The Paradoxical Status of Knowledge in American Postmodern Fiction

Year 2010, Issue: 31, 57 - 78, 01.04.2010

Salwa Karoui-elounelli

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.
• Handwerk, Gary J. Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988.
• ---. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994, 1995.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992.
• Johnston, John. “Superlinear Fiction or Historical Diagram? Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Modern Fiction Studies 40.2 (1994): 319- 342.
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. London: Picador, 1977.
• Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin, 1962.
• Lyotard, Jean François. Discours, Figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.
• ---. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1984.
• McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. On Narrative. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• Paley, Grace. “A Conversation with My Father.” The Short Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1987. 951- 955.
• Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. London: Picador, 1966.
• Schafer, Roy. “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue.” On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1981. 25-49.
• Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Chicago, IL: U of Illinois P, 1979.
• Simmons, Philip, E. Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture and History in Postmodern American Fiction. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1997.
• Stern, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy [1759-67]. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967.
• Ziegler, Heide. “Love’s Labours Won. The Erotics of Contemporary Parody.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. P. O’Donnell and R. Con Davis. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1989.