The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, in collaboration with Wojciech Drąg

Vanessa Guignery (1, 2)

1 IHRIM - Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités
2 ITEM – Joyce - Équipe James Joyce et le Modernisme anglophone

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.

Mots clés: 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

Domaines: Littératures

Vanessa Guignery. The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, in collaboration with Wojciech Drąg. Vernon Press, 2019. ⟨halshs-02414990⟩