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

ecause postmodernism concerns the nature of the world itself—which can be
destabilized not only by literary technique, as such, but by the choice of a highconcept
world. That is, the poetics of postmodernism cannot easily be confined to a
separate category of “literary technique” as can the poetics of modernism. This
perhaps at least partly explains why postmodernism is often identified with a selfaware
return to traditional genre writing as it is with “difficult” writing by authors
such as Thomas Pynchon. 30 This also may explain how easily many popular art forms
incorporate or anticipate postmodernist techniques (particularly to humorous effect),
from the flexible physics and repeated breaking of the fourth wall found in Looney
Tunes to the literary mash-ups and hopping between books found in, for example, the
stories of Woody Allen and the novels of Jasper Fforde. 31 That is, the breaking of
ontological boundaries is a well-founded popular form of storytelling and joketelling,
based, at least in part, on the delight involved in both disturbing and
confirming our expectations of genre and world stability. So, when examining the
presence of both modernism and postmodernism in In Transit, I will argue that the
novel’s postmodernism is both an extension of modernism and its techniques into the
realm of the ontological, and a return to the traditional realms of genre writing and
popular joke-telling.
30 See, for example, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, which includes
“period pastiche” such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance to be a key strain “of Postmodern
British fiction, which by reanimating styles from the literary tradition, explores the relation of that
tradition to the fate of language and literary culture in the contemporary era” (Murphet 722).
31 Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode” tells the story of a bored professor who enters the text of
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in order to engage in an affair with its protagonist, who eventually finds
her way into the real world; in Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, the protagonist must prevent a villain from
erasing Jane Eyre from all copies of the novel by entering the book itself. The novel and its sequels
contain many similar crossings between “real” and “fictional” worlds.
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