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

However, I would argue that we read this collapse of story into discourse as a
violation of ontological boundaries specifically because of the prior assumption that
those boundaries exist. Similarly, In Transit shows how postmodernist narrative
grows out of the grounds of modernist narrative. Ontological plurality and instability
not only may follow from epistemological uncertainty; they also depend on prior
epistemological uncertainty in order to retain their own instability. If we were to
begin In Transit in the middle—with its shifting multiple genres, stock characters,
and shifting realities—we could read the narrative as simply occurring in a fantastical
world. Alternately, we might read it not as a narrative at all, but purely as a discursive
transaction. In both cases, there is relatively little destabilization of our sense of
reality. However, because these changes in the story world first gain expression
primarily as epistemological problems—because we first assume that there is a stable
world about which we have incomplete knowledge or differing points of view—In
Transit creates in its middle a deeply ontologically disruptive narrative poetics.
Modernism emphasizes the separation between story and discourse, between the
world and the consciousness. It is by disrupting this relationship—by implying a
stable story-world and then yanking it out from under us—that In Transit achieves its
greatest ontological disruption. The possibility that a dream may be reality, or that
reality may be a dream, is what gives both dream and reality the sense of plurality and
instability. Once we know we are in a dream, the dream’s own logic and rules can
become their own sort of comfort, a stable realm of escape. In Transit’s narrative
middle is thus simultaneously the space between modernism and postmodernism—
315