Patricia, ed. Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the
Study of Modern Literature. London: Arnold, 1996.
Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “Postmodernity, Métaphore manquée, and the Myth of the
Trans-avant-garde.” Sub-Stance 48 (1986): 68–90.

Literary Aesthetics: Theories and Poetics

Ballard, J. G. “Which Way to Inner Space?” New Worlds 118 (May 1962): 2–3,
116–18.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book. New York: Put-
nam, 1984: 62–76.
———. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction.” The Friday
Book. New York: Putnam, 1984: 193–206.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 358

358 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Los Angeles: Sun &
Moon Press, 1986.
———. A Poetics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
———. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999.
Butor, Michel. Inventory. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Cape, 1970.
Coover, Robert. “The End of Books.” The New York Times Book Review, June
21, 1992: 11, 23–25.
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science
Fiction. Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1977.
———. Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Pleas-
antville, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1984.
Elkin, Stanley. “Plot.” Sub-Stance 27 (1980): 70–74.
Federman, Raymond, ed. Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow. Chicago:
Swallow, 1975.
———. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1993.
Fuentes, Carlos. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz,
1969.
Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Gass, William H. The World within the Word. New York: Knopf, 1978.
———. Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston: Godine, 1979.
———. Habitations of the Word. New York: Touchstone, 1986.
Gaddis, William. “The Art of Fiction CI.” Paris Review, 105 (1987): 55–89.
Graff, Gerald. “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough.” The Novel To-
day. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. London: Fontana, 1977: 217–49.
———. Literature against Itself. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Mathews, Harry, and Brotchie, Alastair. Oulipo Compendium. London: Atlas,
1998.
Moorcock, Michael. “A New Literature for the Space Age.” New Worlds 142
(May–June 1964): 2–3.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Trans.
Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove, 1961.
Reed, Ishmael. Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. New York: Avon, 1978.
Ricardou, Jean. Pour une théorie du nouveau roman. Paris: Seuil, 1971.
———. Nouveaux problèmes du roman. Paris: Seuil, 1978.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Trans. Richard
Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Sollers, Philippe. Logiques. Paris: Seuil, 1968.
———. “The Novel and the Experience of Limits.” Surfiction: Now and To-
morrow. Ed. Raymond Federman. Chicago: Swallow, 1975: 59–74.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 359

Sukenick, Ronald. “The New Tradition in Fiction.” Surfiction: Now and To-
morrow. Ed. Raymond Federman. Chicago: Swallow, 1975: 35–45.
———. In Form: Nine Digressions on the Act of Fiction. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1985.

Literary Aesthetics: Critical Works

Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Pol-
itics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1992
Blau, Herbert. The Eye of the Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1987.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New
York: Routledge, 1990.
Hassan, Ihab. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1975.
———. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. 2d
ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
———. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture and Society 2: 3
(1985): 119–31.
———. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New
York: Routledge, 1988.
———. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. London: Macmillan, 1994.
Kernan, Alvin B. The Death of Literature. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1990.
Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 2004.
Varsava, Jerry A. Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis and the
Reader. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fic-
tion. London: Methuen, 1984.
———. Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism. London: Arnold, 1992.

Anthologies and Collections

Amerika, Mark, and Ronald Sukenick, eds. Degenerative Prose: Writing Be-
yond Category. Boulder, Col.: Black Ice, 1995.
Amerika, Mark, and Lance Olsen, eds. In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays
on the Avant-Pop. San Diego, Cal.: San Diego University Press, 1995.
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360 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein. The L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E Book.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Burroughs, William S., with Daniel Odier. The Job. London: Calder, 1984.
Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. London:
Calder, 1985.
Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. Postmodern American
Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1998.
Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New
York: Norton, 1994.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation. Boulder, Col:
Black Ice, 1993.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. Har-
mondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1995.
Motte, Warren F., ed. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Normal, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive, 1998.
Ridinger, Gayle, and Gian Paolo Renello, eds. Italian Poetry, 1950–1990: A
Bilingual Anthology. Boston: Dante University Press, 1996.
Rosset, Barney, ed. Evergreen Review Reader: 1967–1973. New York: Four
Walls Eight Windows, 1998.
Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree. Orono, Maine.: National Poetry Foun-
dation, 1986.

