Parodistic Intertextuality and Intermediality in Postmodern American Fiction

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Reading postmodern fiction - once a term limited to denote a decidedly US-American tendency in contemporary literature but now applicable to a whole range of works that have in recent years been published by an international group of writers - one almost invariably gets the uneasy feeling of having read it all before. Recognizing some passages the reader feels a strong sense of deja vu and keeps wondering whether the passages he or she does not recognize are just from those books he or she has not read. Surely enough an increasingly large number of postmodern authors tend to conceive their books as a jumble of allusions to themes structures and scenes from earlier texts so-called master- or parent texts. Others go even further in alluding to previously published texts. They deliberately draw an one particular generally acknowledged and highly acclaimed master text or classical piece of world literature and read it parodically against the grain thus re-writing and re-working a renowned classic into a new work of art. Still others overtly appropriate and even plagiarize titles paragraphs and whole passages from a variety of literary predecessors. However allusions appropriations and plagiarisms are only an the surface of postmodern fiction; beneath are other things which are formally more interesting: parodistic intertextuality as a leitmotif central to a postmodern synthesis challenging traditional literary concepts such as author genre and literary period an the one hand and originality and inventiveness an the other hand fragmentation of literature and simultaneous presentation of literary and cinematic scenes and events from a variety of perspectives - also referred to as synchronic approach of telling a story deconstruction and re-presentation of texts and ultimately recognition of fiction as a world of its own as a linguistic artefact which does not stand for reality any longer. Consequently postmodern fiction is no