Postmodern Literature: Form and Function

What if postmodern literature is underscored by formal innovation beyond the novel? Although this is the question which prompted my doctoral research, the motivation behind asking it has little to do with form per se. It instead lies in how acknowledging the presence of a formal fork in the road will probably help engender a more constructive evaluation of postmodern literature. How it might help us move beyond the usual definitions via negation which antonymically classify such books as decentred, disordered, non-linear, unreliably narrated anti-novels. For these definitions speak only of what postmodern is not, not what it is. Upon relationally configuring post-Enlightenment forms of prose, postmodern literature's point of departure becomes intuitively identifiable. It constitutes a thoroughly new breed of writing. A type of literature which is not predicated on faraway synthesis and stabilisation, but which instead directly presents itself to readers as an array of small pieces which do not and cannot cohere. I name this form the vignette and it may be summarised as a fragment without a corresponding whole. The vignette's emphasis on presenting itself rather than representing something else led me to develop a posthermeneutic critical methodology which involves abandoning an axiom that pervades both critical and casual approaches to literature: that books mean something. That their words exist in service to the generation and revelation of something surplus to that which is present. I forfeit this assumption and instead approach books through their material dimensions, using their physical features as a path toward understanding rather than meaning. Although this posthermeneutic approach to literature may sound incredibly restrictive, one of the most remarkable revelations of this research is how it quickly became apparent that the exact opposite is true. Acknowledging the affective presence of literature as a physical object in the hands of readers led me on a far-reaching journey through a whole host of ideas such as books being "about" themselves, literary fractals, extra-linguistic utterances, gazing upon the gaze, the fractal mechanics of information communication and addiction, point-continuum dynamics and chronotopic equilibrium. My readings end by offering a new four-level theoretical understanding of language grounded in recent scientific advances as well as a three-dimensional model of the level that tends to interest us most: natural language. When formally defining the vignette, emphasis is placed on the psychological and intellectual evolution necessary for producing and consuming a new literary form and how it is these developments which make any literary form worth artistically inventing or academically studying. I offer a quantum physics-inspired definition and make the case that postmodern literature functions as exposure therapy which is not forcing us to think about new things, but forcing us to think in fundamentally new ways. The thesis then ends with a lengthy chapter which reassesses the state of truth and (hyper)reality in the postmodern era. The aim of this philosophical and open-ended conclusion is to repurpose the posthermeneutic methodology used to access and interact with the vignette in order to provide a set of practical tools to help orient ourselves in a world increasingly beset by epistemological, ontological and developmental crises.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open