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Postmodernist Fiction
Like it or not, the term ‘postmodernism’ seems to have lodged itself in our critical and theoretical discourses. We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction?
In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.
In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
34 people are currently reading
796 people want to read
About the author
Brian McHale
19 books10 followersBrian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at Ohio State University. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.
McHale is the editor of the journal Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). McHale was an honorary professor, from 2009 to 2011, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He is co-founder, with James Phelan and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at Ohio State University. He is the past President (2011) of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and President of The International Society for the Study of Narrative.
McHale is the editor of the journal Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). McHale was an honorary professor, from 2009 to 2011, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He is co-founder, with James Phelan and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at Ohio State University. He is the past President (2011) of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and President of The International Society for the Study of Narrative.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
December 21, 2015
Featured in my Introduction to Postmodernist Literature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT4L4...
If not The Bible of PostmodernLit aficionados, at least their Luke's gospel. As clear as postmodernist fiction will ever get, full of brilliant examples, and most importantly - it reads like magic. Will make you want to read any title mentioned. McHale's the real OG.
If not The Bible of PostmodernLit aficionados, at least their Luke's gospel. As clear as postmodernist fiction will ever get, full of brilliant examples, and most importantly - it reads like magic. Will make you want to read any title mentioned. McHale's the real OG.
July 12, 2014
It is true that this book is much more readable than majority of books dealing with the subject of postmodernist theory. It's writer is eloquent, not repulsively ambitious in his analysis or theory, sometimes even original and amusing. His book covers the chosen subject very exhaustively, and his discourse is easily approachable by common reader about 70% of time. Hence came well earned 3 stars.
But, there is a downhill also. Sometimes author forgets that he is supposed to write this book for the common folks and that his primary objective should be to stay accessible to other public than college professors. He starts using foreign expressions without any real need, like french or latin ones, and he doesn't give the translation. It is even worse that he chooses to do so on the places in his text where violently imposed foreign expressions are crucial to the understanding of the chapter. Luckily, that happens rarely, but it is still present and a flaw.
Bigger and more problematic flaw of this book is it's constant delivery of theory in form of examples, in form of talking about concrete works of postmodernism. Normally, that wouldn't be flaw at all, but here, reader is challenged with hundreds of names and novels, based on which many of theoretical matter is explained. But, author deliberately chooses less known works of relatively known authors, and constantly shifts among dozens of them, until reader is at times completely lost. I am assured none of the readers of this work have never had the chance of reading at least half of novels mentioned in it in it's crucial explanation spots. True, in most cases author provides a small example of text from text he is talking about, but overall impression is still that in about 60% of this book reader is utterly abandoned in a jungle of names and titles. And that is it's major flaw, and makes it so difficult to read, even though author's discourse is atypically approachable.
But, there is a downhill also. Sometimes author forgets that he is supposed to write this book for the common folks and that his primary objective should be to stay accessible to other public than college professors. He starts using foreign expressions without any real need, like french or latin ones, and he doesn't give the translation. It is even worse that he chooses to do so on the places in his text where violently imposed foreign expressions are crucial to the understanding of the chapter. Luckily, that happens rarely, but it is still present and a flaw.
Bigger and more problematic flaw of this book is it's constant delivery of theory in form of examples, in form of talking about concrete works of postmodernism. Normally, that wouldn't be flaw at all, but here, reader is challenged with hundreds of names and novels, based on which many of theoretical matter is explained. But, author deliberately chooses less known works of relatively known authors, and constantly shifts among dozens of them, until reader is at times completely lost. I am assured none of the readers of this work have never had the chance of reading at least half of novels mentioned in it in it's crucial explanation spots. True, in most cases author provides a small example of text from text he is talking about, but overall impression is still that in about 60% of this book reader is utterly abandoned in a jungle of names and titles. And that is it's major flaw, and makes it so difficult to read, even though author's discourse is atypically approachable.
February 1, 2017
too many references, not the best organising job on chapter subjects!
January 8, 2019
Definitely worth a second and third read...
March 26, 2022
If you had asked me before I started graduate school what I would actually focus on in my dissertation, I would not have said anything having to do with postmodern literature. This is compounded by the fact that I have never taken a class on postmodern literature. And yet, here I am.
