Front Cover
Constructing Postmodernism
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introducing constructing
Constructivism, or, does postmodernism exist?
Narrative turns
The story so far
Essaying
Part 1: Narrating literary histories
1. Telling postmodernist stories
The first story: "Post-Modernism"
Another story: exhaustion, replenishment
A third story: cognitive, postcognitive
The first story again: unlicensed metaphysics
Appendix 1.1: "Post-Modernism", Max Apple
2. Constructing (post)modernism: the case of Ulysses
Modernist Ulysses
Postmodernist Ulysses
Modernism-cut-in-half
Part 2: (Mis)reading Pynchon
3. Modernist reading, postmodernist text: the case of Gravity's Rainbow (1979)
Modernist (mis)readings
World under erasure
Mediums and mappings
De-conditioning the reader
Appendix 3.1: Writing Pynchon
4. "You used to know what these words mean": misreading Gravity's Rainbow (1985)
Being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts
Circuits of narrative communication
The second person of Gravity's Rainbow
Misreading Gravity's Rainbow
Metareading
5. Zapping, the art of switching channels: on Vineland
Mediated lives
Representing TV
Mediated deaths
Part 3: Reading postmodernists
6. The (post)modernism of The Name of the Rose
Epistemology ("How can I interpret this world . .. ?")
Ontology ("Which world is this?")
Topology and eschatology
Postscript to The Name of the Rose
7. Ways of world-making: on Foucault's Pendulum
Paranoid reading
"The Plan" and ways of world-making
The postmodernism of Foucault's Pendulum
Anti-paranoia
8. Women and men and angels: on Joseph McElroy's fiction
Metonymy; or, realism
Epistemology; or, modernism
Angelology; or, postmodernism?
Women and Men; or, late-modernism
9. "I draw the line as a rule between one solar system and another": the postmodernism(s) of Christine Brooke-Rose
Telling postmodernist stories otherwise
From Out to Thru: POSTmodernISM
From Amalgamemnon to Verbivore: as if SF
Part 4: At the interface
10. POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM
Cross the border? Close that gap?
Feedback in the literary system
In the loop (1): postmodernism recycled as cyberpunk
In the loop (2): cyberpunk recycled as postmodernism
Interface fiction
When it changed
Appendix 10.1
Appendix 10.2
11. Towards a poetics of cyberpunk
"Cyberwhatsis"
Cowboys and sundogs
Simstim
The final frontier
Notes
References
Index