Body of the Postmodernist Narrator (PDF)

The goal of this book is to elaborate the theoretical framework with regard to reading postmodern fiction from the perspective of the bodies of their narrators as textual occurrences. It centers on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the intersection between its various political interpretations and feminist theories. The emphasis is on the register of the real, on the domain of trauma as it appears in contemporary world, literature and history and on attempts at artistic resolution of its consequences. Since postmodernism is widely interpreted as a Western phenomenon, the book tries to show its dependence on much broader spatial, political, cultural and ideological dimensions, taking as index the darker side of literature, such as murder and destruction, dark courses of desire and the repercussions of their externalization in the reality of life. Focusing on the conditions that link contemporary cultures to the narratives and narrators' bodies, the book exposes the potential of bodies revealed in the act of narrating and the ambiguities of their fictionalizing and subjectivizing aspects, taking the body as the site of repressed knowledge, traumas, resistance and manipulative desires. The analysis of the fictional works aims to point out a missing link between imagination and the real historical conditions from which imagination derives as well as the discursive struggle to save the tormented, territorialized body from the prismatic world by holding to the "e;absent referent"e; and prevent violence caused by the uncritical "e;pleasure principle"e;.