The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction

by Vanessa Guignery (Editor), Wojciech Drag (Editor)

The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within examine whether contemporary forms of literary fragmentation constitute a return to the modernist episteme or the fragmented literature of exhaustion of the 1960s, mark a continuity with postmodernist aesthetics or signal a deviation from past models and an attempt to reflect today’s accelerated culture of social media and over-communication.

Contributors theorise and classify literary fragments, examine the relationship between fragmentation and the Zeitgeist (influenced by globalisation, media saturation and social networks), analyse the mechanics of multimodal and multimedial fictions, and consider the capacity of literary fragmentation to represent personal or collective trauma and to address ethical concerns. They also investigate the ways in which the architecture of the printed book is destabilised and how aesthetic processes involving fragmentation, bricolage and/or collage raise ontological, ethical and epistemological questions about the globalised contemporary world we live in and its relation to the self and the other. Besides the aforementioned authors, the volume makes reference to the works of J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Markson, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson and several others.

254 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2019

About the author

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (France), after having taught at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris as Assistant and Associate Professor from 1996 to 2009. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 2011 and Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois) in April 2017. She was a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2016, and has been a University Affiliate and Scholar there since 2010 for periods of one up to six months. She was a Junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France between 2012 and 2017, and is now a Honorary member. In 2020-21, she was awarded a one-year delegation with the CNRS research unit ITEM, specialised in genetic criticism.

Vanessa Guignery is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including Julian Barnes from the Margins. Exploring the Writer’s Archives (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts, the webmaster of julianbarnes.com. She has published articles on Jonathan Coe, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Janet Frame, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Alice Munro, as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, Ceci n'est pas une fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, into French (Quidam, 2010) and edited the correspondence between B.S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (PUF, 2012) and of a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2016). She is the editor and co-editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English and regularly conducts interviews with writers. From 2000 to 2009, she co-directed the research center ERCLA ("Writings of the Contemporary Novel in English") at the University of La Sorbonne. She is a permanent member of the CNRS research unit IHRIM.