Interviews
Allen, William Rodney, ed. Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson: Uni-
versity Press of Mississippi, 1988.
Barker, James R. “An Interview with John Fowles.” Michigan Quarterly Re-
view 25: 4 (Autumn, 1989): 661–83.
Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American
Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.
Bunge, Nancy, ed. Conversations with Clarence Major. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2002.
Delany, Samuel R. Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction,
and Some Comics. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Gado, Frank. First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing. Schenectady,
N.Y.: Union College Press, 1973.
Gass, William S. “A Debate: William Gass and John Gardner.” Anything Can
Happen. Eds. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 1983: 20–31.
LeClair, Tom, and Larry McCaffery, eds. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with
Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 361

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contem-
porary American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1990.
McKenzie, James. “Pole Vaulting in Top Hats: A Public Conversation with
John Barth, William Gass, and Ishmael Reed.” Modern Fiction Studies 22: 2
(1976): 131–51.
Reder, Michael. Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2000.
Reed, Peter J., and Marc Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and
Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.
Skenazy, Paul, and Tera Martin, eds. Conversations with Maxine Hong
Kingston. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Vale, V., ed. J.G. Ballard: Interviews. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications,
2005.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE
(FICTION, DRAMA, AND POETRY)

African, Asian, and Australasian Authors

Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. London: Faber, 1985.
———. Oscar and Lucinda. London: Faber, 1988.
———. True History of the Kelly Gang. London: Faber, 2001.
Coetzee, J.M. In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.
———. Life and Times of Michael K. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.
———. Foe. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
———. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg, 1999.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. London: Michael Joseph, 1962.
———. The Memoirs of a Survivor. London: Octagon, 1974.
———. Shikasta. London: Cape, 1979.
Levy, Deborah. Swallowing Geography. London: Cape, 1993.
———. Billy and Girl. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
Murakami, Haruki. Sekai no owari to hâdoboirudo wandārando. Tokyo: Shin-
chosha, 1985. (Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World. Trans. Al-
fred Birnbaum. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991.)
———. Noruwei no mori. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987. (Norwegian Wood. Trans.
Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage, 2000.)
———. Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru. Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1994. (The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Knopf, 1997.)
Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. London: Cape, 1991.
———. Songs of Enchantment. London: Cape, 1993.
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362 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Astonishing the Gods. London: Phoenix House, 1995.

———. Infinite Riches. London: Phoenix House, 1998.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Cape, 1981.
———. Shame. London: Cape, 1993.
———. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988.
———. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Cape, 1995.
———. The Ground beneath Her Feet. London: Cape, 1999.
———. Shalimar the Clown. London: Cape, 2005

European Authors
Ackroyd, Peter. Hawksmoor. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985.
———. Chatterton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.
———. English Music. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992.
———. The Plato Papers. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999.
Atxaga, Bernardo. Obabakoak. Donostia, Spain: Erein, 1988. (Obabakoak.
Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New York: Pantheon, 1992.)
Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Cape, 1970.
———. Vermilion Sands. London: Cape, 1973.
———. Crash. London: Cape, 1973.
———. The Voices of Time. London: Dent, 1984.
———. War Fever. London: Collins, 1990.
Banville, John. The Book of Evidence. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Cape, 1984.
———. A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters. London: Cape, 1989.
———. England, England. London: Cape, 1998.
Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: A Trilogy. Paris:
Olympia, 1959.
———. En attendant Godot. Paris: Minuit, 1952. (Waiting for Godot. London:
Samuel French, 1957.)
Bénabou, Marcel. Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres. Paris: Hachette,
1986. (Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. Trans. David Kornacker.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.)
———. Jette ce livre avant qu’il soit trop tard! Paris: Seghers, 1992. (Dump
This Book While You Still Can! Trans. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2001.)
Bernhard, Thomas. Das Kalkwerk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. (The
Lime Works. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986.)
———. Beton. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. (Concrete. Trans. David
McClintock. London: Dent, 1984.)
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 363

