Figures of Belatedness: Postmodernist Fiction in English, Edited by Javier Gascueña Gahete and Paula Martín Salván, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 2006, 316 pages, ISBN: 84-7801-811-5
As our title indicates, this book wants to offer a sample of postmodernist fiction in English. We trust not so much in helping to the establishment of a literary canon, but to provide a useful tool for scholars and students of this complex cultural phenomenon and heterogeneous literary category, in the belief that in spite of its ambiguity as a term, an effort at systematization and analysis is still necessary. This book is, in this sense, a proof of the richness and diversity of postmodernist studies, and it shows the immense possibilities of research offered by that very complexity and heterogeneity attributed to Postmodernism.
The organization of the essays in this volume follows a literary chronology. The chronological ordering of their works can be said to provide a journey through Postmodernism's route, which allows for unusual combinations: the New York poet James Schuyler stands between the postmodernist popes William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon; A.S. Byatt shares her time with Tim O'Brien, while Yann Martel's Life of Pi is contemporary to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist .
To some extent, we would like to claim that the format of the book mirrors some of the usual qualms about the term "Postmodernism" that will be discussed in it. A question repeatedly asked by theoreticians and literary critics has been: What does the "post-" in "Postmodernism" or "postmodern" mean? Risking a truism, we would like to point to the meaning of the prefix as "what comes after ..." Just what those three dots must stand for has been one of the most fertile grounds for discussion for the past thirty years. The term necessarily implies some degree of belatedness as to the position of its practitioners in the literary canon. This leads back to the title of the book: "Figures of Belatedness." Postmodernism, we have meant to signify in our title, is always a figure of belatedness respecting a previous "something."
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface.................................................................................................
Introduction: Postmodernism, or the Problematics of a Figure of Belatedness...............PAULA MARTÍN SALVÁN
Postmodern Literary Sensibility: An Eighteenth-century "Antecedent" and its Contemporary Significance.........................................................................YOLANDA CABALLERO ACEITUNO
Poetic Postmodern Fiction?: The Radical Prose of E.E. Cummings and WCW..............ANTONIO RUIZ SÁNCHEZ
The Recognitions by William Gaddis. A Reassessment..........................................JULIÁN JIMÉNEZ HEFFERNAN
"I'm rubber and you're glue:" James Schuyler's Alfred and Guinevere in the Context of the New York School of Poets......................................................................MARIO JURADO BONILLA
Jerzy Kosinski's Anti-Bildungsroman Steps : Self as a Function of Power...................CLAUS-PETER NEUMANN
Images of the Uncertainty: Mapping the Unmappable in Pynchon's Zone..................DAVID CRUZ ACEVEDO
"The world was all before them:" Intertextual Echoes from Milton in A.S. Byatt's Quartet.........................................................................................................CARMEN LARA RALLO
Tim O'Brien's Fabulation............................................................................PILAR MARÍN MADRAZO
Magic Realism Revisited. Recreations of History in Midnight's Children .........................MARÍA JESÚS LÓPEZ SÁNCHEZ-VIZCAÍNO
Postmodern Biographies: Reader Called to Interpretation in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot ...............................................................MARICEL ORÓ
The Rhetorics of Waste in Don DeLillo's Fiction................................................PAULA MARTÍN SALVÁN
Magic Realism in Arundhati Roy and Isabel Allende: The Experience of Dislocation.....ANTONIA NAVARRO TEJERO AND MANUEL CABELLO PINO
Transcendence and Historiographic Metafiction in Peter Ackroyd's The Plato Papers ...ANA MARÍA GARCÍA DOMÍNGUEZ
The Postmodern Twist in Yann Martel's Life of Pi ..............................................MERCEDES DÍAZ DUEÑAS
Narrative Delusion and Aesthetic Pleasure in Toni Morrison's Love ................................JAVIER GASCUEÑA GAHETE
¿Postmodernidad? Narrativa de la imagen, Next-Generation y razón catódica en la narrativa contemporánea.............................................................................VICENTE LUÍS MORA
Some Final Remarks on Storytelling, Postmodernism and the Transition of Critical Thinking................................................................................................JAVIER GASCUEÑA GAHETE