POSTMODERNISM IN SHORT
FICTION
John Barth, Ted Hughes, Italo Calvino and Dino
Buzzati
OUTLINE OF THE LECTURE
is postmodernism?
 How
does a postmodern story differ from a
modernist one?
The breakdown of structure
 Narrative uncertainty
 Self-conscious narration

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 What
1939
Outbreak of WWII
1942
Dino Buzzati, “I sette messaggeri”
Liberation of Belsen concentration camp
Atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
1947
The Truman Doctrine (Start of the Cold War)
1950
Start of the Korean War
1962
Cuban missile crisis
1965
Start of the ground war in Vietnam
Italo Calvino, “Il conte di Montecristo”
Ted Hughes, “Snow”
1967
1968
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”
1972
USSR equals US nuclear capacity
1979
Soviet War in Afghanistan
1985
Introduction of Glasnost
1989
Fall of the Berlin Wall
1991
Dissolution of the USSR
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POSTMODERNISM –
CONTEXTUAL
TIMELINE
1945
WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
 Postmodern
 Some
common themes include:
Meaninglessness of human experience
 Paranoia and conspiracy theory
 Focus on the individual and subjectivity
 Blending of genres
 Multiple narratives
 Breakdown of time and space

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literature is highly variable
but essentially rejects any rules for
writing.
POSTMODERNISM VS MODERNISM
Modernism
Believed order had
never really existed.
 Championed popular
culture as high art.
 Questions any form of
shared reality – there
is only interpretation.

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Mourned loss of order
in society.
 Used elitist ‘high
culture’ references.
 Language seen as
inadequate to convey
reality.

Postmodernism
DINO BUZZATTI (1906-1972)

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
Italian novelist, short
story writer, journalist
and poet.
His narratives often
blend the fantastic with
the realistic.
His work sometimes
described as magical
realism.
Interested in the
relationship between
the individual and their
environment.
ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985)


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
Italian journalist and
fiction writer.
His work is often playful
and mixes science
fiction with more
experimental forms.
He was also interested
in self-conscious
literature and
narratorial
unreliability.
TED HUGHES (1930-1998)



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
Best known as poet (Poet
Laureate until 1998).
His writing often focused
on nature but also the
place of the individual in
the natural world.
His fiction writing is also
interested in subjectivity
and defamiliarisation.
Also interested in
narrative experimentation
and the effect on the
reader.
JOHN BARTH (B.1930)



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
American novelist and
short story writer.
One of the first-wave of
American
postmodernists.
Another very playful
writer – experiments
with form and narrative
structure.
Also interested in
disordered realities and
non-linear plot-lines.
THE BREAKDOWN OF STRUCTURE
None of the stories are ‘about’ anything in the
conventional sense – all illustrate a state of mind
instead.
 Absence of a conventional structure encourages
the reader to remake the text – open to us
remodelling it.
 All about how we respond as individuals – no
right or wrong way to read these stories.
 Can see the contrast with some of the modernist
texts but can also link to Woolf and Pirandello’s
approaches to narrative.

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BREAKDOWN OF STRUCTURE BUZZATI
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Ripartirà per l’ultima volta. Sul taccuino ho calcolato che,
se tutto andrà bene, io continuando il cammino come ho
fatto finora e lui il suo, non potrò rivedere Domenico che
fra trentaquattro anni. Io allora ne avrò settantadue. Ma
comincio a sentirmi stanco ed è probabile che la morte mi
coglierà prima […] Fra trentaquattro anni (prima anzi,
molto prima) Domenico scorgerà inaspettetamente i fuochi
del mio accampamento e si domanderà perché mai nel
frattempo io abbia fatto così poco cammino. Come
stasera, il buon messaggero entrerà nella mia tenda con le
lettre ingiallite dagli anni, cariche di assurde notizie di un
tempo già sepolto.
BREAKDOWN OF STRUCTURE - BARTH
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Naturally he didn’t have nerve enough to ask Magda to
go through the funhouse with him. With incredible
nerve and to everyone’s surprise he invited Magda,
quietly and politely, to go through the funhouse with
him. “I warn you, I’ve never been through it before,” he
added, laughing easily; “but I reckon we can manage
somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is
that it’s meant to be a funhouse; that is, a place of
amusement. If people really got lost or injured or too
badly frightened in it, the owner’d go out of business.
There’d even be lawsuits. No character in a work of
fiction can make a speech this long without interruption
or acknowledgment from the other characters.”
NARRATIVE UNRELIABILITY



The stories don’t make the narrators attempt to
explain what is happening – they just accept their
condition and get on with it.
So the stories refuse to satisfy the reader’s desire for
meaning – remain totally enigmatic.
Is this why they are successful – they fire our
imagination differently to more conventional
narratives?
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
This is not based on mental instability like earlier
stories – more a discussion about nature of reality.
NARRATIVE UNCERTAINTY - HUGHES
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Our aircraft was forced down by this unusual storm.
The pilot tried to make a landing, but misjudged the
extraordinary power of the wind and the whereabouts
of the ground. The crash was violent. The fuselage
buckled and gaped, and I was flung clear […] Of
course, everything previous to that first waking may
have been entirely different since I don’t remember a
thing about it. Whatever chance dropped me here in
the snow evidently destroyed my memory. That’s one
thing of which there is no doubt whatsoever. It is, so
to speak, one of my facts. The aircraft crash is a
working hypothesis, that merely.
SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATION
Breaks boundary between fiction and reality.
 Why might Barth want us to be conscious of how
the text is constructed and why it affects the
reader?
 Partly to unsettle the narrative structure but
also to undermine the conventional relationship
between text and reader.
 Usually the text presents the reader with a
coherent reality to interpret – here the text is
interrupted by what appears to be a version of
the reader’s reality, where the text is a
constructed object.

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SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATION - BARTH
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For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For
Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He has come
to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the
occasion of their visit is Independence Day, the most
important secular holiday of the United States of
America. A single straight underline is the manuscript
mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed
equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as
well as the customary type for titles of complete works,
not to mention. […] If passages originally in roman type
are italicized by some repeating them, it’s customary to
acknowledge that fact. Italics mine.
SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATION - CALVINO
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Faria apre una breccia nella parete, penetra nello studio di
Alexandre Dumas, getta uno sguardo imparziale e scevre
di passione sulla distesa si passati e di presenti e di futuri
– come non potrei fare io, io che cercherei di riconoscermi
con tenerezza nel giovane Dantès appena promosso
capitano, con pietà nel Dantès galeotto, con delirio di
grandezza nel conte di Montecristo che fa il suo ingresso
maestoso nei più alteri salotti di Parigi […] – prende un
foglio qua un foglio là, muove come una scimmia le lunghe
braccia pelose, cerca il capitolo dell’evasione, la pagina
sense la quale tutte le possibili continuazioni del romanzo
fuori della fortezza diventano impossibili.
SEMINAR QUESTIONS


Have the language and tone of the stories
changed from the modernist texts?
What is the relationship between reader and
narrator in these stories?
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
How do the postmodern narratives differ from
the modernist ones?
QUESTIONS FOR NEXT WEEK

Is the individual represented differently in
postmodern stories compared to in realist and
modernist texts?
Are these stories more difficult for the reader to
engage with than the other stories we’ve read
this term?
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Warwick, 2014