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 363

———. Wittgensteins Neffe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. (Wittgen-

stein’s Nephew. Trans. Ewad Osers. London: Quartet, 1986.)
———. Auslöschung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. (Extinction. Trans.
David McClintock. London: Quartet, 1995.)
———. Heldenplatz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988.
Bonnefoy, Yves. New and Selected Poems. Trans. John Naughton. Manchester,
UK: Carcanet, 1995.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Amalgamemnon. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1984.
———. The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Four Novels. Manchester, UK:
Carcanet, 1986.
Butor, Michel. L’Emploi du temps. Paris: Minuit, 1956. (Passing Time. Trans.
Jean Stewart. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.)
———. La Modification. Paris: Minuit, 1957. (Second Thoughts. Trans. Jean
Stewart. London: Faber, 1958; A Change of Heart. Trans. Jean Stewart. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1959.)
———. Degrés. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. (Degrees. Trans. Richard Howard. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1962.)
———. Mobile. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. (Mobile. Trans. Richard Howard. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1963.)
———. Boomerang. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. (Letters from the Antipodes. Trans.
Michael Spencer. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1981.)
Byatt, A.S. Possession. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990.
———. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000.
Calder, Richard. Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things. New York: St. Martin’s,
1998.
———. Malignos. London: Earthlight, 2000.
Calvino, Italo. I nostri antenati. Torino: Einaudi, 1960. (Our Ancestors. Trans.
Archibald Colquhoun. London: Pan, 1980.)
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Latin American Authors

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———. El siglo del viento. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986. (Century of the Wind.
Trans. Cedric Belfrage. London: Minerva, 1990.)
———. El libro de los abrazos. Montevideo: Chanchito, 1989. (The Book of
Embraces. Trans. Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer. New York: Norton,
1991.)
García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,
1967. (One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York:
Harper & Row, 1970.)
———. El otoño del patriarca. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1975. (The Au-
tumn of the Patriarch. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper, 1976.)
———. El amor en los tiempos del cólera. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1985.
(Love in the Time of Cholera. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Knopf,
1988.)
———. El general en su laberinto. Bogota: Oveja Negra, 1989. (The General in
His Labyrinth. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Knopf, 1990.)
Lins, Osman. Avolavara. Sao Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1973. (Avolavara. Trans.
Gregory Rabassa. New York: Random House, 1990.)
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 373

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 373

———. A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia. Sao Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1976.

(The Queen of the Prisons of Greece. Trans. Adria Frizzi. Normal, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive, 1995.)
Paz, Octavio. The Collected Poems 1957–1987. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. Man-
chester, UK: Carcanet, 1988.
Puig, Manuel. La traición de Rita Hayworth. Buenos Aires: Alvarez, 1968. (Be-
trayed by Rita Hayworth. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Dutton,
1971.)
———. Boquitas Pintados. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969. (Heartbreak
Tango. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Dutton, 1973.)
———. El beso de la mujer araña. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976. (Kiss of the
Spiderwoman. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New York: Knopf, 1979.)
Sarduy, Severo. De donde son los cantantes. Mexico: Mortiz, 1967. (From
Cuba with a Song. Trans. S.J. Levine. New York: Dutton, 1973.)
———. Cobra. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1972. (Cobra. Trans. S.J. Levine.
New York: Dutton, 1975.)
Valenzuela, Luisa. Cola de Lagartija. Buenos Aires: Bruguera, 1983. (The
Lizard’s Tail. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1983.)
———. Realidad Nacional desde la Cama. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Lati-
noamericana, 1990. (Bedside Manners. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1995.)
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La casa verde. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1963. (The Green
House. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.)
———. Conversación en la catedral. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969. (Conversa-
tion in the Cathedral. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row,
1975.)
———. La Guerra del fin del mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981. (The War of
the End of the World. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1984.)
———. Historia de Mayta. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984. (The Real Life of Ale-
jandro Mayta. Trans. Alfred J. MacAdam. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1987.)

North American Authors

Abish, Walter. Alphabetical Africa. New York: New Directions, 1974.
———. How German Is It? New York: New Directions, 1980.
———. In the Future Perfect. New York: New Directions, 1977.
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove, 1984.
———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 374

374 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. In Memoriam to Identity. New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1990.

