![]() ![]() Further, a distinct subset of fiction termed postmodern (in addition to the works studied in this essay, see Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV, Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, and Tim Gautreaux’s short story “Welding With Children,” amongst others) reflects upon the medium of the television, often using the device to frame the narrative, situate the text, as a plot device, and sometimes the television is employed to such an extent as to grant the medium agency (often as a disembodied character inserting its voice within the dialogue of the narrative). Postmodern fiction is often meta-fictional and self-reflexive, meaning it reflects on the medium in which the narrative inhabits. If we are to characterize the contemporary situation and/or literary movement DeLillo and Wallace are so often grouped into as postmodern – and such a statement has evoked a substantive debate amongst both cultural and literary theorists – the economic and cultural aspects of the contemporary situation as well as the representative literary devices must be studied. In other words, Wallace and DeLillo produced texts representative of an ethos of time-space compression and its effects on the postmodern world – particularly through the medium of television. Similarly, the “formal innovation and experimentation” of David Foster Wallace’s 1989 collection of short stories, Girl With Curious Hair, situates itself in the temporal, spatial, televisual, post-Fordist, postmodern situation so well, it is as if the specific impetus behind the collection was to examine the effects of the postmodern condition on characters situated within such an untenable, diaphanous, and angst-riddled situation. In his reading of Don DeLillo’s White Noise-a novel many have deemed the quintessential postmodern novel-Mitchum Huehls argues: Formal innovation and experimentation can effectively create the experience of a meaningful temporality for readers White Noise is an ideal text for this venture because its content concerns one man's attempt to gain knowledge of his future while its form exemplifies a uniquely American version of the postmodern novel closely tied to television, commercialism, and the ideological mystifications of global capital. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity “For most people, there are only two places in the world. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction “A strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us As space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.” That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’” Banecker “The dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. ![]() ![]() Time-Space Compression and the Role of Television in DeLillo’s White Noise and Wallace’s “Little Expressionless Animals”Īndrew H. ![]()
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