The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, in collaboration with Wojciech Drąg
Abstract
The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within examine whether contemporary forms of literary fragmentation constitute a return to the modernist episteme or the fragmented literature of exhaustion of the 1960s, mark a continuity with postmodernist aesthetics or signal a deviation from past models and an attempt to reflect today’s accelerated culture of social media and over-communication.
Keywords
braid
postmodernism
modernism
fragmentary writing
bricolage
mosaic
Zeitgeist
collage
montage
heteroglossia
multiplicity
polyphonic novel
liberature
typographical experimentation
metafiction
appropriation
shuffle narratives
multimodality
multimediality
short story
novel
deconstruction
transtextuality
uncreative writing