Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction

Reader response and reader reception theories of the twentieth-century have left one area of research curiously unexamined—readers. From the Russian Formalists (Victor Shklovksy), to the Constance school (Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser), to the poststructuralists (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida), the focus of theorists has always been on texts and the characteristics that define their literariness. Readers—in actuality, a multitude of real individuals with various aptitudes, experiences and tastes—have been abstracted into “the reader,” a hypothetical everyman. As such, a vast section on the spectrum of possible reader responses, which may include interest, intrigue and enjoyment, but also frustration, boredom and annoyance, has been regretfully ignored in the discipline of literary studies. Texts that present readers with difficulties—either linguistic or logical—highlight especially well the wide array of possible reader responses, for experimental art (whether visual or written) sets out to defy expectations, aiming precisely to incite controversy and divide opinions. This dissertation therefore takes up works published in the late 1960s and early 1970s that are known for their difficult, experimental styles and studies how readers respond to them, taking particular interest in the cognitive processes that are involved in the act of reading. Under the lens are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela and Macedonio iii Fernández’s El Museo de la novela de la Eterna . To consider the impact of readers’ expectations surrounding genre, responses to Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, a text of theory that employs similar formal games, are also compared. Numerous advances in the cognitive sciences over the past two decades have granted previously unfathomable insights into the functioning of the human brain where language and reading are concerned. The purpose of this thesis is twofold: 1) to promote a new framework for the study of reader response that is informed by the cognitive sciences; and 2) to acknowledge that texts elicit various responses from readers and thus argue that cognitive factors such as attention, long-term and working memory and emotions, as well as readers’ expectations of coherency, shape these responses.

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Understanding Difficulty: Reader Response and Cognition Across Genres

This study aims to discover the triangulation of madness, power and resistance in
 selected post-war American novels, namely The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D.
 Salinger, On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac, and The End of the Road (1958) by
 John Barth. It is hypothesized in this study that the protagonists of the novels represent
 different modes of madness and resistance and I aim to analyze how the protagonists
 react to pressures by the disciplinary power that attempts either to normalize them or
 cast them into asylums and alienation. Thus, I present three objectives, namely to
 examine the characters’ entanglement in the disciplinary power system of their society
 and their different reactions to the status quo, to explore the concepts of madness and a
 madman as reflected by the characters of the selected texts and to discover how the
 authors portray the characters’ resistance to the pressures the disciplinary power
 imposed on them. This approach allows for a textual analysis of the characters of the
 selected texts based on Foucauldian concepts of madness, power and resistance as the
 theoretical tool, where Foucault suggests that madness and sanity are socially
 constructed concepts created by the disciplinary power system to eliminate resistant
 individuals. My findings demonstrate that the selected authors present those concepts
 of madness, power and resistance through the characters’ portrayal of visible
 disagreement with their respective society’s cultural codes of conformity. Thus, the
 three selected authors share a similar way in depicting mad resisting individuals who
 respond to society’s disciplinary power through their conducts. However, my findings
 also reveal that, despite sharing this similarity, the selected texts exhibit different
 modes of madness and resistance to society’s disciplinary power. For example, the
 protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is regarded as mad because of his
 resistance to accept his society’s disciplinary codes. Thus, in terms of the triangulation
 of madness, power and resistance, Holden’s resistance to disciplinary power is
 portrayed as madness. On the other hand, Sal and Dean, the protagonists of On the
 Road, give birth to a new resistance strategy against the 1950s American cultural codes
 by transfiguring the dichotomy of madness and sanity, where their resistance to accept
 the disciplinary cultural codes of their society is depicted as madness that actually
 brings real happiness and prosperity to them. Thus, madness becomes a strategy for Sal
 and Dean to resist their society’s norms that are established by the disciplinary power
 system. Hence, the triangulation of madness, power and resistance in On the Road is Sal and Dean’s madness as resistance to society’s disciplinary power. In contrast, Jake,
 the protagonist of The End of the Road, resists the popular culture and mainstream
 values of the society by getting paralyzed; thus, he is entangled in the psychiatric
 power from which he has no way of freedom. Conversely, Joe, another major character
 in the text, is portrayed as a sane character whose obsession in gaining power and his
 resistance to society’s network of power relations manipulate the concept of madness.
 Joe resists his position in the network of power and decides to deconstruct the structure
 of the network by bringing Jake under his control. Thus, in the triangulation of
 madness, power and resistance, I posit the view that, in The End of the Road, the
 relation is madness to gain power in order to resist disciplinary system. Therefore, my
 findings show that the triangular relationship between Foucauldian concepts of
 madness, power and resistance is attained from the selected authors’ depictions of the
 different modes of madness and resistance to society’s powerful disciplinary norms.