———. My Mother: Demonology, A Novel. New York: Pantheon, 1993.
Amerika, Mark. The Kafka Chronicles. Boulder, Col.: Fiction Collective 2,
1993.
———. Sexual Blood. Boulder, Col.: Fiction Collective 2, 1995.
———. Grammaton, www.grammaton.com, 1997.
Antin, David. Talking. New York: Kulchur, 1972.
———. Tuning. New York: New Directions, 1984.
Ashbery, John. The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1962.
———. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: Dutton, 1970.
———. Three Poems. New York: Viking, 1972.
———. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking, 1975.
———. Your Name Here. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Cape, 1986.
———. The Blind Assassin. London: Bloomsbury, 2000.
———. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Barth, John. The Sotweed Factor. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
———. Giles Goat Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus. New York: Doubleday,
1966.
———. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Bantam, 1969.
———. LETTERS. New York: Putnam, 1979.
Barthelme, Donald. City Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
———. Sadness. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972.
———. Amateurs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.
———. Sixty Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.
Bernstein, Charles. Shades. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon Press, 1978.
———. Controlling Interests. New York: Roof, 1980.
———. Islets/Irritations. New York: Jordan Davies Books, 1983.
———. Dark City. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1984.
———. With Strings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Water Music. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.
———. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1987.
Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America. San Francisco: Four Seasons
Foundation, 1967.
———. In Watermelon Sugar. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1968.
———. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. London: Picador, 1974.
———. Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel. London: Picador, 1979.
Burroughs, William S. The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia, 1959.
———. The Soft Machine. Paris: Olympia, 1961.
———. The Ticket That Exploded. Paris: Olympia, 1962.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 375

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 375

———. Nova Express. New York: Grove, 1964.

———. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. New York: Grove, 1971.
———. Cities of the Red Night. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981.
Cadigan, Pat. Synners. London: Grafton, 1991.
———. Fools. London: Grafton, 1994.
Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh,
Prop. New York: Random House, 1968.
———. Pricksongs and Descants. New York: Dutton, 1969.
———. The Public Burning. New York: Viking, 1977.
———. Gerald’s Party. New York: Linden Press, 1986.
———. John’s Wife. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New
York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
Creeley, Robert. For Love: Poems, 1950–1960. New York: Scribner, 1962.
———. Collected Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon, 2000.
Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. New York: Bantam, 1975.
———. Triton. New York: Bantam, 1976.
DeLillo, Don. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf, 1976.
———. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985.
———. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988.
———. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. New York: Putnam, 1962.
———. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. New York: Doubleday, 1965.
———. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday, 1968.
Duncan, Robert. Of the War: Passages 22–27. Berkeley, Cal.: Oyez, 1966.
———. Ground Work: Before the War. New York: New Directions, 1983.
———. Ground Work II: In the Dark. New York: New Directions, 1987.
Elkin, Stanley. The Dick Gibson Show. New York: Random House, 1971.
———. The Franchiser. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.
———. George Mills. New York: Dutton, 1982.
———. The Magic Kingdom. New York: Dutton, 1985.
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994.
———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Ellroy, James. The Black Dahlia. New York: Mysterious Press, 1987.
———. The Big Nowhere. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988.
———. L.A. Confidential. New York: Mysterious Press, 1990.
———. White Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.
Erickson, Steve. Tours of the Black Clock. New York: Poseidon, 1989.
———. Arc d’X. New York: Poseidon, 1993.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 376

376 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Amnesiascope. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Federman, Raymond. Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse.
Chicago: Swallow, 1971.
———. Take It or Leave It. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976.
———. The Voice in the Closet. Madison, Wis.: Coda Press, 1979.
———. The Twofold Vibration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Gaddis, William. The Recognitions. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955.
———. JR. New York: Knopf, 1975.
———. A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon, 1994.
Gass, William H. Omensetter’s Luck. New York: New American Library, 1966.
———. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. New York:
Harper & Row, 1968.
———. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1968.
———. The Tunnel. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
———. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam, 1993.
———. Idoru. New York: Putnam, 1996.
———. Pattern Recognition. New York: Putnam, 2003.
Hawkes, John. The Cannibal. New York: New Directions, 1949.
———. The Lime Twig. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1961.
Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck Press, 1980.
———. Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures,
1991.
———. A Border Comedy. New York: Granary Press, 2001.
Hoban, Russell. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. London: Cape,
1973.
———. Kleinzeit. London: Cape, 1974.
———. Riddley Walker. London: Cape, 1980.
———. Pilgermann. London: Cape, 1983.
———. Fremder. London: Cape, 1996.
Howe, Susan. Secret History of the Dividing Line. New York: Telephone
Books, 1978.
———. Defenestration of Prague. New York: Kulchur, 1983.
———. Singularities. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.
Katz, Steve. The Exagggerations of Peter Prince. New York: Holt, Rhinehart &
Winston, 1968.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among
Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976.
———. Tripmaster Monkey. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Leyner, Mark. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. New York: Harmony, 1990.
———. Et Tu, Babe. New York: Harmony, 1992.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 377

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 377

———. The Tetherballs of Bougainville. New York: Vintage, 1998.

McElroy, Joseph. A Smuggler’s Bible. New York: Harcourt, 1966.
———. Lookout Cartridge. New York: Knopf, 1974.
———. Plus. New York: Knopf, 1977.
———. Women and Men. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Major, Clarence. Reflex and Bone Structure. New York: Fiction Collective,
1975.
———. Emergency Exit. New York: Fiction Collective, 1979.
Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Elmwood Park. Ill.: Dalkey Archive,
1988.
———. This Is Not a Novel. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001.
Mathews, Harry. The Conversions. New York: Random House, 1962.
———. Tlooth. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.
———. Cigarettes. New York: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1987.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.
———. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.
———. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
———. Jazz. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1992.
Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990.
———. White Butterfly. New York: Norton, 1992.
———. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. New York: Norton, 1998.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Paris: Olympia, 1955.
———. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.
———. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw Hill, 1969.
Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983.
———. Collected Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Norton, 1976.
Pynchon, Thomas. V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.
———. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
———. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
———. Vineland. Boston: Little Brown, 1990.
———. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Reed, Ishmael. Yellow Back Radio Broke Down. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1969.
———. Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
———. Flight to Canada. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967.
———. The Terrible Twos. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.
Shirley, John. New Noir. Boulder, Col.: Fiction Collective Two, 1993.
Silliman, Ron. Ketjak. San Francisco: This Press, 1978.
———. Tjanting. Berkeley, Cal.: The Figures, 1981.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 378

378 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. The Age of Huts. New York: Roof Books, 1986.

———. N/O. New York: Roof Books, 1994.
Sorrentino, Gilbert. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. New York: Pan-
theon, 1971.
———. Mulligan Stew. New York: Grove, 1979.
Spicer, Jack. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow,
1975.
Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam, 1992.
———. The Diamond Age. New York: Bantam, 1995.
———. Cryptonomicon. New York: Avon, 1999.
Sterling, Bruce. Schismatrix. New York: Arbor House, 1985.
———, ed. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Arbor House,
1986.
———. Islands in the Net. New York: Arbor House, 1988.
Sukenick, Ronald. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: Dial
Press, 1969.
———. Out. Chicago: Swallow, 1973.
———. 98.6. New York: Fiction Collective, 1975.
———. Long Talking Bad Condition Blues. New York: Fiction Collective, 1979.
———. Narralogues: Truth in Fiction. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2000.
Vollmann, William T. You Bright and Risen Angels. New York: Atheneum,
1987.
———. The Ice Shirt. New York: Viking, 1990.
———. Europe Central. New York: Viking, 2005.
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Delacorte, 1959.
———. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte, 1969.
———. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delacorte, 1973.
Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. New York: Viking Penguin,
1987.
———. Girl with Curious Hair. New York: Norton, 1989.
———. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little Brown, 1996.
Watten, Barrett. Frames: 1971–1990. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE (CRITICAL WORKS)

General Contemporary Literature

Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contempo-
rary Novel. London: Pluto, 1998.
Boccia, Michael. Form as Content and Rhetoric in the Modern Novel. New
York: Lang, 1989.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 379

