Class

1
Class 14

• Literary Criticism

2
Postmodern Fiction

• Postmodernist representation
• Re-presenting the past

3
Postmodernist Representation

• Anti-realism
• . . . Many postmodern strategies are openly
  premised on a challenge to the realist notion of
  representation that presumes the transparency of
  the medium and thus the direct and natural link
  between sign and referent or between words and
  world
• 
  (Hutcheon, Politics, 34).

4
Postmodernist Representation

• Exhaustion and replenishment
• Literature itself had been exhausted, as Barth
  argued . . . . The great plots has been used
  again and again centuries of stylistic
  innovation and formal experimentation had left
  contemporary writers with nothing new to say or
  do. That nothing . . . Was the starting point
  for the postmoderns, itself the key to the
  treasure of a new literature, what Barth would
  subsequently call the literature of
  replenishment (Rowe 181).

5
Postmodernist Representation

• Laying bare the device
• Postmodern de-naturalizing the simultaneous
  inscribing and subverting of the conventions of
  narrative (Hutcheon, Politics, 49).

6
Postmodernist Representation

• Metafiction
• Fiction about fiction
• Narcissistic narrative
• Fiction that includes within itself a commentary
  a commentary on its own narrative and/or
  linguistic identity (Hutcheon, Narcissistic
  Narrative, 1)

7
Postmodernist Representation

• Metafiction
• The novelists business is no longer to
  render the world, but to make one from language
  fiction is no longer mimetic, but constructive
  (Woods 56).

8
metafiction

• Authors of metafiction often violate narrative
  levels by
• intruding to comment on writing involving
  his or herself with fictional characters
  directly addressing the reader openly
  questioning how narrative assumptions and
  conventions transform and filter reality, trying
  to ultimately prove that no singular truths or
  meanings exist
• http//faculty.millikin.edu/moconner/e360/p
  ostmodern.html

9
Metafiction

• unconventional and experimental techniques
• rejecting conventional plot refusing to
  attempt to become "real life" subverting
  conventions to transform 'reality' into a highly
  suspect concept flaunting and exaggerating
  foundations of their instability
• displaying reflexivity http//faculty.milliki
  n.edu/moconner/e360/postmodern.html

10
Re-presenting the past

• Intertextuality
• Nostalgia or Transgression?
• Pastiche or parody?

11
Pastiche (Fredric Jameson)

• Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a
  peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the
  wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead
  language. But it is a neutral practice of such
  mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior
  motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid
  of laughter and of any conviction that alongside
  the abnormal tongue you have momentarily
  borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still
  exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue
  with blind eyeballs . . . .
• http//prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/ex
  cerpts/postmod.html

12
Pastiche (Fredric Jameson)

• This omnipresence of pastiche is not
  incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor
  is it innocent of all passion it is at the least
  compatible with addiction--with a whole
  historically original consumers' appetite for a
  world transformed into sheer images of itself and
  for pseudoevents and spectacles . . . . It is
  for such objects that we may reserve Plato's
  conception of the simulacrum, the identical
  copy for which no original has ever existed.
• http//prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/ex
  cerpts/postmod.html

13
Parody (Linda Hutcheon)

• Postmodern fiction
• historiographic metafiction
• narratives of double-coded politics

14
Parody (Linda Hutcheon)

• Postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one
  that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts,
  the very concepts it challenges . . . (Hutcheon,
  Poetics, 3).
• Postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory,
  resolutely historical, and inescapably political
  (Hutcheon, Poetics, 4).

15
Parody (Linda Hutcheon)

• The prevailing interpretation is that
  postmodernism offers a value-free, decorative,
  de-historicized quotation of past forms and that
  this is a most apt mode for a culture like our
  own that is oversaturated with images. Instead, I
  would want to argue that postmodernist parody is
  a value-problematizing, denaturalizing form of
  acknowledging the history (and through irony, the
  politics) of representations. (Hutcheon,
  Politics, 94)

16
Parody (Linda Hutcheon)

• What I mean by parody . . . is not the
  ridiculing imitation of the standard theories and
  definitions . . . . The collective weight of
  parodic practice suggests a redefinition of
  parody as repetition with critical distance that
  allows ironic signalling of difference at the
  heart of similarity. In historiographic
  metafiction . . . This parody paradoxically
  enacts both change and cultural continuity
  (Hutcheon, Poetics, 26)

17
???????

• ???????????lt??gt??????????????gt???????????O?lt??
  ????gt?lt???gt??????
• ??????????lt?????????gt???????????lt???gt
• ?????????lt????gt?
• ?????????lt??????????gt?
• ??????????lt???gt
• http//www.srcs.nctu.edu.tw/taiwanlit/issue4/4-1.h
  tm

18
Food for Thought

• 1. Discuss the characteristics of postmodern
  fiction in ??slt?????????gt.
• 2. On p.24, the narrator reveals that they
  measured the width of the drainage ditch with the
  help of a rope tied to the end of an arrow,
  whereas in the end he says they never figured out
  how to do it in 1960. Why does the narrator
  contradict himself?
• 3. Whats the connection between ????and ????as
  intimated by the narrator on p. 14?

19
References

• Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative. New
  York Methuen, 1980.
• ---. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London
  Routledge, 1988.
• ---. The Politics of Postmodernism. London
  Routledge, 1989.
• Rowe, John Carlos. Postmodernist Studies.
  Redrawing the Boundaries. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt
  and Giles Gunn. New York MLA of America, 1992.
  179-208.
• Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester
  Manchester UP, 1999.
• http//chronicle.com/free/v46/i37/37b00401.htm
• http//www.altx.com/ebr/riposte/rip2/rip2ras.htm