Constructing Postmodernism"Postmodernism is not a found object, but a manufactured artifact." Beginning from this constructivist premise, Brian McHale develops a series of readings of problematically postmodernist novelsJoyce's Ulysses; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland; Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum; the novels of James McElroy and Christine Brooke-Rose, avant-garde works such as Kathy Aker's Empire of the Senseless, and works of cyberpunk science-fiction by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and others. Although mainly focused on "high" or "elite" cultural products, Constructing Postmodernism relates these products to such phenomena of postmodern popular culture as television and the cinema, paranoia and nuclear apocalypse, angelology and the cybernetic interface, and death, now as always, the true Final Frontier. McHale's previous book, Postmodernist Fiction (Routledge, 1987) seemed to propose a single, all-inclusive inventory of postmodernist poetics. This book, by contrast, proposes multiple, overlapping and intersecting inventoriesnot a construction of postmodernism, but a plurality of constructions. - Publisher description. |
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Contents
Introducing constructing | 1 |
Narrating literary histories | 17 |
Misreading Pynchon | 59 |
Reading postmodernists | 142 |
At the interface | 223 |
Notes | 268 |
308 | |
325 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Amalgamemnon angels apocalypse Barth Bloom Brooke-Rose Casaubon chapters characters Christine Brooke-Rose cognitive consciousness conspiracy conspiracy fiction construct course critics Crying of Lot culture cyberpunk cyberpunk SF death Diabolicals discourse displaced Eco's episode epistemological epistemological quest ernist essay Eumaeus example extra-diegetic extrapolated fictional world film Foucault's Pendulum function genre Gibson Gravity's Rainbow hallucination Higgins's instance interpretation Jameson Joyce Kenner kind language literally literary history mainstream Max Apple McElroy McElroy's McHale mediated metafictional metanarrative metaphor metonymic microworlds mind modernism modernist modernist poetics motifs movie Name narrative narrator Neuromancer norms novel nuclear ontological ontological plurality Pale Fire parallax parallel paranoid reading parody passage perhaps postcognitive postmod postmodernism postmodernist fiction postmodernist poetics postmodernist texts pronoun Pynchon reader reality reconstructed repertoire representation Rose Schismatrix science fiction second-person seems sense Slothrop space Sterling's story strategies Tlön transition Ulysses Vacuum Flowers Vineland words writing Xorandor