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 379

Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern

Fiction. 1st ed. London: Fontana, 1977.
Clayton, Jay. The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and
Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Dipple, Elizabeth. The Unresolvable Plot: Reading Contemporary Fiction.
New York: Routledge, 1988.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3d ed. London: Pelican, 1980.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Harris, Charles. Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd. New Haven,
Conn.: College and University Press, 1971.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary
American Fiction. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
———. “The Extra-Literary in Contemporary American Fiction.” Contempo-
rary American Fiction. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and Sigmund Ro. London:
Arnold, 1987: 19–37.
Moylan, Tom, and Baccolini Raffaella, eds. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction
and the Utopian Imagination. London: Routledge, 2003.
O’ Donnell, Patrick. Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contem-
porary American Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.
———. “Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative.” Boundary 2, 19: 1
(1992): 181–204.
Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.
Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the
Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2001.
Poirier, Richard. “The Politics of Self-Parody.” Partisan Review 35: 3 (1968):
339–53.
———. The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Lan-
guages of Contemporary Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971.
Richard, Claude. “Causality and Mimesis in Contemporary Fiction.” Sub-
Stance 40 (1983): 84–93.
Sturrock, John, ed. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1996.
Tanner, Tony. The City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970. London: Cape,
1976.
———. Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
Versluys, Kristiaan, ed. Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction. Am-
sterdam: Rodopi, 1992.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:44 AM Page 380

380 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wilde, Alan. Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic

Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.
———. Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.
Young, Elizabeth, and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on Amer-
ican ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992.

General Studies of Postmodernist Literature

Broderick, Damien. Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Burke, Ruth E. Games of Poetics: Ludic Criticism and Postmodern Fiction.
New York: Lang, 1994.
Caesar, Terry. “‘Impervious to Criticism’: Contemporary Parody and Trash.”
Sub-Stance 64 (1991): 67–79.
Caramello, Charles. Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self and Postmodern American
Fiction. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1983.
Currie, Mark, ed. Metafiction. London: Longman, 1995.
DiGaetani, John L. A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Con-
temporary Playwrights. New York: Greenwood, 1991.
Farrell, Frank B. Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: the Recovery of the
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Fokkema, Douwe. Literary History, Modernism and Postmodernism. Amster-
dam: Benjamins, 1984.
Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s
Experimental Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Gaggi, Silvio. From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film,
the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1997.
Gregson, Ian. Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Es-
trangement. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
———. Postmodern Literature. London: Arnold, 2004
Hardin, Michael. Playing the Reader: The Homoerotics of Self-Reflexive Fic-
tion. New York: Lang, 2000.
Harkin, Patricia, and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition
and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Associa-
tion of America, 1991.
Jarvis, Brian. Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in
Contemporary American Culture. London: Pluto, 1998.
Lloyd Smith, Allan. “Brain Damage: The World and the Word in Postmodernist
Writing.” Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and Sig-
mund Ro. London: Arnold, 1987: 39–50.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:45 AM Page 381

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 381

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

———. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992.
———. “Making (Non)Sense of Postmodern Poetry.” Language, Text and Con-
text: Essays in Stylistics. Ed. Michael Toolan. New York: Routledge, 1992.
———. The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Mepham, John. “Narratives of Postmodernism.” Postmodernism and Contem-
porary Fiction. Ed. Edmund J. Smyth. London: Batsford, 1991: 138–55.
Michael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post–World
War II Fiction. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996.
Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption
in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: the Art of Fiction in an Age of In-
flation. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985.
Olsen, Lance. Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy.
New York: Greenwood, 1987.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound
Tradition. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern, 1996.
Quendler, Christian. From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction: A
Contribution to the History of Literary Self-reflexivity in its Philosophical
Context. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001.
Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967;
rev. as Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1979.
Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future.
Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
Seed, David, ed. Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis. London:
Macmillan, 2000.
Slusser, George E., and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Tech-
nique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1993.
Smyth, Edmund J., ed. Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. London:
Batsford, 1991.
Spanos, William V. Repetitions: The Postmodern Occasion in Literature and
Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Stevick, Philip. “Scheherezade runs out of plots, goes on talking; the King, puz-
zled, listens: an Essay on New Fiction.” The Novel Today. Ed. Malcolm
Bradbury. London: Fontana, 1977: 186–216.
Thiher, Allen. Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern
Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Watt, Stephen. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Ar-
bor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:45 AM Page 382

382 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London: Rout-

ledge, 1989.
Whitmore, Jon. Directing Postmodern Theater: Shaping Signification in Per-
formance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Thematic Studies of Postmodernist Literature

