The Paradoxical Status of Knowledge in American Postmodern Fiction
Abstract
The question that the present work addresses is related to the paradoxical investment and questioning of knowledge in the American experimental fiction since the second half of the twentieth century. The thematic importance assigned in American postmodern fiction to the examination of language games that inform the narrativity of literary and informational or scientific texts, is linked to a critical exploration of the discursive articulations of knowledge. Such interest in the textuality and textualization of knowledge does not, however, bind postmodern fiction with a purely epistemological perspective. Actually, part of the paradoxes that inform the poetics of postmodern fiction are related to its tendency to situate its critique of the notion of knowledge within the arena of aesthetics, mainly because its major concern is with the status that knowledge acquires when appropriated by literary narrativity and the ways such appropriation affects the aesthetics of fiction.
References
- Atherton, Carol. Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge. 1880-2002. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2005.
- Chénetier, Marc. Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction since 1960. Trans. Elizabeth A. Houlding. Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.
- DeLillo, Don. Libra. London: Viking Penguin 1988.
- Federman, Raymond. Critifiction. Postmodern Essays. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
- Fischer, Michael M. J. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986. 194- 233.
- Gault, Pierre. John Hawkes: la parole coupée. Anatomie d’une écriture romanesque. Paris: Klincksieck, 1984.
- Habermas, Jürgen. Connaissance et intérêt. Trans. G. Clémençon and J.M. Brohm, Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
- Hawkes, John. The Cannibal. New York: New Directions, 1949.
- ---. The Lime Twig. New York: New Directions, 1961.
- ---. Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. New York: Penguin, 1985.