Laurence Sterne in Modernism and PostmodernismDavid Pierce, Peter Jan de Voogd Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is the most wayward -- and in some respects the most powerful -- critique of Locke's theory of knowledge, while his interest in the gulf between biological and clock time makes him a contemporary of Proust and Bergson. In obscuring the fine line between autobiography and fiction, Sterne belongs to the generation of modern writers that includes Joyce and Nabokov. In his deliberate refusal to construct a 'goahead plot' Sterne commends himself to contemporary narratologists. In his concern with personal identity, he anticipates the Derridean stress on 'trace'. In his promiscuous borrowings from past authors, he offers himself as a suitably perverse model for the school of postmodern theory. In his attention to matters of typography and to a visual language, he provides a running commentary on almost every aspect of the relationship between word and image. Himself influenced by Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes and Burton, Sterne has influenced writers as diverse as Cabrera Infante, Kundera, Márquez, Rushdie and Beckett. And James Joyce. These influences are traced here by sixteen scholars from Europe and the USA, proof if any were needed that Laurence Sterne today is as rewardingly puzzling as he was in his own century. |
Contents
Acknowledgements 3 | 3 |
The Modernity of Sterne | 13 |
Carol Watts | 19 |
Copyright | |
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aesthetic autobiography becomes beginning biography Cabrera Infante causal century Cervantes chapter characters chronotope comic complex conception consciousness contemporary context critical Diderot's digressions discourse Don Quixote eighteenth-century episode essay ethical fact fiction Finnegans Wake fragments Gargantua Gargantua and Pantagruel genre Hamlet Hume idea identity imagination intertextual Jacques le fataliste James Joyce Joyce's Kundera language Laurence Sterne literal literary literature lives Márquez meaning metaphor Midnight's Children modern modernist Nabokov narrator novelists original paradoxical parody Parson Yorick perspective play postmodern postmodernist present Proust Rabelais reader reading reality reference rhetoric Rushdie Rushdie's Saleem satire sceptical sense Sentimental Journey sexual Shakespeare Shandean Shandy's Sterne and Joyce Sterne's narrative Sterne's novel Sternean story strategy structure telling temporal theory tradition Tristram Shandy Tristrapaedia truth Ulysses Uncle Toby Uncle Toby's understanding Volume Walter Shandy words writing written Yorick