History and Postmodernism
Booker, M. Keith. Monsters, Mushroom Clouds and the Cold War: American
Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 2001.
Ermarth, Elizabeth. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crises of Rep-
resentational Time. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Heise, Ursula K. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Martin, Richard. “Clio Bemused: The Uses of History in Contemporary Amer-
ican Fiction.” Sub-Stance 27 (1980): 13–24.
Moraru, Christian. Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Post-
modernism. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004.
Olster, Stacey. Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fic-
tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Politics and Postmodernism

Cohen, Josh. Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the
Politics of Seeing. London: Pluto, 1998.
Edwards, Brian. Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction. New York: Garland,
1998.
Fletcher, M.D. Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-
modern Context. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987.
Middleton, Peter. “Language Poetry and Linguistic Activism.” Social Text
25–26 (1990): 242–53.
Worthington, Kim L. Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Con-
temporary Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

Ethnicity and Postcolonialism

Grice, Helena. Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian-American Writ-
ing. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002.
06-641_z1_Bib.qxd 1/19/07 9:45 AM Page 383

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 383

De Toro, Fernando, and Alfonso de Toro, eds. Borders and Margins: Post-Colo-
nialism and Post-Modernism. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1995.
De Toro, Fernando. New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the
Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener,
2003.

Narrative and Postmodernism

Cornis-Pope, Marcel. Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold
War Era and After. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
D’Haen, Theo, and Hans Bertens, eds. Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in
Postmodernism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.
Smethurst, Paul. The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in
Contemporary Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

Genre and Postmodernism

Cornwell, Neil. The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. Lon-
don: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
Davis, Mike. “Sunshine or Noir?” City of Quartz. London: Vintage, 1991:
15–97.
Perloff, Marjorie, ed. Postmodern Genres. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1989.
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Michael Moorcock
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Toni Morrison
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Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998.
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Peach, Linden, ed. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York:
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Vladimir Nabokov
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. London: Chatto & Win-
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Hennard, Martine. “Playing a Game of Words in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale
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Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1993.
Sharpe, Tony. Vladimir Nabokov. London: Arnold, 1991.
Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction.
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Frank O’Hara
Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. 2d ed. Chicago: Uni-
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McPheron, William. Charles Olson, The Critical Reception, 1941–1983. New
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Georges Perec
Bellos, David. George Perec: A Life in Words. London: Harvill, 1999.
Mathews, Harry. The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec. Flint, Mich.:
Bamberger Books, 1988.
Motte, Warren F. The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges
Perec. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum Monographs, 1984.

Harold Pinter
Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. London: Faber, 1996.
Gale, Steven H., ed. Critical Essays on Harold Pinter. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.
Regal, Martin S. Harold Pinter: A Question of Timing. Basingstoke, UK:
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Silverstein, Marc. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. Lewis-
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Manuel Puig
Levine, Suzanne Jill. Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fic-
tions. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

Thomas Pynchon
Abbas, Niran, ed. Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Madison, NJ:
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Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25 (1989):
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Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Carter, Dale. The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket
State. London: Verso, 1988.
Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. Columbus: Ohio State
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Copestake, Ian D., ed. American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction
of Thomas Pynchon. Oxford: Lang, 2003.
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Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall, ed. The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s “Mason and
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McHoul, Alec, and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional
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Madsen, Deborah L. The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. Leices-
ter, UK: Leicester University Press, 1991.
Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural De-
sire in the Works of Thomas Pynchon. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
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O’ Donnell, Patrick, ed. New Essays on ‘The Crying of Lot 49.’ Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa City: Univer-
sity of Iowa Press, 1988.
Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen, 1982.
Weisenberger, Steven. A ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ Companion: Sources and Notes
for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Raymond Queneau
Bastin, Nina. Queneau’s Fictional Worlds. New York: Lang, 2002.

Ishmael Reed
Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. New
York: St. Martin’s, 1988.
Mason Jr., Theodore O. “Performance, History, and Myth: The Problem of Ish-
mael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” Modern Fiction Studies 34: 1 (1988): 97–109.

Jean Ricardou
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ham, Ala.: Summa, 1984.

Alain Robbe-Grillet
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let. Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press, 1998.
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Jefferson, Ann. Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference.
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David Foster Wallace

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Nichols, Catherine. “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43: 1 (2001): 3–16.

