Read more
Novel arguments argues that innovative fiction - by which is meant writing that has been variously labeled postmodern, metafictional, experimental - extends our ways of thinking about the world, and rejects the critical consensus that, under the rubrics of postmodernism and metafiction, homogenizes this fiction as autonomous and self-absorbed. Play, self-consciousness, and immanence - supposed symptoms of innovative fiction's autonomy - are here reconsidered as integral to its means of engagement. The book advances a concept of the "argument" of fiction as a construct wedding structure and content into a highly evolved and expressive experimental form. Close readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker show how they articulate matters of substance, social engagement, and ideological currency by virtue of the act of innovation. Walsh deftly argues for a new understanding of fictional cognition at the theoretical level, and, in an act of great critical creativity, discards altogether the flattening totalities of received postmodern formulations.
List of contents
Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. The idea of innovative fiction; 2. How to succeed: Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father; 3. 'A man's story is his gris-gris': cultural slavery, literary emancipation and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada; 4. Narrative inscription, history and the reader in Robert Coover's The Public Burning; 5. 'One's image of oneself': Structured identity in Walter Abish's How German Is It; 6. The quest for love and the writing of female desire in Kathy Acker's Don Quixote; Conclusion; Notes; Index.
About the author
Richard Walsh is Professor of Religion at Methodist University in Fayettevile, North Carolina, and is the author of Reading the Gospels in the Dark and co-editor with Aichele of Screening Scripture.
Summary
Novel Arguments, first published in 1995, argues that innovative fiction extends our ways of thinking about the world, rejecting the critical consensus that, under the rubrics of postmodernism and metafiction, homogenises this fiction as autonomous and self-absorbed.
