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

in the diegetic reality of the novel. McHale’s additional questions address the
dominance of genre play and overt shifting literary forms in the novel’s second half:
“What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how
do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in
confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of
existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it
projects?; How is a projected world structured?” (McHale 10). Throughout In Transit,
most of the epistemological and ontological questions are raised to one degree or
another.
Contrary to previous critics who read In Transit primarily as a unitary (if
progressive) exploration of language, gender, and literary technique, I argue that the
dominant concerns as well as poetics of In Transit undergo a major shift in the middle
of the novel. Hopkins, for example, argues that the novel is postmodernist from the
start:
The self-consciousness within the narrating voice of the problems of
stream of consciousness narration is striking and an index of the
novel’s obsession with narration and language. Indeed, this metafictive
quality (an awareness of fiction as an issue to be explicitly emphasized
with the fiction itself) and the simultaneous self-awareness and
fragmentation of the narrator over numerous different kinds of
discourse take this novel towards postmodernism in a more obvious
sense than that suggested earlier as applicable to Brophy. (Hopkins 17)
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