Class 14 Literary Criticism Postmodern Fiction Postmodernist representation

Class #14 Literary Criticism

Postmodern Fiction • Postmodernist representation • Re-presenting the past

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

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

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

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

Postmodernist Representation • Metafiction “The novelist’s business is no longer to render the world, but to make one from language: fiction is no longer mimetic, but constructive” (Woods 56).

metafiction • Authors of metafiction often violate narrative levels by * intruding to comment on writing * involving his or herself with fictional characters * directly addressing the reader * openly questioning how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter reality, trying to ultimately prove that no singular truths or meanings exist http: //faculty. millikin. edu/~moconner/e 360/postmodern. html

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. millikin. edu/~moconner/e 360/postmodern. html

Re-presenting the past • Intertextuality Nostalgia or Transgression? Pastiche or parody?

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/excerpts/postmod. html

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/excerpts/postmod. html

Parody (Linda Hutcheon) • Postmodern fiction = historiographic metafiction = narratives of double-coded politics

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).

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 valueproblematizing, denaturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representations. ” (Hutcheon, Politics, 94)

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)

Food for Thought • 1. Discuss the characteristics of postmodern fiction in 黃凡’s〈如何測量 水溝的寬度〉. • 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. What’s the connection between 「水 溝」and 「靈魂」as intimated by the narrator on p. 14?

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/v 46/i 37/37 b 00401. htm • http: //www. altx. com/ebr/riposte/rip 2 ras. htm