The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author! Postmodern Metanarrative and the Performance of the Author Function

This research paper critically examines the meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.

The Postmodern Multi-Layered Narrative of Existential Feminist Subjectivity: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Postmodern fiction demonstrates a suspicion about the narrative status of history. Arguably, its project is to reveal the illusion of truth in history because of history's reliance on texts. There is no doubt that historical events occur, but their transmutation into “fact” and their transmission to posterity are limited by their narrativization and textualization. In the Afterword to her novel, Alias Grace (1996) – a fictionalized narrative centering on a real-life person embroiled in a double murder in 1843 – Margaret Atwood reveals her interest in this problem with “history”. She tells the reader, “I have of course fictionalized historical events … as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history”. The purpose of this paper is thus to consider Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace as a postmodern fiction that seeks to reveal the illusion of truth in history through her use of innovatory narrative techniques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “double-voiced” is used to examine the permitted, surface-level utterances – and the necessarily conflicting actual narratives – of the two narrators in Atwood’s novel. However, the term is also applied in the broader feminist/theoretical context of the silencing of the female subject more generally. Atwood establishes a fragmented, multiplicity narrative. This arises from the reported and somewhat self-aware observations of the eponymous Grace and a doctor named Simon Jordan. Seemingly, the author’s own authority does not exist. Atwood thus exploits the slippery nature of language that does not have some kind of “truth” imposed upon it. The historical “truth” about Grace Marks is never revealed, not because Atwood is “leaving it to the reader's imagination” but because Atwood plays with the problem of personality as a social construction. Almost invisible as “author”, Atwood nevertheless reveals just how language can be manipulated and made to conform to a certain version of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood also recuperates the voice of a supposedly murderous woman by revising the myth of woman’s silence and subjugation. Because her speaking voices are required to practice “double-voicing” to be heard, through presenting the reader with both voices, Atwood recuperates the moments of existential liberation to be heard from emergent voices.

Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time

"Narrative Language and Possible Worlds in Postmodern Fiction. A Borderline Study of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. The present paper is a study of more traditional hermeneutics combined with a tinge of possible world modality, with the purpose of creating a thorough picture of narrative worlds and balancing it against the possible world system, with practical applications onto postmodern fiction, in Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. The article focuses on exposing narrative language, worlds and characters, viewing them through Seymour Chatman’s perspective and slightly counterbalancing this approach with the possible world semantics system (as envisioned by Kripke, Lewis, Nolan, Putnam) for a diverse understanding of the inner structure and functioning of narrative text and fictional worlds. Keywords: possible worlds, possible-world semantics, narrative worlds, fictional worlds, narrative language, fiction, postmodern fiction, fictional characters "

Narasi-narasi Kecil (Mikronarasi) dalam genre Fiksi Pedesaan Pendekatan Posmodernisme terhadap Cerpen Menghilang Bersama Angin karya Xing Qingjie

The short story text Disappearing with the Wind by Xing Qingjie as a representation of the rural fiction genre in Chinese Literature attempts to refute the grand narratives of modern fiction. For the author of the text, the power of modernity is not eternal, but can be subverted or deconstructed by giving acknowledgment to the small voices represented by Mr Zou, Sha Xiaobao, and the idiot woman in Disappearing with the Wind. This study uses a postmodernism approach to map the elements of disorientation, abnormality and small voices in that short story. Affirmation of the micronarrative is a way of working of postmodern fiction in challenging the power of modernity with the grand narrative as its main basis. For Xing Qingjie, reality does not always depend on big people, famous people, but can also be celebrated by village people, unusual people, including people who are marginalized in modern life. In his lawsuit, the presence of this text will emphasize that there is no central, no peripheral. All can be the center, and all can also be the periphery. Rural fiction pioneered by Lu Xun proves that denial of the power of grand narratives is possible in the same way that Xing Qingjie has done in a number of his works, including the short story Disappearing with the Wind.

Postmodern Absurdist Critique of Julian Barnes’s The Only Story

This research paper endeavors to examine the postmodern absurdism as a literary sub genre in postmodern fiction. It delves deep into the concept of absurdism by concentrating upon the characteristics that distinguish it as a postmodern sub genre. Through the analysis of the postmodern novel, The Only Story (2018), this research paper illustrates how the characteristics of absurdism haven impact upon a postmodern society characterized by boredom, meaninglessness, futility, and confusion. It also highlights how different characters, events, and places have been portrayed in the novel to depict the absurdity of human existence. The theoretical paradigm of the research is based upon Thomas Nagel’s Essay “The Absurd” which is about postmodern space of absurdism and was presented in the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division. The study limelight's how the absurd occurrences and bizarre characters found in the researcher's primary text depict the complexity of the postmodern absurd world in both literal and metaphoric dimensions.

A Postmodern Reading of Don DeLillo’s Short Stories

The focus of this paper is to study how different techniques are incorporated in the postmodern fiction to present the multiplicity of meaning and subjectivity of the reality. For this purpose, the researcher has selected American novelist and short story writer Donald Richard DeLillo’s short stories “The Itch” and “Coming. Sun. Mon. Tues”. The researcher has analyzed the selected works using the theoretical frameworks provided by Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Henri Bergson. The theoretical insights of the selected theorists help understand the subjective reality of the postmodernism. Textual analysis has been used as a method to study the selected fictional work. Postmodernism is critical of certain foundational conventions of philosophy, specifically, the Enlightenment thinking, as it symbolizes the pursuit of reason and logic. On the other hand, it focuses on the personalization and subjectivity in the construction of truth and worldviews. The rejection of objective reality gives way to multiple realities and subjectivity. American fiction, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been influenced by postmodernism to a great extent. The analyzed short stories provide a good postmodern reading since they cover a range of features that are relatable in the postmodern world.

Re-politicizing Mental Illness: Reflections on Boredom and Depression in American Post-postmodern Fiction

Figurations of psychological problems, mental illness, boredom, depression, addiction and medication abound in post-postmodern fiction. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and The Pale King and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections are cases in point. Apparently, what these works share in common are the material and psycho-biological explanations that they hint at or provide for the various mental problems and disorders experienced by the characters. These pertain to the specific socio-economic and cultural mode characterizing the contemporary scene. Drawing on the insights provided by Franco Berardi the present article tries to shed light on the significance of such figurations. Keywords: Davis Foster Wallace; Jonathan Franzen; Franco Berardi; boredom; depression.