Word: harper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title of Philip Brian Harper's recent book filled me at once with intrigue and suspicion...
Framing the Margins is a refreshing addition to a potentially frustrating debate in that Harper's analysis prompts more questions than it offers solutions. Writers linked by their identification as "marginal" (of which more will be discussed later) are compared with the canonically "postmodern" novelists Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. The result of this comparison is to redefine the origins of the fragmentation of the subject that is generally seen as characteristic of literary postmodernity. The "marginal" writers chosen Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison-present a rather motley collection. When...
...standardly seen as a major work in the minor tradition, that it say that its minorities does drive from the social minority of Ellison himself." By tracing evidence of what he terms "psychic fragmentation" through the work of these diverse writers and into the dominant contemporary literary culture, Harper aims to question the very criteria by which they are termed socially or artistically "marginal...
...Harper insists that in doing this he is not attempting to discredit current interpretations of postmodernism. "On the one hand, I'm calling into question the concept of fragmentation as somehow singly characteristic of postmodernism, but on the other hand I receive very strongly in that characteristic." In this way, paradoxically to re-assert the centrality of fragmentation in postmodernity...
Inevitably, Harper's calls to re-examine the connection between literary theory and wider issues in contemporary political culture. "I find myself personally moving beyond the literary in so far as it seems to a large degree in the extra-literary realm that our sense of ourselves as individuals and as communities and as nations is forged. The way I'm working lately is to identify various issues and problems that seen to leap out at me from other geners, other media...and then to interogate these through a literary text...