English Literature: Postmodernism, Metafiction, Historiographic Metafiction

This monograph focuses on postmodernist tendencies which may be found in the work of Stephen King. It also deals with his place in the literary tradition which is being determined by literary critics. Because King is viewed as an author of horror fiction, his status in literature is degraded, and his works are being continually perceived as popular literature, thus they are pushed to the fringes of high-culture literature. However, the sole fact that King incorporates elements of postmodernist literary and scientific theories, makes him a good candidate for serious literary analysis.
The aim of this work is to explore the literary corpus of Stephen King in the context of postmodernist tendencies which are characteristic of contemporary literature in order to demystify his place in the literary tradition. The argument is that Stephen King’s literary corpus encompasses several of the most prominent postmodernist theories which greatly contribute to the raise of his literary status in world literature, not only as a titan of horror fiction but mostly as a valuable literary figure which diserves its rightful place in the literary tradition.
The detailed analysis of King’s use of postmodernist concepts along with the unique properties of horror fiction, masterfully depicted by King, show great potential for innovations which contribute to the world of postmodernist literature. King chooses a rather unconventional approach to each of the analyzed postmodernist theories, namely metafiction, Lacanian post-structuralist psychoanalysis, as well as the notion of intertextuality.
In his postmodernist works, King completely ignores traditional forms of metafiction, and instead, mixes them with elements of horror fiction, and as a result, creates their permutations. Three distinct forms of metafiction have been isolated: psychogenic metafiction, transpositional metafiction, and corporeal metafiction.
In a similar manner, under the patronage of horror fiction, King works with Lacanian post-structuralist psychoanalysis. Into the chosen novels, King implements the core elements of this form of psychoanalysis with uncanny proficiency. In these novels, King reflects Lacanian motifs of the formation of the human psyche, the unconscious being structured like language as well as a redefined theory of the Oedipus complex. By employing these motifs into his work, King presents his examination of the alienation and fragmentation of the human psyche felt by the postmodern man which constitues the central premise interiorized within the phenomenon of the postmodern human condition.
In connection with Lacanian psychoanalysis, King examines another aspect of postmodernist thought, namely the notion of intertextuality. This literary phenomenon is realized through its metaphorical reflection represented by Stephen King’s Duma Key. This novel encompasses King’s attempts at examining not only the metatextual relations but also the very essence of the driving force behind art, which is the artistic talent. King thus puts the writer in the position of a mere conduit for preconceived textual information; therefore rendering the notion of originality inert. King also uses intertextuality to bridge the gap between high and low forms of literary fiction which undermines the very concept of literary criticism itself. 
All of these contemporary tendencies, theories and practices are reflected at their best in King’s ultimate postmodernist epic called The Dark Tower series. In this septimology, King examines the very foundation of literary fiction as well as criticism by combining metafiction, intertextuality and contemporary scientific multiple-worlds theory into a postmodernist chaos of information. King basically presents a universal model which is composed of purely symbolic composites that encompass the four basic pillars of creating a written text, i.e. the author, extralinguistic reality, fictional universe, and language as a medium of written discourse. Furthermore, by dividing intertextuality into its intrinsic and extrinsic form, in combination with the multiple-worlds theory, King renders literary criticism itself mute. He does so via the element of collapsing fictional universes, i.e. an act he positions in parallel with the flattening of the worlds of high and low culture, thus creating a vision of culture which functions on the principles of equality.
The findings in this monograph suggest that the shift in Stephen King's status in the literary tradition from popular fiction into the realm of academic value is justifiable. King’s unique ability to use horror fiction as a literary lens through which he perceives objective reality, serves as a mere veil under which a myriad of different insightful ideas reside. Despite the fact that immersing King’s literary universe into postmodernism has shown great promise in the demystification of his place within the literary universe, it is only a small fraction of what his unfathomable literary universe has to bestow upon literature itself. King’s unyielding endeavor embodied in his continuing desire to create serious literary artifacts concealed under the patronage of horror fiction, combined with the literary recognition his work is receiving, shows the futility of all efforts to discredit King on the part of literary critics.

This paper concerns the development of the post-postmodern, the dominant mode of contemporary American fiction, and the question of narrative irony as it relates to the rhetoric and form of 20th and 21st century American literature and literary theory.

