ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

spatial and temporal confines. On the subject of whether this is the only type of
narrative text which should be called modernism, I am agnostic. There are clear
advantages to a broader, planetary range of modernisms, and there are advantages to
grounding our definition of modernism in the features that initially piqued Friedman’s
interest in modernism as well as my own. There are even advantages in abandoning
the term “modernism” altogether; it is, even when deployed with care, a term that
causes confusion for the layman. However, like Jameson, I believe we are stuck with
the word modernism. Tying the term to the stylistic features of canonical modernist
texts at least gives lends it a certain shape and continuity, even as the field of
modernist studies expands.
Just as I have chosen McHale’s definition of modernism in part because of its
usefulness for narratological inquiry, so too can classical narratology provide further
clarification about the nature of modernist poetics as defined by McHale. British
Modernist Narrative Middles, by looking closely at how six British modernist texts
construct their own middles, examines many of the different functions and forms of
the central narrative middle. The primary theoretical tools employed are those of
classical narrative theory, especially the work of Gérard Genette. Genette’s
distinction between story, “the signified or narrated content” and narrative discourse,
“the signifier, statement, discourse, or narrative text itself” (Genette, Narrative
Discourse 27) may help clarify the distinction between the epistemological poetics of
modernism and the epistemological plots of detective fiction, as well as to distinguish
the epistemological dominant of modernism from the ontological dominant McHale
associates with postmodernism (McHale 10). Epistemological problems—questions
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