Contemporary American fiction between local and global knowledge - Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and the novel of information.

This project investigates a pivotal response in contemporary American fiction to the representational aporias of canonical postmodernism. In answer to their literary forebears-self-conscious writers such as John Barth or Thomas Pynchon, who turned toward irony, metafiction and fragmentation¿Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace revalorize narrative as the ideal vehicle for the creation of meaning. They envision the "novel of information" (Powers 2008) as a text that combines diverse fields of knowledge so as to enable the reader to develop a personal and yet integrated perspective on the world. The central question that consequently needs to be addressed is: how can their novels create the illusion of totality without being totalitarian? This question will be answered on the levels of form and content. Drawing on recent instances of reader-oriented narratology, the project first intends to show how various formal aspects of The Gold Bug Variations (Powers 1991) and Infinite Jest (Wallace 1996) can entice the reader to continuously reconstruct his or her mental representation of thenarrative. This cognitive approach will be further developed in a thematic analysis, which will focus on the novels' many passages about mental mapping as potential beacons in the reader's search for coherence.

Keywords:AMERICAN LITERATURE, LITERATURE SCIENCES

Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies