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

of the modernist approach and the potential uses of the middle in a pluralistic and
postmodernist future.
Brian McHale’s theories of modernist and postmodernist fiction have formed
the basis for the definition of modernism used in this study. Modernism and
postmodernism are distinguished in his work not by historical periodization, by their
relationship to the concept of the modern, or to a list of typical traits or techniques
(though McHale does often supply the latter). Instead, they are distinguished by the
concept of the dominant, which McHale credits to Jurij Tynjanov via Roman
Jakobson. For McHale’s (and our) purposes, the dominant is the primary focus of the
work, conceived by McHale in this case as a philosophical category around which a
work structures its thematics. For modernism, the dominant is the epistemological,
while for postmodernism, the dominant is the ontological. That is, modernism is
concerned with questions about the nature of knowledge, while postmodernism is
concerned with questions about the nature of the world. However, a thematic
epistemological or ontological dominant is not enough to make a work modernist or
postmodernist. McHale connects each philosophical category with a type of genre
fiction: the epistemological with detective fiction; the ontological with science
fiction. These genres explore their dominants thematically, as well as through plot
mechanics. However, they differ from modernism and postmodernism in that the -
isms incorporate the dominant in their poetics as well as their thematics.
The line between postmodernism and world-building genre fiction such as
science fiction or fantasy is a good deal thinner than the difference between
modernism and detective fiction or other mystery-driven forms of realism. This is
268