Brian McHale
Encyclopedia
Brian G. McHale is an American literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly those relating to postmodernism and narrative theory.
. In charting this shift in the dominant from epistemology to ontology, McHale in his first book was able to show how the devices of narrative fiction are transformed when viewed in relation to this shift. In Constructing Postmodernism, McHale provides readings of James Joyce
's Ulysses
, Thomas Pynchon
's Gravity's Rainbow
and Vineland
, Umberto Eco
's The Name of the Rose
and Foucault's Pendulum
, the fiction of Joseph McElroy
, of Christine Brook-Rose, and of some of the contemporary writers who go under the label of "cyberpunk," most notably William Gibson
, Bruce Sterling
, and Walter Jon Williams
. For critics who have been aware of McHale's work since long before Postmodernist Fiction , the two chapters on Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow have been instrumental in shaping McHale's critical construction of postmodernism. Additionally, McHale's second major text is a critique of his first, demonstrating its own dynamics of construction within postmodernist criticism.
Brian McHale is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand),among other institution. McHale is Visiting Professor (2009–2011) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai, China. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is co-founder, with James Phelan
and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at The Ohio State University. He is the President (2011) of A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
Career
Raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McHale is a Rhodes Scholar (Rhode Island 1974), D Phil from Merton College, Oxford, and B.A. from Brown University (1974). He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (2004), as well as articles on free indirect discourse, mise en abyme, narrativity, modernist and postmodernist poetics, and science fiction. He is co-editor with Randall Stevenson of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006).Main Issues
McHale's books detail his main thesis in the shift from modernism to postmodernism. He claims that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontologyOntology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. In charting this shift in the dominant from epistemology to ontology, McHale in his first book was able to show how the devices of narrative fiction are transformed when viewed in relation to this shift. In Constructing Postmodernism, McHale provides readings of James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
, Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
and Vineland
Vineland
Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election...
, Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
's The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose is the first novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
and Foucault's Pendulum
Foucault's Pendulum
Foucault's Pendulum is a novel by Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988; the translation into English by William Weaver appeared a year later....
, the fiction of Joseph McElroy
Joseph McElroy
Joseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of his fiction. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 1951 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952...
, of Christine Brook-Rose, and of some of the contemporary writers who go under the label of "cyberpunk," most notably William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
, Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
, and Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams is an American writer, primarily of science fiction.Several of Williams' novels have a distinct cyberpunk feel to them, notably Hardwired , Voice of the Whirlwind and Angel Stationn...
. For critics who have been aware of McHale's work since long before Postmodernist Fiction , the two chapters on Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow have been instrumental in shaping McHale's critical construction of postmodernism. Additionally, McHale's second major text is a critique of his first, demonstrating its own dynamics of construction within postmodernist criticism.
Brian McHale is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand),among other institution. McHale is Visiting Professor (2009–2011) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai, China. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is co-founder, with James Phelan
James Phelan
James Phelan may refer to:*James Phelan , American college football coach*James Phelan , American literary critic*James Phelan, Sr. , Confederate States of America politician...
and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at The Ohio State University. He is the President (2011) of A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
Chapters in Books
- "Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing. In: Douwe Fokkema & Hans Bertens, eds., Approaching Postmodernism. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986. pp. 53–79.
- "POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM. In: Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. pp. 308–323.
- "Whatever Happened to Descriptive Poetics?" In: Mieke Bal and Inge Boer, eds. The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. 1994. pp. 56–65.
- "Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory". In The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory. Edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005. pp. 60–71. --Translated into Italian as "Fantasmi e mostri: sulla (im)possibilità di raccontare la storie della teoria narrativa". Neuronarratologia: Il futuro dell'analisi del racconto. Ed. and trans. Stefano Calabrese. Bologna: Archetipolibri, 2009. 169-86.
- "Poetry under Erasure". In Theory into Practice: New Approaches to Poetry. Eds. Eva Müller-Zettelman and Margarete Rubik. Amsterdam & New York: Peter Lang. pp. 277–301.
- "Afterword: Two Presents". In Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. Eds. R.M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di LeoJeffrey R. Di LeoJeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston–Victoria. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symplokē, editor and publisher of the American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for...
. SUNY Press, 2007. 255-64. - "En Abyme: Internal Models and Cognitive Mapping". In A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge. Eds. John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci. Routledge, 2007. 189-205.
- "What Was Postmodernism? or, The Last of the Angels". In Identities and Alterities. Eds. Silke Horstkotte and Esther Peeren. Rodopi, 2007. 39-55.
- "Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Long Poem". Poetry Criticism, vol. 80, ed. Michelle Lee (Detroit: Thomson Gale), 331-9. Reprinted from Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000).
- "Speech Representation". Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 434-446.
Journal Articles
- "Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts". PTL 3:2 (April 1978), 249-87.
- "Postmodernism, or The Anxiety of Master Narratives". Essay-review of Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism; Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Diacritics 22:1 (Spring 1992), 17-33.
- "Archaeologies of Knowledge: Hill's Middens, Heaney's Bogs, Schwerner's Tablets". New Literary History 30, 1 (Winter 1999): 239-262.
- "Gravity's Angels in America, or, Pynchon's Angelology Revisited". Pynchon Notes 42 43 (Spring Fall 1998), 303 316
- "Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Long Poem". The Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (January 2000), 250-262.
- "Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry". Narrative 9, 2 (May 2001), 161-167.
- "Poetry as Prosthesis". Poetics Today 21, 1 (Spring 2000), 1-32.
- "Cognition En Abyme: Models, Manuals, Maps." Partial AnswersPartial AnswersPartial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary academic journal that focuses on the study of literature and the history of ideas. The journal publishes articles on various national literatures including Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Russian, and ...
: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 4:2 (June 2006), 175-89. - "What Was Postmodernism?" electronic book review (December 2007). http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/tense
- "1966 Nervous Breakdown, or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?" Modern Language Quarterly 69, 3 (September 2008): 391-413.
- "Beginning to Think About Narrative in Poetry". Narrative 17,1 (January 2009): 11-30.