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

suggests on the back of the box that serves as its cover “appropriate places to set
down, forget or completely lose any number of its contents within the walls of an
average well-appointed home” (Ware). Thus, Building Stories suggests both how
containing the fragments of a middle within even an unconventional physical
structure creates a coherent narrative, even as parts of that middle may be easily
jettisoned or lost. By suggesting that its component parts are as much objects in the
reader’s home as they are pieces of a single narrative, Building Stories takes a further
step in the direction of postmodernism.
Films may also employ modernist narrative middles. One particular recent
film contains a modernist narrative middle that shine some light on the connections
between modernist and postmodernist narrative. Rian Johnson’s time-travel drama
Looper (2012) shifts its tense, mood, genre, and visual style quite dramatically in its
middle. From a fast-moving urban crime drama, shown through its young male
protagonist’s eyes, it shifts to a slow moving rural fantasy/horror drama seen initially
through the eyes of a young woman. The shift in point of view is eventually reflected
in the young man’s actions, as he begins to see the needs and desires of others. His
actions, culminating in his suicide, eventually affect the world ontologically, wiping
out most of the events of the film. That is, an epistemological shift at the film’s
middle effects an ontological shift at the film’s end. This shift begins with a change in
how the audience perceives the narrative.
As some of the possibilities I have outlined above suggest, the study of
narrative middles is in its infancy, and its scope should extend well beyond
modernism. While it is certainly not the case that the middles of texts have been paid
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