Cristopher Nash - Böcker

Discourse can no longer be contained within the frameworks of literature and linguistics. It has broken through the barriers between subjects and dominates the way we relate to each other and to the world. Even where we least expect it, `storytelling' is going on, and the implications of this are vast. This is the view universally shared by the writers contributing to this book. Specialists in economics, law, the history and semiotics of science, psychology, politics, philosophy, and literary theory and criticism, they are a uniquely cross-disciplinary group.

Can the postmodern decide things? Can it oppose abuses of fantasy and power, and resist the attractions of violence? Can it make adequate provision for its own future? Who stands to gain from postmodernity? Cristopher Nash sets out these questions and more, taking the view that the entire body of writing on postmodernity needs to be reread in the light of the unique psychological character and motives that now appear to mould and drive it. Challenging our habit of confusing the vast vigorous culture of postmodernity with theories of 'postmodernism', he argues for a new way of seeing things. Instead of looking at the world through the filter of philosophical abstraction, The Unravelling of the Postmodern Mind is expressly and radically about affect. About what it feels like to (want to) be postmodern. Casting a wide net - beginning with a radical reading of the felt human needs fulfilled by philosophical indeterminist and pluralist thinking, and tracking similar impulses through the media, literature, fashion, the arts and architecture, tourism, dance and rock, drug culture, the cultures of cyberspace, virtual reality and cyberorganics, and the proliferation of new modes of birth, lifestyle and death - it catches the sound of the postmodern phenomenon in its greater clamour. This unique and controversial book shows that the postmodern does offer many of the things it claims for itself. That it presents problems about which it must keep silent. That it is, in elemental ways, a matter of choice. And that we have choices to make.

Contemporary readers face a literature that seems to ‘speak for’ them, yet they often struggle to say just how or why. Out of the deluge of works from such writers as Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Borges, Brooke-Rose, Burroughs, Butor, Calvino, Cortázar, Federman, Fuentes, Le Guin, Márquez, McElroy, Nabokov, O’Brien, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Sanguineti, Sarraute, Sollers, Sukenick, Tolkien, Vonnegut, new words and world-models that demand understanding fill the air. Yet they seem frequently beyond reach because the framework of ideas within which this often brilliant but seemingly bewilderingly disparate flood of discourses might make sense remains largely unexpressed.Beginning with the first concisely concerted assessment in English of the premisses and practice of Realism as viewed by those who feel that there is no choice but to move on, this book (first published in 1987) confronts the vocabulary and rhetoric of current radical theory with the actual procedures of post-war fiction. In a spirit of challenging experiment, it scrutinizes the themes, motifs, and strategies of contemporary narrative and reveals an unsuspected continuity of hitherto concealed premisses and dilemmas built into recent postmodern and poststructuralist thought. As provocative as the literature it regards, it proposes that anti-Realism is no longer merely a ‘movement’ – that it has become a massive and equally conventionalized and problematical tradition living alongside Realism throughout the Western world.