Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After

M. Cornis-Pope

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781403970039
• Print ISBN:
  9780312238377

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting undertakes a systematic study of postmodernism's responses to the polarized ideologies of the postwar period that have held cultures hostage to a confrontation between rival ideologies abroad and a clash between champions of uniformity and disruptive others at home. Considering a broad range of narrative projects and approaches (from polysystemic fiction to surfiction, postmodern feminism, and multicultural/postcolonial fiction), this book highlights their solutions to ontological division (real vs. imaginary, wordly and other-worldly), sociocultural oppositions (of race, class, gender) and narratological dualities (imitation vs. invention, realism vs. formalism). A thorough rereading of the best experimental work published in the US since the mid-1960s reveals the fact that innovative fiction has been from the beginning concerned with redefining the relationship between history and fiction, narrative and cultural articulation. Stepping back from traditional polarizations, innovative novelists have tried to envision an alternative history of irreducible particularities, excluded middles, and creative intercrossings.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter I Postmodernism's Polytropic Imagination: Unwriting/Rewriting the Cold War Narratives of Polarization
• Chapter 2 Innovative Responses to the Metanarratives of Modern History: Polysystemic Fiction, Surfiction, and the Postmodern Feminist Novel
• Chapter 3 "Chain of Links" or "Disorderly Tangle of Lines"? Alternative Cartographies of Modernity in Thomas Pynchon's Fiction
• Chapter 4 Interventive Writing in the "Post-Human" Age: Experiential and Cultural Rearticulation in Ronald Sukenick's Fiction
• Chapter 5 Narrative (Dis-)Articulation in the "Shadowbox" of History: Raymond Federman's Exploratory Surfiction
• Chapter 6 Translating a History of "Unspeakable" Otherness into a Discourse of Empowered "Choices": Toni Morrison's Novels of Radical Rememory
• Epilogue Exploring the Ignored Outskirts of the Art of Telling: Innovative Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium
• Works Cited
• Index