John Banville : arguments of postmodernity

I begin my paper with the observation that one often finds John Banville’s works being read as ‘postmodern’ by scholars in the critical discourse about the author’s fiction. I will proceed to demonstrate that this concept of Banville’s writings being ‘postmodern’ is taken for granted by many academi...

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Main Author: Wan, Jasmine Xiang Ling
Other Authors: Daniel Keith Jernigan
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52276
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-522762019-12-10T12:08:18Z John Banville : arguments of postmodernity Wan, Jasmine Xiang Ling Daniel Keith Jernigan School of Humanities and Social Sciences DRNTU::Humanities::Literature I begin my paper with the observation that one often finds John Banville’s works being read as ‘postmodern’ by scholars in the critical discourse about the author’s fiction. I will proceed to demonstrate that this concept of Banville’s writings being ‘postmodern’ is taken for granted by many academics but is actually rather unstable. My exposition shall thus address the dearth of literature dealing particularly with the tenuous relationship between Banville’s compositions and postmodernism by seeking to determine which characteristics of Banville’s texts make them postmodern. To do so, I will define postmodernism and use its definition to identify the postmodern aspects of the writer’s novels. I contend that postmodernism possesses three distinguishing elements—lack of a single definition, self-contradiction, and a debated existence—which appear, counter-intuitively, to prevent it from being defined. This contention shapes the overall structure of my essay, which has three chapters—each one expounds one of the three elements and responds to its apparent self-undermining—flanked by my introduction and conclusion. Within the chapters, I will be using Banville’s works to contextualise my discussions of the aforementioned traits of postmodernism as this allows me to illustrate the postmodern nature of his fiction in the process. Bachelor of Arts 2013-05-03T07:25:25Z 2013-05-03T07:25:25Z 2013 2013 Final Year Project (FYP) http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52276 en Nanyang Technological University 37 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic DRNTU::Humanities::Literature
spellingShingle DRNTU::Humanities::Literature
Wan, Jasmine Xiang Ling
John Banville : arguments of postmodernity
description I begin my paper with the observation that one often finds John Banville’s works being read as ‘postmodern’ by scholars in the critical discourse about the author’s fiction. I will proceed to demonstrate that this concept of Banville’s writings being ‘postmodern’ is taken for granted by many academics but is actually rather unstable. My exposition shall thus address the dearth of literature dealing particularly with the tenuous relationship between Banville’s compositions and postmodernism by seeking to determine which characteristics of Banville’s texts make them postmodern. To do so, I will define postmodernism and use its definition to identify the postmodern aspects of the writer’s novels. I contend that postmodernism possesses three distinguishing elements—lack of a single definition, self-contradiction, and a debated existence—which appear, counter-intuitively, to prevent it from being defined. This contention shapes the overall structure of my essay, which has three chapters—each one expounds one of the three elements and responds to its apparent self-undermining—flanked by my introduction and conclusion. Within the chapters, I will be using Banville’s works to contextualise my discussions of the aforementioned traits of postmodernism as this allows me to illustrate the postmodern nature of his fiction in the process.
author2 Daniel Keith Jernigan
author_facet Daniel Keith Jernigan
Wan, Jasmine Xiang Ling
format Final Year Project
author Wan, Jasmine Xiang Ling
author_sort Wan, Jasmine Xiang Ling
title John Banville : arguments of postmodernity
title_short John Banville : arguments of postmodernity
title_full John Banville : arguments of postmodernity
title_fullStr John Banville : arguments of postmodernity
title_full_unstemmed John Banville : arguments of postmodernity
title_sort john banville : arguments of postmodernity
publishDate 2013
url http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52276
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