Uncertainty and meaning: Postmodern British fiction and pragmatic pluralism

According to William James, reality, truth, and meaning are those things that we perceive as real, true, and meaningful because it is useful for us to do so; and the basis for our perceptions and, consequently, our beliefs is experience. James believed in the connectedness of things. Rather than adopt any one theory or ideology, James advocated inclusion and endorsed the use of all applicable theories as instruments for divining plural possibilities. The ultimate danger, in James's view, lies in a kind of intellectualism where theories become ends in themselves rather than the means to interpretative ends.;I employ James's method of pragmatic pluralism, designate the text as a bounded reality and the site of a reader's experience, and select the most useful strategies from theory and praxis in order to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate narrative and to locate a number of possible meanings within the uncertainties inherent in the indeterminacies---such as circularity, open-endedness, blurring of genres, parody, and aleatory arrangements---that characterize postmodern fictions.;Chapter 1 establishes the rationale for merging the ideas of a philosopher from the early years of the twentieth century with British fictional works written during the last two decades of that century. Chapter 2 examines Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter; Chapter 3 discusses Waterland (1983) and Last Orders (1996) by Graham Swift; and Chapter 4 concentrates on The Winshaw Legacy (1994) and The House of Sleep (1997) by Jonathan Coe. Chapter 5 contains a brief summary of the study.;The point of this study is not to locate any definitive meaning in these works of postmodern British fiction. Instead, diverse theoreticians and ideologies including Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, N. Katherine Hayles, David Morley, Linda Hutcheon, feminism, film theory, and chaos theory, as well as myriad others, are considered when they are deemed useful for making sense of these complex texts.