Fortunately, McHale manages the seemingly impossible: in the aftermath of dense theorists like Derrida, and amidst contemporaries like Foucault and D.A. Miller, McHale manages to be lucid and readable. Equally impressive is that he is writing about postmodernism but, unlike Frederick Jameson, McHale can actually present a clear thesis and write about it legibly.
This book is excellent. There are some examples that would probably make more sense to me if I had read the specific novels or stories, McHale does a very good job making his points accessible. He's also a generous critic; writing in a decade when fantasy and science fiction were on the rise but frequently lambasted by academics (sadly still the case, in some instances), he openly and gladly embraces them as legitimate forms of literature and contributors to the ongoing and developing literary tradition. And his arguments, at least in their specific applications, are very persuasive.
That brings us to the book's one major failing: the central thesis. McHale argues that postmodernism is defined best by a turn towards ontology, meaning postmodernist texts differentiate themselves from Modernist (and others, ostensibly) texts by an interest in making/bending/shaping/reading reality. On the one hand, this is interesting and, in so many cases, very persuasive. Certainly, when I think of texts that I feel are the most definitive of the postmodern movement (Crying of Lot 49; Pale Fire; etc.), this seems like a perfect description. However, the broader scope of postmodern texts complicates this definition. Furthermore, while I can believe in it as a (sometimes) defining trait of the main pillars of postmodernism, I'm not satisfied that it doesn't apply to many modernist texts as well.
And really, that's fine – no critic has ever offered a totalizing argument for anything that successfully held up against scrutiny. But it is a big enough flaw that it does hold McHale back from a full five stars.
Still, if you have any interest in postmodern literature or just an interest in poetics, I highly recommend this book.
Fortunately, McHale manages the seemingly impossible: in the aftermath of dense theorists like Derrida, and amidst contemporaries like Foucault and D.A. Miller, McHale manages to be lucid and readable. Equally impressive is that he is writing about postmodernism but, unlike Frederick Jameson, McHale can actually present a clear thesis and write about it legibly.
This book is excellent. There are some examples that would probably make more sense to me if I had read the specific novels or stories, McHale does a very good job making his points accessible. He's also a generous critic; writing in a decade when fantasy and science fiction were on the rise but frequently lambasted by academics (sadly still the case, in some instances), he openly and gladly embraces them as legitimate forms of literature and contributors to the ongoing and developing literary tradition. And his arguments, at least in their specific applications, are very persuasive.
That brings us to the book's one major failing: the central thesis. McHale argues that postmodernism is defined best by a turn towards ontology, meaning postmodernist texts differentiate themselves from Modernist (and others, ostensibly) texts by an interest in making/bending/shaping/reading reality. On the one hand, this is interesting and, in so many cases, very persuasive. Certainly, when I think of texts that I feel are the most definitive of the postmodern movement (Crying of Lot 49; Pale Fire; etc.), this seems like a perfect description. However, the broader scope of postmodern texts complicates this definition. Furthermore, while I can believe in it as a (sometimes) defining trait of the main pillars of postmodernism, I'm not satisfied that it doesn't apply to many modernist texts as well.
And really, that's fine – no critic has ever offered a totalizing argument for anything that successfully held up against scrutiny. But it is a big enough flaw that it does hold McHale back from a full five stars.
Still, if you have any interest in postmodern literature or just an interest in poetics, I highly recommend this book.
November 12, 2013
McHale presents a curiously confusingly postmodern take on postmodernist fiction, jam-packed with conceptual loops and twists and experimental visual displays of language. His main focus is on distinguishing the primarily epistemological concerns of modernist fiction from the primarily ontological concerns of postmodernist fiction. He argues that postmodernist fiction is fraught with uncertainty over the nature of reality and being. Ultimately however, he argues that postmodernist fiction, as an incoherent and semi-intangible whole, has successfully found a way to represent/reflect/mirror the postmodernist realities of advanced industrial societies through its resolutions of form. He writes,
"Postmodernist fiction turns out to be mimetic after all; but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form... What postmodernist fiction imitates, the object of its mimesis, is the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures... permeat[ed] by secondary realities, especially mass-media fictions" (p. 38).
"Postmodernist fiction turns out to be mimetic after all; but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form... What postmodernist fiction imitates, the object of its mimesis, is the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures... permeat[ed] by secondary realities, especially mass-media fictions" (p. 38).
April 6, 2008
This is a must have book for anyone interested in postmodern theory. McHale does an excellent job of breaking down the various terms and arguments that [could] constitute the definition of postmodernism [if indeed postmodernism exists].
The language in the book is very accessible and McHale uses a large number of excellent examples to illustrate his points.
The language in the book is very accessible and McHale uses a large number of excellent examples to illustrate his points.
May 23, 2019
one of the best texts on the subject. rich and insightful study with a bunch of now-forgotten names. McHale does know his postmodernism and can tell you a lot about it. just open this f(...abulous) book.
January 26, 2021
La mia riflessione qui: https://youtu.be/quOqZdqmb4k
April 14, 2008
Read this one a few times but recently reread it again. It is notable for McHale's primary thesis, that modernism's poetics were concerned with epistemological questions and postmodernism in all its myriad forms is concerned with ontological questions. Part one discusses this shift from epistemological to ontological concerns with an emphasis on hybrid texts and then sets the context for the rest of the book with its analysis of the ontologies of fiction. Context established, McHale proceeds with a detailed analysis of the entire breadth of techniques used in postmodernist fiction. If you are wanting to understand what is going on in postmodernist texts--why'd they do that?--then McHale's study is indispensable.
March 15, 2020
McHale's central thesis that postmodernist literature is ontological in contrast to modernist literature, which is epistemological, seemed facile to me at first and quickly won me over. McHale gets a lot of mileage out of this analytic. The true strength of this book is in its clear-eyed explanation of the characteristic techniques post-45 fiction employs with increasing frequency. This book is out of date, missing much of the end of what is typically dated as postmodernity. McHale is easier to understand than Jameson or Hutcheon, but also lacks the depth of the other two, especially the former. This is a great treasure-trove of books and authors that don't get read much any more, in addition to some of the big names like Pynchon and Reed. The book has almost nothing to say about women's postmodern fiction, and little to say about non-American (excluding Latin American magical realism, which he folds into this topic), & European and non-white postmodernisms.
Some rubrics like the forking paths metaphor from Borges or metalepsis from Genet, I found to be quite pervasive for the little insight that they gave me. In particular, McHale's borrowings from Russian formalism and French semiotics are more often an attempt to apply some technical language to the processes he's describing than they are useful apparati. The main exception is his use of the dominant, which very helpfully explains shifts in periodization and leads to his useful formulation of limit-modernism (which is a characterization of novels that is akin to the periodizing late-modernism).
Some rubrics like the forking paths metaphor from Borges or metalepsis from Genet, I found to be quite pervasive for the little insight that they gave me. In particular, McHale's borrowings from Russian formalism and French semiotics are more often an attempt to apply some technical language to the processes he's describing than they are useful apparati. The main exception is his use of the dominant, which very helpfully explains shifts in periodization and leads to his useful formulation of limit-modernism (which is a characterization of novels that is akin to the periodizing late-modernism).
Read
November 10, 2021First re-read of the whole thing in about 30 years. In the interim, I have read more (by no means all) of the fiction McHale uses as illustrative examples, so that makes some of the more abstract elements of the book more comprehensible. Lots of ideas in here, finishing with the general notion that, really, postmodernism is all about love ad death -- and what art of any era is not?
December 31, 2007
excellent study of pomo except: too much pynchon not enough acker. no acker at all, in fact! but, to his credit, discusses in detail cortazar and angela carter, neither of whom get enough cred amid the coover and the pynchon.
June 23, 2013
Quite comprehensive & easy-to-follow (which a lot of writing around postmodernism isn't).
June 21, 2013
I will ALWAYS be reading this book.
January 15, 2019
None of the critical literature (theory) about postmodernism is easy to read, though some texts are easier than others and this might be the easiest. Such ease of reading has here to do with McHale’s methodology, through which, rather than build up abstractions upon an abstract foundation, he sees clearly what he understands postmodernism to be and goes about explaining this in a commendably matter-of-fact style. But, of course, easy reading does not mean simple thinking, although McHale’s thesis is deceptively simple: Postmodernist fiction is that which foregrounds ontological questions. This ontology, though, is a tricky business. Contrasted to epistemology, the philosophy of knowing (the foregrounding of epistemological questions, by the by, is what marks out Modernist lit.), ontology is the philosophy of being. In theory, ontological studies orbit notions of existence and seek to determine how we know whether reality is real. In practice, ontological studies perform a sort of grand scale classification, which is what McHale does here. Moving out from his definition, McHale indexes what he considers to be postmodern fiction’s defining traits (e.g., intertextuality, self-reflexiveness, allegory, metalepsis) then circles back to state how such traits foreground ontological questions. By way of bolstering his argument he draws from a LOT of textual examples (like, a whole lot (this might be the most impressive part of the book)), a method of argumentation that I, for one, find helpful. The thing that appears to me to be missing from this argument, however, is the thing that shifts literature’s focus from the epistemological to the ontological, the things that brings about postmodernism. For my part, this is brought about through lit.’s relationship with poststructuralism (a subject I wish McHale spent more time on) which influences literature, as Mark McGurl argues, when lit. enters the academy. This influence is significant inasmuch as poststructuralism suspends reality, demanding ontological confrontations all over the place. This gap notwithstanding, McHale’s book is a welcome clarifying presence in a field replete with abstraction, overcomplication, and Jameson-imitation.
December 26, 2024
This book's thesis is that postmodernist fiction is fiction that arises in consequence of modernist fiction. Modernist fiction has a focus on epistemology, postmodernist fiction has a focus on ontology. For example, modernist writers like Woolf present a stable story world in which we occupy various minds and could ask questions about who knows what, and what is true. Postmodernist writers make the world itself unstable, disrupting the illusions of realism with techniques such as the authors appearing in the novels.
It's an interesting book, particularly at the start where McHale shows authors that wrote both and how these transitions occurred in their work. It's clearly and humorously written, except for being full of scattered French phrases without translation that I didn't understand. Most of the book is a catalogue of examples of how postmodernist novels achieve their effects. It's full of inventive ways to mess with the form of the novel. It does however have for me a sense of McHale reading these books so I don't have to! Briefly reading about the clever things done in these novels is more appealing to me than plodding through them.
It's an interesting book, particularly at the start where McHale shows authors that wrote both and how these transitions occurred in their work. It's clearly and humorously written, except for being full of scattered French phrases without translation that I didn't understand. Most of the book is a catalogue of examples of how postmodernist novels achieve their effects. It's full of inventive ways to mess with the form of the novel. It does however have for me a sense of McHale reading these books so I don't have to! Briefly reading about the clever things done in these novels is more appealing to me than plodding through them.
March 3, 2025
Recomendadísimo libro al que esté interesado en encontrar una caja de herramientas para el análisis del posmodernismo literario. Realmente no ofrece nada que sea tremendamente nuevo, pero actualiza una serie de herramientas críticas de toería literaria (muy influenciado por el formalismo ruso) para aplicarlas a las obras de Barth, Pynchon, Gass y compañía. Ofrece además una serie de ejemplos interesantísimos y una extraña clasificación que divide lo moderno y lo posmoderno de una manera curiosa (tal vez algo desactualizada) pero no quita que el libro me parezca una referencia importante a la hora de abordar el tema.
April 26, 2020
Cannot recommend this enough. If you like postmodernist lit, you will find a friend in McHale (a Virgil?); a guide, too for those who are intimidated by it, find it useless, or just dismiss it. The final chapter, where McHale gives his real defense of postmodernist literature, is well-earned & beautifully argued/articulated.
Also, bare bones, this is a delightfully easy read without becoming reductive/vacuous/superficial.
Also, bare bones, this is a delightfully easy read without becoming reductive/vacuous/superficial.
January 18, 2019
frate, nu e rea cartea, dar se pierde omu in neologisme si-n placearea de-a le folosi, zicand de altfel lucruri simple.
April 19, 2023
excellent and thoroughgoing, strongly defends pomo against all comers and clarifies some confusions i've long had myself
Want to read
September 22, 2016d
February 25, 2015
It's not simply that this work is unwilling to engage fully in/with the heterachical ontology both our world and textual worlds are part of, it's the unwillingness to allow an alternative epistemology that would render our own inferior. The continual emphasis on the inferior/superior ontology (and, surprise, our's is never inferior) inhibit's the text's inability to make the radical break with reality some of the ideas gesture towards (hesitation, the excluded middle, Hofstadter's Strange Loops).
May 6, 2024
A really lovely overview of the major themes in postmodern literature at the time of writing. Really enlightening in many ways. I would love to see an updated edition if Mr McHale or any of his successors are still out there!
October 13, 2016
کتابی عالی برای فهم و درک تکنیک ها و عناصر داستان های پست مدرنیستی
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