Constructing Postmodernism

Synopsis

Lively and wide-ranging, Constructing Postmodernism provides a series of readings of problematically postmodernist novels - Joyce's Ulysses ; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland ; Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum ; the novels of Joseph McElroy and Christine Brooke-Rose; avant-garde works such as Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless ; and the works of cyberpunk science-fiction. Brian McHale relates these high' culture products to such aspects of postmodern popular culture as television and the cinema, paranoia and nuclear apocalypse, angelology, the cybernetic interface, and death. Broadening the parameters of McHale's earlier Postmodernist Fiction , Constructing Postmodernism does not propose a construction of postmodernism, but offers instead a plurality of postmodernist constructions.