Türk tarihinde çalkantılı dönemlerin çok olması ve Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e geçiş sürecinde yaşanan kökten değişimler, tarihsel roman yazarlarına varsıl bir esin kaynağı sunar. Ancak, Türk romancıların bu konuya yeterince ilgi gösterdiklerini söylemek olası değildir. Çanakkale, Kurtuluş savaşı, ermeni sorunu, karşılıklı nüfus değişimi ile ilgili yazılan Türk romanları genellikle Türkler’in bakış açısıyla kaleme alınırken, yabancı yazarlar da bu olaylara kendi pencerelerinden bakmayı yeğlerler. Fransız kökenli bir İngiliz yazar olan Louis de Bernières, bu olayları değişik bir yaklaşımla ele alır. Anne tarafından dedesinin Çanakkale savaşına katılıp yaralanmasına karşın o, savaşı Türk tarafından katılanların gözüyle aktarır. Daha doğrusu yirminci yüzyılın başlarında farklı ırk ve dinden oluşan Osmanlı vatandaşların gözüyle Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nın kendilerine getirdiği değişim ve yıkım anlatılır romanda.
Biz bu çalışmada, postmodern anlatım tekniklerinden yararlanarak, Kanatsız Kuşlar’da yabancı bir yazarın kurmaca aracılığıyla Türk tarihine bakışını açımlanmaya çalışılıyor.

Featuring Toni Morrison's Beloved and Myself and Marco Polo by Paul Griffiths.

The following dissertation proposes the emergence of a new genre in the mid-1980s period: the New Historical novel; as uniquely defined within the broad panorama of Post Modernist Literature as Magic Realism and Metafiction.  I would also like to propose that its emergence and popularity is a manifestation of a crisis within the notion of genre itself and can be viewed against the wider anxieties of modern culture. Each of the novels looked at address issues relating to Foucault’s concept of the ‘heterotopia’ and the processes by which reality is constructed socially and history is produced.  I have focused on two novels: Myself and Marco Polo (1989) and Beloved (1987).

This is the first book-length analysis of Whitehead's body of work, from _The Intuitionist_ through _Zone One_ (alas, it went to press before _The Noble Hustle_ was released...to say nothing of _The Underground Railroad_).

(NOTE: What is appended here is the table of contents, an excerpt from Chapter One that lays out the critical apparatus of the book, and the bibliography for the volume)

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Reviews:

"Derek C. Maus’s book _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. Hundreds of reviewers have commented on Whitehead’s individual books, and several literary scholars have published articles highlighting aspects of his writing. However, Understanding Colson Whitehead is the first book-length examination, and thus a notable cornerstone in what might someday become known as Whitehead studies. [...]

Further, Maus’s book represents a surprisingly rare extended treatment on an African American writer born after 1960. [...]

_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ rewards those who are new to the novelist’s works as well as his longtime readers. Maus summarizes and then provides in-depth analyses of Whitehead’s books, highlighting the workings of the individual selections. The overall examination paints a broad and detailed picture of what Whitehead has produced over the years.

Given the structural complexity of Whitehead’s _John Henry Days_, Maus’s chapter on that novel is particularly notable.[...] Maus’s chapter confirms the praise reviewers placed on Whitehead after the publication of the novel and goes further by explaining the details of Whitehead’s artistic capabilities in producing such an intricate, multithreaded novel.

_Understanding Colson Whitehead_ offers many important insights concerning the novelist’s compositions."

          -- Howard Rambsy II, in _African American Review_ 48.4 (Winter 2015): 482-83.

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"This volume on Whitehead...announces that his work should be taken as seriously as that of other authors in the series, such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace. Maus (SUNY, Potsdam) does an admirable job of explaining Whitehead's aesthetics and reading his novels. [...] Maus is particularly strong when discussing _Sag Harbor_, which he calls Whitehead's most accessible yet least understood work, and when addressing Whitehead's debut novel, _The Intuitionist_. This volume should help move Whitehead onto classroom syllabi and further the current critical conversation about his works. [...] Highly recommended."

      -- D.J. Rosenthal, _Choice_ 52.10 (June 2015)

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"Derek Maus's _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ is a comprehensive overview of Whitehead's shape-shifting ouevre...The chapters all give in-depth analyses of Whitehead's novels, building on the work of other critics while offering fresh readings. Maus gives academics and Whitehead fans alike a crisp and thorough reading of this work."

