POMO FICTION

General Features: Fragmentation Discontinuity Indeterminacy Plurality Metafictionality Heterogeneity Intertextuality Decentredness Dislocation Ludism

Discontinuity

Plurality

Dislocation

POMO FICTION
a.k.a. Surfiction/critifiction (Raymond Federman) Metafiction (Patricia Waugh) Fabulation/structural fabulation (Robert Scholes) Historiographic metafiction (Linda Hutcheon) Superfiction/transfiction/anti-realist fiction (Christopher Nash)

Raymond Federman

Patricia Waugh

Robert Scholes

Linda Hutcheon

POMO FICTION
Questions the distinction between fiction-non-fiction the distinction between history-mythology -other kinds of writing the concepts of liberal humanism

LIBERAL HUMANISM
E.g. autonomy transcendence certainty authority unity totalization system (Linda Hutcheon)

POMO FICTION
Functions of the fiction : Sublimation (a way of turning our concerns into satisfying shape, a way of relieving anxiety of making life bearable) Cognition (to know ourselves and our existential situation offering a record of experience or a picture of real life) (Robert Scholes)

POMO FICTION
Historical writing (development from/rejection of some aspects of modernism) Philosophical writing (related to poststructuralist undecidability of meaning and constructedness of reality/world through language)

POMO FICTION
Ideological/pedagogical writing (to problematize reality, to unsettle the readers sense of reality) Textual writing (metafictional strategies) (John Mepham)

POMO FICTION
Features : Contradiction/permutation/choice Discontinuity due to lack of causation Randomness due to lack of authorial guide in role of God/destiny Excess Short circuit (breaking the frame/exposing literary conventions (David Lodge)

David Lodge

POMO FICTION
Its reaction to the austere autonomy of high modernism turns into embracing the language of commerce and the commodity Its stance is that of a playful/ironizing/selfironizing/schizoid artefact a pastiche

POMO TEXTS
Depend on The readers ability to give meaning/a coherent frame to disjunctive/fragmentary/refractory details The readers capacity to comprehend the constructedness of all writing/composition The readers potential to realize the impossibility of the texts to render the truth The readers intellect to process the textual strategies in decoding meaning (intertextual competence)

INTERTEXTUALITY
Ironical (Parody) Copy Plagiarism Pastiche Palimpsest Simulation Echo Quotation

INTERTEXTUALITY
Arthur Kroker: pomo fiction is a site of Conflicting citations Absorptions of other texts Transformations of other texts Unmaking/deconstructing codes Opening of spaces and fractures Ludic freedom of combinations Self-discovery in a joyous/playful manner

Arthur Kroker

BRITISH POMO NOVELISTS

Samuel Beckett (in-between) Salman Rushdie John Fowles Alasdair Gray B. S. Johnson Christine Brooke-Rose Andrew Sinclair Julian Mitchell D. M. Thomas Lawrence Norfolk Martin Amis Angela Carter Malcolm Bradbury etc

S.Beckett

S.Rushdie

John Fowles

Alasdair Gray

B.S.Johnson

Christine Brooke-Rose

Andrew Sinclair

Julian Mitchell

D.M.Thomas

Lawrence Norfolk

Martin Amis

Angela Carter

Malcolm Bradbury

Changing shape
Minimalist K-Mart_Fiction of the late 20 th century Cyberpunk fiction Hi-Tech Fiction Sudden Fiction Illuminated Fiction Transfiction (Raymond Federman)

Cyberpunk fiction

Hi-tech fiction

Transfiction