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Jeanette Winterson
Burns, Christy. “Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Post-
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terson and the Politics of Reading. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
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Macmillan, 2005.

JOURNALS

Boundary 2. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Conjunctions. Annandale-on-Hudson, New York: Bard College.
Contemporary Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Washington D.C.: Heldref Pub-
lications.
diacritics. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Granta. London: Granta Publications.
Journal of Beckett Studies. Tallahassee: Florida State University
Journal of Modern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Modern Fiction Studies. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pynchon Notes. Hamilton: University of Miami-Hamilton; and Eau Claire:
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Review of Contemporary Fiction. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press.
SubStance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
World Literature Today. Norman: University of Oklahoma.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY • 403

WEBSITES

Alt-X Online Publishing Network (website for avant-pop writers and the Black
Ice imprint, the site also includes details of hyperfiction projects):
www.altx.com/alt.x
Contemporary Writers in the UK (British Council website): www.contemporary
writers.com
CTheory (a journal of contemporary postmodern culture and theory):
www.ctheory.net/home.aspx
Center for Book Culture (includes online pages for the Dalkey Archive Press, the
Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Context): www.centerforbookculture.org
Complete Review, The (website mainly related to contemporary world literature
with an experimental edge. Extensive internal links to reviews and with some
author pages): www.complete-review.com/main/main.html
Complete Review Quarterly, The (linked to The Complete Review, includes more
wide-ranging and scholarly work on 20th-century literature): www.complete-
review.com/quarterly/index.htm
Conjunctions (website for the journal of contemporary writing): www
.conjunctions.com
Electronic Poetry Center (includes author-based pages with bibliographies, ar-
ticles, and links to poetry and to author web-pages): http://epc.buffalo.edu
Electronic Poetry Review (international poetry with an emphasis on contempo-
rary work): www.poetry.org
Fantastic Fiction (includes bibliographies and publishing details of many con-
temporary writers, including some postmodernist fiction, although the site’s
main focus is on speculative fiction): www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/index.html
Fiction Collective Two: http://fc2.org
Granta: www.granta.com
Hyperizons (Hyperfiction website with details of hypertext writers, links to fic-
tion, bibliographies, and critical articles): www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic
.html
The Invisible Library (information on fictional authors and nonexistent texts,
with a catalog of examples that includes substantial reference to postmodernist
writers’ use of such devices): www.invisiblelibrary.com/ILMaindesk.htm
Labyrinthe: index des écrivains contemporains (French website with extensive
links to contemporary literature sites and individual author pages):
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/labyrinthe/contemporains.html
Literary Encyclopedia, The (general literature site with some useful material on
contemporary writing, including author studies and types of experimental lit-
erature): www.litencyc.com.
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404 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Modern American Poetry (index of 20th-century American poetry with many

links to postmodern poets): www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/index.htm
The Modern Word (20th-century and contemporary literature with individual
author pages): www.themodernword.com/themodword.cfm
OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle): www.oulipo.net
Poetry International Web (includes links to separate national poetry sites):
www.poetryinternational.org
Postmodern Culture (journal of academic articles and reviews with an interdis-
ciplinary approach to postmodernism): www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/con-
tents.all.html
Spike Magazine (a site that focuses on contemporary writing and includes arti-
cles, reviews, and interviews): www.spikemagazine.com/index.php
Stride Magazine (contemporary poetry website): www.stridemagazine.co.uk
World Literature Today Online (general contemporary literature with review
section organized by country or region): www.ou.edu/worldlit
06-641_z2_AA.qxd 1/19/07 9:46 AM Page 405

About the Author

Fran Mason (B.A., University of Southampton; Ph.D, University of

Southampton) is a lecturer at the University of Winchester, where he is
program director of film studies and the master’s program in contem-
porary popular knowledges. He also teaches a range of courses relating
to postmodernism, cyberculture, and contemporary writing for the
American studies program. Dr. Mason wrote his doctoral thesis on
American postmodernist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and has pub-
lished widely on film, literature, and contemporary culture, including
American Gangster Cinema: From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction (2002);
articles on contemporary fiction that include studies of Thomas Pyn-
chon and Richard Calder; and studies of cyborgs, cyberculture, and
popular culture.

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