            -- _Forum on Modern Language Studies_ 51.4 (October 2015)

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"Maus’s book is an excellent and enlightening guide to Whitehead’s work"

            -- Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com (http://www.vulture.com/2016/09/how-colson-whitehead-got-from-zombies-to-slavery.html)

In this article, I examine the formal overlap between "camp" as a social and performance repertoire and postmodern metafiction through a reading of the novels of Muriel Spark, primarily Not to Disturb (1971) and The Abbess of Crewe (1974). I suggest that in Spark's novels, two kinds of "inconsequentiality"--the first a tradition of refined triviality inherited from British high camp, and the second a species of narrative and poetic "inconsequence" associated with the metafiction of the sixties and seventies--share a cultural and formal logic. Drawing on Sianne Ngai's revitalization of the problem of "tone," I begin by reassessing Spark's frequently remarked-upon "triviality" in terms of the dynamics of camp, which I read in conjunction with a narratological emphasis on metafictionality. Spark thematizes her abiding concern with the ontology of narrative by foregrounding technologies of medial reproduction and surveillance. Accordingly, I turn to accounts of "techno-modernism" in order to clarify Spark's campy metafiction. Finally, I explore Spark's ambivalent engagement with queer characters as emblems of her camp metafiction. Sparkian metafiction rests, finally, on the commitment to reflexivity shared by camp theatricality and techno-modernist metafiction alike.

A.S. Byatt's works have had an intricate relationship with postmodernism, and this relationship is probably best exhibited in Possession and The Biographer's Tale. Both novels display complex webs of allusions, references, play with genre and form, as well as intense self-reflection, all of which can be seen as typical postmodern features. However, it can be argued that both novels go beyond that, and instead of merely being self-reflexive, they are primarily intensely reflexive of their status as postmodern works. In other words, both novels seek to examine and parody postmodernism from the inside, thus subverting it and transcending it by going beyond its typical features. This approach to writing can be referred to as meta-postmodern since the novels essentially use postmodern techniques to discuss postmodernism, as well as to contrast it with some other periods of literary history and/or approaches to literature and scholarship in general. The aim of the following paper is to examine these characteristics of the novels and to find an apt description of Byatt's narrative style.

This chapter explores the space between correspondence and response that is neglected by the materialist cum historicist approach taken by folklorists such as Jack Zipes and Anna Kérchy. Zipes writes: ‘Each innovative retelling and rewriting of a well-known tale in the cultural heritage is an independent human act seeking to align itself with the original utopian impulse of the first-told tale.’ Though this statement basically traces the same line of approach followed by Kérchy, the most interesting connection is the point at which Kérchy’s sense of correspondence/response aligns with what Zipes frames as the ‘original utopian impulse.’ This alignment seems to beg the introduction of an intermediary term, a utopian core to which a ‘core-response’ could be said to relate, thereby delineating the formal correspondence of texts from the ideological response of texts. When the core-response is one of utopian reification or recuperation (no matter how stylistically revisionary and/or superficially subversive), the narrative response is one that maintains this mythopoeic core—it both corresponds to and responds as a work of mythopoesis. However, when this utopianism and the ideologically loaded semiotic systems that support this utopianism become the subjects of profound doubt, are rendered indeterminate, or are eschewed altogether, the narrative can no longer be said to conform to the same literary mode and must, therefore, be placed within a separate mode and typological category. It is this relationship of correspondence and response that this chapter will analyze.

This paper is a case study reflecting on a nonfiction author’s methodology for developing credible fictional characters in a
historical novel. In writing the artifact that became A respectable married woman (2012), Banks placed great weight on finding
the ‘fictional truth’ of the characters populating the story. Borrowing from the genre of historiographic metafiction
(Hutcheon 1988) and the notion of a journalist’s ‘toolbox’ (Banks & Andrew 2012), Banks’s challenge was to create ‘authentic’
‘whole person’ characters informed by historical artifacts as well as contemporary understandings such as the practice-led
theories of Kundera (2003). This study describes and exemplifies how Banks strove for ‘authenticity’ in a bid to do justice to
the ‘herstory’ of the challenges and achievements of the women of Victoria’s mid- 19th century goldfields. Drawing on insights
from a variety of sources, this paper proposes one practitioner’s experience of creating historical identities. The study
emphasizes the need to write credible oral language and idiom and examines the centrality of backstories. Such backstories
impact readers’ expectations about how potentially stock ‘characters’ develop into more authentic ‘selves’.

Discusses shift in the politics of the avant-garde after World War II.  I argue that the utopian aspirations of the avant-garde are refocused on providing singular, non-binding examples of alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing everyday life.  Chapters on John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Gilbert Sorrentino, Samuel Beckett.

Los textos son una de las principales vías de acercamiento al pasado. En un lugar indeterminado entre los relatos de la historia y los de la ficción se encuentra la forma denominada "metaficción historiográfica" cuyos perfiles se aproximan sobremanera al territorio de la teoría.