Triangulation of madness, power and resistance in selected post-war American novels

7 Introduction 9 Antecedents 13 Theoretical framework 17 Methodological framework and empirical corpus 31 Analytical scheme and study of empirical corpus 39 Metafiction, parody and intertextuality 40 The functions of myths as intertexts in parodic metafiction 48 The use of irony in parodic metafiction 59 Conclusion 65 Appendix A 71 Appendix B 77 Bibliography 93

Parodic metafiction : an approach to self-reflexive fiction in two works by John Barth

Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the leading British modernist novelists. Woolf, with her radical innovation and experimental styles, can also be acknowledged as the precursor of postmodernism. This paper aims to discuss Woolf`s the most challenging and innovative novel The Waves as a novel bearing postmodernist novel features although it is categorized as a modern novel. Woolf employs the very postmodernist techniques such as intertextuality, metafictionality and pastische. She rejects not only the established literary traditions of the earlier periods but also the socio-cultural values and sets out to come up with something novel to provide insights into the psychology of the characters to examine their reactions against the absence of stability, order, continuity and wholeness. Woolf exposes the voices of six characters, which calls into question the concepts such as unchangeable and timeless truth, objective reality and meaning. The Waves does not offer characters who are whole and knowable; rather, they are characterized by fragmentation, discontinuity, and multiplicity which are preferred in postmodern literature to the ideology of unity and continuity. The characters pursue an existential quest to be complete, whole, stable and solid but this quest results in failure and the characters have gained the postmodern awareness that self is not single, unique and unified but many, fluid and in constant process.

Virginia woolf`un `dalgalar` adli romaninda postmoderni̇zmi̇n i̇zleri̇

Like Ernest Hemingway, another ground-breaking writer of twentieth-century American fiction, John Barth writes every day, the initial drafts always in pen. He says that his inspiration does not "waft like a gentle whisper from a Greek muse," but resembles, instead, a "rumbling King Kong," a metaphor for self-reference and self-reflection. But unlike his modernist predecessors, Barth has resisted the traditions of twentieth-century realism. Instead, he has collected an eclectic montage, the past with the present, the old story formulas in a postmodern guise, displaying the elements alongside each other to produce a curious image of a world with which we are not always immediately comfortable or familiar. But, then, neither is he, always. Barth's twelfth book of fiction was released in May 1994 by Little, Brown. The title is classic Barth, disarming but with a cryptic punch: Once upon a Time. And it is the book's subtitle, A Floating Opera, that comes like a finger's light touch, or reminder. Through it he has returned full circle to the riff that set him in search of a new literary form in his first long fiction piece, A Floating Opera (1956). Barth's description of his new novel as "a memoir wrapped in a novel" echoes his generative technique of searching for and therefore redefining the narrative perspective of fiction. Barth's version of postmodernism is less jagged at the edges than that of some writers in the mode, if it will sit still long enough to be characterized as a mode. He defined his approach in 1967 in "The Literature of Exhaustion" and refined it a little more than a decade later in "The Literature of Replenishment." The heart of his thesis is that the modern genre had been exhausted by the close of World War II. Writers at the turn of the century had picked up the torch of the Romantics and carried it once around the track: "The great project of modernism, the idea of shaking up bourgeois notions of 'linearity,' and 'consecutivity' and ordinary description of character and ordinary cause and effect, had honorably done its job." Writers after World War II rebelled against their modernist predecessors, realizing that nothing of the human condition was left to report in a modern sense, except through retold tales--which is something like re-tasting a stale raisin cookie that has been belched. New ground had to be broken if a place for literature was to be found in a life that not only sounded a distinctly different tone but one that could not be fully apprehended (a point already made by modern existentialists). And Barth was among the vanguard writers to seek a synthesis of art and life, itself an imitation of an imitation, thus making of fiction something of a two-way mirror through which one peers murkily. Barth makes this effort by employing repetition and by expanding the formal range available to modern fiction to include such forms as the epistolary novel (Letters), the eighteenth-century adventure novel (The Sot-Weed Factor), and the quest tale (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor or Giles Goat-Boy). A narrative voice, usually omniscient, is central to traditional fiction, but in his work there is a tension between eliminating the omniscient narrator (since "apprehended" life is at best tentative) and achieving a synthesis towards which the text is headed. Forty years after his initial effort, many of his characters wave at each other from across novels, his house rule being "that no particular reader should have to be aware of their appearance in other books." A short piece which probably best captures Barth's effort to use fiction to grab life by the scruff of the neck is "Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction," which was part of a monophonic tape series in which he participated in the 1960s. Here, fiction invents itself. As narrator, fiction is dissatisfied with the disturbing evolution of the product and argues with its father (Barth?) and its mother (the muse? …

William Plumley

Papers

An Interview with John Barth