Over the past 25 years, postmodernist and anti-realist fiction have striven to carry out the problematization of fact and fiction - what has sometime been referred to as the problematics of faction - in its frontal assault against modernist poetics, most notably in its combination of biography, autobiography and transhistorical narrative and its disruption of character, author, plot and ultimately, story itself. Does such fiction accomplish anything beyond this problematization? Postfaction provides a forum for the treatment of this question by exploring three characteristic topoi: the attempt to problematize traditional notions of time and history; the attempt to foreground the acts of writing and discursive practice in the creation and interpretation of texts; and the reconsideration of language in light of the notions of entropy and apocalypse in order to expose language as an impure medium of communication. We encourage papers that will contribute to an examination of the possible undercurrents left unexplored by one dimensional critiques of postmodernist and anti-realist fiction in an effort to vivify the very fiction these critiques intend to explore.
Participants will include:
Please send all papers to Postfaction
Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
England.
E-mail: pyrck@snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk
Deadline For Submissions: July 31, 1995.