Fiction and theory of the postmodern moment

Designed as an introduction to some concerns of the postmodern moment--a moment which demands an awareness of \u27being-within\u27 language as well as a particular historical, social, and cultural framework--this text reads selected contemporary theory and contemporary fiction as a means of interrogating their shared discursive space. Neither is privileged over the other: the theory is not used to explicate the fiction, and the fiction is not presented as proof of the theory. Neither is the site of Truth; rather, the theory and the fiction use varying narrative strategies to express similar critiques and concerns of the postmodern moment. Poststructuralism\u27s use (and critique) of the tenets of structuralism is introduced in a chapter which reads Italo Calvino\u27s A Sign in Space as a fabulous tale which discovers and then dismantles the Saussurean understanding of linguistic signs. The deconstruction of the linguistic sign continues in a larger critique of representation in the following chapter, which brings together J. M. Coetzee\u27s novel, Foe, and Jacques Derrida\u27s essays, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences and Differance, to discuss the shift from a mimetic confidence in the referentiality of language to an awareness of the unstable function performed by any semiotic sign. The subject is then looked at as an historically specific construct, and in its relationship to power, with Michel Foucault\u27s essay The Subject and Power and Michel Tournier\u27s novel Friday providing the primary texts. The following chapter uses Roland Barthes\u27 essay From Work to Text and Foe and Friday as a means of discussing intertextuality. The final chapter brings the theoretical tools gathered thus far to the discussion of history within the postmodern moment. The counter-memory of three novels (Christa Wolf\u27s Cassandra, Timothy Findley\u27s Famous Last Words, and Salman Rushdie\u27s Midnight\u27s Children), each an example of \u27historiographic metafiction\u27, is highlighted, along with Michel Foucault\u27s essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History