Avant-Postman

David Vichnar is assistant professor of critical and cultural theory in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University.

• INTRODUCTION. JOYCE THE AVANT-1. Preliminary notes on the novel, experiment, and the avant-garde2. Joyce the avant-gardist: the Wake in transition3. transition in the Wake: Joyce the transitionist4. A Joycean avant-garde: parallax, metempsychosis, concretism, forgery, and neologism5. Joycean (?) traditions: Hayman, Adams, Werner, Levitt6. Post-JoyceCHAPTER 1. JOYCE DE NOUVEAU: “WITHIN OR BEHIND OR BEYOND OR ABOVE” THE NEW NOVEL, 1947–671.1 “Equivalent images, analogous sensations”: Nathalie Sarraute1.2 “The Additional Step in Subverting the System”: Alain Robbe-Grillet1.3 “Forever advancing on shifting sands”: Claude Simon1.4 “Anamnesis of leitmotifs”: Robert Pinget1.5 “To fail this way, in a superhuman attempt”: Claude Mauriac1.6 “Do whatever you can to get the most out of it”: Michel ButorCHAPTER 2. “BUT HOW MANY HAVE FOLLOWED HIM?” JOYCE IN BRITAIN, 1955–752.1 “A horroshow crack on the ooko or earhole”: Anthony Burgess2.2 “The Einstein of the novel”: B. S. Johnson2.3 “This distanced technique of writing from the unconscious”: Alan Burns2.4 “The voyce crying in the wilderness, rejoice with me”: Brigid Brophy2.5 “A death wish and a sense of sin”: Ann Quin2.6 “Who’s she when she’s (not) at home”: Christine Brooke-Rose, 1964–75CHAPTER 3. MAKING JOYCE “PART OF THE LANDSCAPE”:AMERICAN LITERARY EXPERIMENT, 1953–19733.1 “A new mythology for the space age”: William S. Burroughs3.2 “The self who could do more”: William Gaddis3.3 “That style which deliberately exhausts its possibilities”: John Barth3.4 “Never cut when you can paste”: William H. Gass3.5 “The book remains problematic, unexhausted”: Donald Barthelme3.6 “Orpheus Puts Down Harp”: Thomas PynchonCHAPTER 4. JOYCEAN OULIPO, OULIPIAN JOYCE4.1 The joys of constraint and potential4.2 “Nothing left to chance”: Raymond Queneau4.3 “A man of letters”: Georges Perec4.4 “A pre-modern, encyclopedic cast of mind”: Harry Mathews4.5 “The Babel effect”: Jacques Roubaud 4.6 The anticipatory plagiaristCHAPTER 5. “THE CENTENARIAN STILL SEEMS AVANT-GARDE”:EXPERIMENT IN BRITISH FICTION, 1976–20065.0 “Of the dissolution of character”: Christine Brooke-Rose, 1984–20065.1 “Life’s too shored to embark on it now”: Brian W. Aldiss5.2 “Packed with meaningless local references”: J.G. Ballard5.3 “A polyglot babble like a symphonic Euro-language”: Angela Carter 5.4 “Realism is anti-art”: Jeanette Winterson5.5 “Great art should not move”: Alasdair Gray5.6 “Grafting, editing: quotations, correspondences”: Iain SinclairCHAPTER 6. “THE FUNNYMENTAL NOVEL OF OUR ERROR”:JOYCEAN AVANT-GARDE IN U.S. FICTION, 1973–19976.0 “‘Realism,’ the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought”: Language poetry6.1 “That level of activity that reveals life as fiction”: Raymond Federman 6.2 “A novel as a concrete structure rather than an allegory”: Ronald Sukenick6.3 “Another awareness, another alphabet”: Walter Abish 6.4 “The parodying punning pre-Joycean cakewalk”: Ishmael Reed6.5 “Does language control like money?”: Kathy Acker6.6 “The joyous heresy that will not go away”: Gilbert SorrentinoCHAPTER 7. JOYCE AS SUCH / TEL QUEL JOYCE7.1 Tel Quel’s “Enigmatic Reserve”7.2 “A certain type of Excess“: Jean-Louis Houdebine7.3 “Dis: Yes – I.R.A.”: Maurice Roche7.4 “As close as possible to that unheard-of place”: Hélène Cixous7.5 “A subject illimitable, numberless”: Philippe Sollers7.6 “An avatar of catholicity”: Beyond Tel QuelCHAPTER 8. POST-2000 CODA: CONCEPTUAL JOYCE8.1 “Misinterpreting the avant-garde”: Raczymow, Hadengue, Levé8.2 Breaking “the recursive loops of realism”: Mitchell, Hall, Home, Moore8.3 “Crucial to the health of the ecosystem”: Amerika, Foster Wallace, Goldsmith, Danielewski, CohenCONCLUSION. JOYCE THE POST-1. Countersigning Joyce’s signature2. A Joycean postmodernism: “Rituals originating in piety”3. Joycean anti-postmodernists4. Revis(it)ing the Joycean tradition: “His producers are they not his consumers?”5. Genealogies of parallax, metempsychosis, trace, forgery, and neologism6. Joyce’s baroque error: “One more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at”

"We feel The Avant-Postman is successful in locating and contextualizing some of the sprawling echoes of Joyce’s influence in English- and French-language fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."