Fragmentation(s) and Realism(s): Has the Fragment Gone Mainstream?

• Authors: Corina Selejan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article tackles what seems to be a revival of fragmentary fiction in English in the 21st century. It briefly traces the lineage of critical interest in the fragment from German Romanticism through Bertolt Brecht and Modernism to (postmodern) film studies, in an attempt to highlight not only the temporal, but also the spatial and visual dimension of discontinuity evinced by recent fragmentary fiction. Six novels published between 2005 and 2017 are discussed sequentially, in a manner redolent of cinematic movement: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007), Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). The formal fragmentariness of these novels is read in connection to their recurrent themes: trauma, loss, death, grief, exile, displacement, memory and violence. In the process, the opposition between fragmentariness on the one hand and realism on the other is challenged; the argument draws on William Burroughs, Tom McCarthy and Fernand Léger. Although they are fragmentary in very different ways, all of the novels under scrutiny are what one may term “mainstream” novels, most of them boasting large readerships and having either won or been shortlisted for literary prizes such as the Booker Prize, thus seemingly confirming Ted Gioia’s contention that “mainstream literary fiction is falling to pieces”.

Keywords

EN

fragmentary fiction; recent mainstream fiction; realism; film studies; discontinuity

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego
• Journal: Anglica Wratislaviensia
• Year: 2019
• Issue: 57
• Pages: 103-112

Contributors

author

Corina Selejan

• Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu