The Postmodern Chronotope

The Postmodern Chronotope is an innovative interdisciplinary study of the contemporary. It will be of special interest to anyone interested in relations between postmodernism, geography and contemporary fiction. Some claim that postmodernism questions history and historical bases to culture; some say it is about loss of affect, loss of depth models, and superficiality; others claim it follows from the conditions of post-industrial society; and others cite commodification of place, Disneyfication, simulation and post-tourist spectacle as evidence that postmodernism is wedded to late capitalism. Whatever postmodernism is, or turns out to have been, it is bound up in rethinking and reworking space and time, and Paul Smethurst's intervention here is to introduce the postmodern chronotope as a term through which these spatial and temporal shifts might be apprehended. The postmodern chronotope constitutes a postmodern world-view and postmodern way of seeing. In a sense it is the natural successor to a modernist way of seeing defined through cubism, montage and relativity. The book is arranged as follows: - Part 1 is an interdisciplinary study casting a wide net across a range of cultural, social and scientific activity, from chaos theory to cinema, from architecture to performance art, from IT to tourism. - Part 2 offers original readings of a selection of postmodern novels, including Graham Swift's Waterland and Out of this World, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and First Light, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Marina Warner's Indigo, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, and Don DeLillo's The Names and Ratner's Star.

In Landscapes of Postmodernity, a group of young scholars link key concepts of postmodern thought to our present everyday experience in which we change our identities on a regular basis. While many of the essays look at less conventional modes of aesthetic representation - computer games, graphic novels, telenovelas, queer and animated films - others analyze more canonical works following less conventional approaches. Either way, the cultural and literary cartographies presented in this book allow America to be conceived as polymorphous or transnational, celebrating a new American self that is aware and proud of its non-Anglo-Saxon origins.

Using the theoretical frameworks of Freud, Todorov, and Bahktin, this book explores how American writers of the late 20th century have translated the psychoanalytical concept of »the uncanny« into their novelistic discourses. The two texts under scrutiny - Paul Auster's »City of Glass« and Toni Morrison's »Jazz« - show that the uncanny has developed into a crucial trope to delineate personal and collective fears that are often grounded on the postmodern disruption of spatio-temporal continuities and coherences.

This collection of essays, comprised of research first presented at the seventh annual Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture, explores one of the most pervasive, vexing, and alluring concepts in the Humanities, that of place. Including essays which encompass a broad range of research fields and methodologies, from Geography to Cybernetics, it presents a cross-section of approaches aimed revealing the complex cultural machinations behind what once may have seemed a static, one-dimensional topic. Investigations into the function of place as a force in contemporary culture inevitably reveal a long history of the interplay between place and cultural product, between 'context' and 'text'. Just as traditional cultures mythologize sacred spaces, so too has Western culture sanctified its own places through its literature. Imagined places such as Faulker’s Yoknapatawpha or Joyce’s Dublin become the focus of conferences and festivals; authors’ homes, birthplaces, and gravesites are transformed into sites of pilgrimage; locales created for television shows and movies become actual businesses catering to a public for whom the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurred; and persisting through the great cultural shifts of the past two hundred years is the popular and romantic notion that words, performances, narratives, and even national identities are always in some way an expression of the places in which they are created and set. With the idea of place foregrounded in so much contemporary discourse, this collection promises to enter into an already lively debate and one which, due to its relevance to where we live and how we make sense of our own “places” within them, does not show any signs of flagging.

Are we living in a post-temporal age? Has history come to an end? This book argues against the widespread perception of postmodern narrativity as atemporal and ahistorical, claiming that postmodernity is characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous narrative "timeshapes" or chronotopes. Chronological linearity is being challenged by quantum physics that implies temporal simultaneity; by evolutionary theory that charts multiple time-lines; and by religious and political millenarianism that espouses an apocalyptic finitude of both time and space. While science, religion, and politics have generated new narrative forms of apprehending temporality, literary incarnations can be found in the worlds of science fiction. By engaging classic science-fictional conventions, such as time travel, alternative history, and the end of the world, and by situating these conventions in their cultural context, this book offers a new and fresh perspective on the narratology and cultural significance of time.

Poet Richard Berengarten has published over 25 books including poetry, translations and criticism since his first collection, The Easter Rising, appeared in 1968. His poetry has been translated into more than 90 languages. His book-length poem The Manager was first published in 2001. This original and innovative work received high praise from reviewers at the time and has since then seen two more editions in 2008 and 2011 with various revisions by the author. His complex, entertaining book engages with issues such as the Modernist heritage, Postmodernist experimentation, gender relations and the problem of contemporary spiritual emptiness. Recognized as a seminal work of the late 20th century, this book-length poem employs a little-used poetic form the verset or verse paragraph. This volume brings together original essays on The Manager by nine internationally-known poets, critics and academics. It is aimed primarily at a scholarly audience—teachers, researchers and students of contemporary poetry written in English. While the essays are specialized, they are at the same time clearly-written and avoid academic jargon. Their argumentative transparence will therefore also make them available to a more general readership interested in contemporary poetry and the broader cultural issues that it entails. This book will serve for many as an introduction to a figure who is arguably one of the most significant poets writing in English today.

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.