Reinventing narrative: The relationship of the post-contemporary novel to the cinema
Description
To dramatize the active exchange between text and reader and the growing significance of the process of composing, post-contemporary authors, often called surfictionists, disrupt conventional narrative form by using collage, fragmentation, extreme self-reflexivity, discontinuity, and space/time experimentation. This adaptation of cinematic techniques in the post-modern novel distorts plot structure, characterization, syntax, and word choice in favor of disjointed and disassociated experimentation. I believe that surfictionists who combine the verbal with the visual produce a new narrative which establishes its subversiveness and initiates its obscurity through the use of montage. In this project I will examine the relationship of a number of post-contemporary novelists to the cinema in order to define filmic characteristics of surfictional narrative Borrowing from the film studies of Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer and V. I. Pudovkin, I divide montage into eight types: simultaneity, parallelism, leit motif, symbolism, attraction, collision, deceleration and acceleration. In the introduction, I define the formalist and realist schools of film theory to clarify the origin and nature of montage. In each of the following chapters, I discuss three post-contemporary novelists who use two of these montage techniques. The authors whose work I explore include Gilbert Sorrentino, Jonathan Baumbach, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Federman, Eugene Wildman, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Ronald Sukenick, and Steve Katz. In the conclusion, I examine Ronald Sukenick's The Endless Short Story in depth, identifying each of the montage techniques discussed in the dissertation The purpose of this study is neither to assign influence nor to trace specific techniques to their source. Determining exact influences is unnecessary to reach an understanding of the shared tendencies of cinema and literature. By exploring parallel developments and innovations within the novel and the film, I hope to delineate in this study the variety of methods that surfictionists use to incorporate montage and to define unifying tendencies prevalent in the literature of the past twenty years