Starting from a comprehensive examination of current post-structuralist and socio-semiotic theories of narrative, this book formulates an interactive model of literary interpretation and pedagogy emphasizing process, critical self-awareness and strategies of re-reading/re-writing. A literary pedagogy premised on the concept of "rewriting", the author argues, will enable readers to experience the process of narrative and critical construction creatively.;The earlier chapters explore the implications of recent theories (reader-oriented, deconstructive, feminist and socio-semiotic) that bank on an interactive, recreative paradigm of criticism. The latter part of the book argues the advantages of a literary pedagogy that encourages critical reformulation and a focus on the reader's own articulatory strategies, thereby bridging critical theory and practice, production and reception of texts. This theoretical and methodological argument is organized around a cluster of post-structuralist readings of Henry James and two experimental seminars that have all foregrounded, though from different angles, the essential affinity between James' narrative and critical practice, and a literary pedag

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era undertakes a systematic study of postmodernism's responses to the polarized ideologies of the postwar period that have held cultures hostage to a confrontation between rival ideologies abroad and a clash between champions of uniformity and disruptive others at home. Considering a broad range of narrative projects and approaches (from polysystemic fiction to surfiction, postmodern feminism, and multicultural/postcolonial fiction), this book highlights their solutions to ontological divisions (real vs. imaginary, wordly, and other-worldly), sociocultural oppositions (of race, class, gender), and narratological dualities (imitation vs. invention, realism vs. formalism). A thorough rereading of the best experimental work published in the US since the mid-1960s reveals the fact that innovative fiction has been from the beginning concerned with redefining the relationship between history and fiction, narrative and cultural articulation. Stepping back from traditional polarizations, innovative novelists have tried to envision an alternative history of irreducible particularities, excluded middles, and creative intercrossings.

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting undertakes a systematic study of postmodernism's responses to the polarized ideologies of the postwar period that have held cultures hostage to a confrontation between rival ideologies abroad and a clash between champions of uniformity and disruptive others at home. Considering a broad range of narrative projects and approaches (from polysystemic fiction to surfiction, postmodern feminism, and multicultural/postcolonial fiction), this book highlights their solutions to ontological division (real vs. imaginary, wordly and other-worldly), sociocultural oppositions (of race, class, gender) and narratological dualities (imitation vs. invention, realism vs. formalism). A thorough rereading of the best experimental work published in the US since the mid-1960s reveals the fact that innovative fiction has been from the beginning concerned with redefining the relationship between history and fiction, narrative and cultural articulation. Stepping back from traditional polarizations, innovative novelists have tried to envision an alternative history of irreducible particularities, excluded middles, and creative intercrossings.