POSTMODERNISM David Lodge Linda Hutcheon Bradbury, The Novel Today, 1977 1)1950s 2)1960s 3)1970’s 4)1980’s

POSTMODERNISM Frank Kermode, Parochial novels Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959) Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra flying, (1936) Academic Novels Angry Young Men (John Osborne and Kingsley Amis) John Osborne, Look back in Anger

POSTMODERNISM Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (1954) William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954) To the Ends of the Earth (1980- 1989) Iris Murdoch, «Against dryness. A polemical sketch» (1961)

POSTMODERNISM We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity. (Iris Murdoch “Against dryness”)

POSTMODERNISM The eighteenth century was an era of rationalistic allegories and moral tales. The nineteenth century (roughly) was the great era of the novel: and the novel throve upon a dynamic merging of the idea of person with the idea of class. Because nineteenth-century society was dynamic and interesting and because (to use a Marxist notion) the type and the individual could there be seen as merged, the solution of the eighteenth-century problem could be put off. It has been put off till now. (Iris Murdoch “Against dryness”)

POSTMODERNISM If we consider twentieth-century literature as compared to nineteenth-century literature, we notice certain significant contrasts. I said that, in a way, we were back in the eighteenth century, the era of rationalistic allegories and moral tales, the era when the idea of human nature was unitary and single. The nineteenth-century novel (I use these terms boldly and roughly: of course there were exceptions) was not concerned with ‘the human condition’, it was concerned with real various individuals struggling in society. The twentieth-century novel is usually either crystalline of journalistic; that is, it is either a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human conditions and not containing ‘characters’ in the nineteenth-century sense, or else it is a large shapeless quasi-documentary object, the degenerate descendent of the nineteenth-century novel, telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story enlivened with empirical facts. Neither of these kinds of literature engages with the problem that I mentioned above. Iris Murdoch “Against dryness”)

POSTMODERNISMO David Lodge‘The Novelist at the Crossroads’. 1969 ‘[t]he novelist who has any kind of self-awareness must at least hesitate at the crossroads; and the solution many novelists have chosen in their dilemma is to build their hesitation into the novel itself.’ (David Lodge, ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads,’ (Lodge’s emphases).

POSTMODERNISMO Doris Lessing, John Fowles and Muriel Spark Michel Butor, ‘The Novel as Research,’ The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, ed. Malcolm Bradbury, 1990.

POSTMODERNISM 1970s Magic(al) Realism Magic Realism, Magical realism, marvellous realism German : Magischer Realismus Spanish Realismo Magico; lo realismo maravilloso

POSTMODERNISM Gabriel Garzia Marquez Isabelle Allende Salman Rushdie Toni Morrison Angela Carter

POSTMODERNISM

POSTMODERNISM MAGIC REALISM “the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” . Franz Roh MAGICAL REALISM “ commingling of the improbable and the mundane” Salman Rushdie

POSTMODERNISM “Magical realism at its best opposes fundamentalism and purity; it is at odds with racism, ethnicity and the quest for tap roots, origins and homogeneity” Brenda Cooper

POSTMODERNISM Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (1990) Todorov

POSTMODERNISM Metawriting Cervantes Don Quixote (1605-1615) Sterne Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) Flaubert Madame Bovary (1856) John Barth “literature of exhaustion” Harold Bloom Anxiety of influence Roland Barthes (S/Z) de-doxification

POSTMODERNISM Metawriting Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962) John Fowles Mantissa (1982) William Golding The Paper Man (1984)

POSTMODERNISM The Writer as Liar Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (1980) Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (1967) Fabulation and Metafiction (1979) Peirce Fallibilism

POSTMODERNISM The Writer as Liar/thief Plagiarism/Playgiarism (coined by Raymond Federman) “Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal”  T.S. Eliot Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton (1987)

POSTMODERNISM You’re born a playgiarizer or you are not. It’s as simple as that. The laws of playgiarism are unwritten, it’s a tabou, like incest, it cannot be legalized. The great playgiarizers of all time, Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Diderot, Rimbaud, Proust, Beckett, and Federman have never pretended to do anything else than playgiarizing. Inferior writers deny that they playgiarize because they confuse plagiarism with playgiarism. These are not the same. The difference is enormous, but no one has ever been able to tell what it is. It cannot be measured in weight or size. Plagiarism is sad. It cries […]. It always apologizes. Playgiarism on the other hand laughs all the time. It makes fun of what it does while doing it.”

POSTMODERNISM Detectives, Murderers and Labyrinths Detective Story as archetype of story-telling process Peter Ackroyd Hawksmoor (1985) The Labyrinth

POSTMODERNISM: Historiography as fiction

POSTMODERNISM Historiography as fiction Linda Hutcheon, “Beginning to theorize the Postmodern” (1987); The Politics of Postmodernism, 1988 Historiographic Metafiction Boyd

POSTMODERNISM Literature as game Bakhtin and Kristeva: carnivalesque Irony (Leslie Fiedler, Umberto Eco, Hutcheon. Terry Eagleton) Parody and pastiche (Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism, 1991) Intertextuality

POSTMODERNISM Desire for Reading, or the Body and the Book “Like the sexual act, the act of fiction is a reciprocal relationship. It takes two” Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction Nabokov, Lolita (1955) Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, (1969) Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook (1962) Fowles, Mantissa, (1982)

POSTMODERNISM Re-writing and Re-creating: The reading Process Barthes readerly/writerly texts Foucault Deconstruction: Hartman and Derrida Phenomenological approach; transactive criticism Barthes and Riffaterre Hutcheon “heterocosm”

POSTMODERNISM Language and its fragments Barthes Lyotard Derrida

POSTMODERNISM