MIRROR, MIRROR: DIMENSIONS OF REFLEXIVITY IN POST-MODERN BRITISH AND AMERICAN FICTION

Post-World War II British and American fiction has shown a significant increase in reflexivity, particularly during the last two decades. This phenomenon may be obscured by the plethora of critical terms surrounding it, but the reflexive or self-conscious fiction, the story or novel which exhibits literary self-consciousness by baring its artifice and drawing attention to its status as fiction, is an integral part of the contemporary literary scene. Consolidating the many observations which have been made concerning this mode of literature, sorting out and codifying its features, has become a vital critical task.;Since it is but one part of the many reflexive aspects of the world, reflexive fiction may be placed in a context of reflexive activity in contemporary television, theater, and film and related to various philosophical, psychological, and sociological movements in this relativistic, skeptical, game-playing age. Contemporary reflexive fiction must also be seen as part of a sprawling but unified body of literature stretching back to early frame-tales, the self-conscious theater of Shakespeare, and the self-conscious novels of Cervantes and Sterne.;Complementing this synoptic theoretical and historical study required consideration of fictionists of the present era. The work of Vladimir Nabokov, the greatest of post-modern reflexive novelists, demanded elucidation. The comparatively diminutive British branch of self-conscious novelists--including Beckett, Durrell, Fowles, and Murdoch--had to be examined and contrasted with the vigorously reflexive Americans--from John Barth and his Literature of Exhaustion through Pynchon and Vonnegut to the New Journalists and younger disruptivists such as Barthelme, Sukenick, and Sorrentino. The generally neglected field of reflexive short fiction also had to be considered--its history and recent blossoming, the seminal figure of Borges and his ficciones, the collections of reflexive fiction by Barth and Coover, and the recent anthologies and textbooks which have discovered, promoted, and analyzed this contemporary literary self-consciousness.;Establishing the dimensions of reflexivity, erecting a foundation of theory, and examining a wide range of significant post-modern reflexive works and their authors is not sufficient however. Further dissemination and application of this broad, flexible concept of reflexivity, this concept of multiple continua of involution, is needed. Whether the surge of contemporary self-conscious fiction be a product of its time, a necessary result of literary evolution, or an outcropping of some permanent potential of fiction, establishing the dimensions of literary self-consciousness will enable critics to intelligently observe and better comprehend whatever future directions fictional reflexivity may take.;A pluralistic, theoretical overview shows the relationship of reader to reflexive fiction to be essentially one of dissociation of reader from text. Self-conscious literature disrupts the belief-inducing illusions of literary art, playing with its conventions and reader expectations. Reflexive fiction--rejecting the processes of identification upon which more realistic and romantic modes depend--moves toward the anti-mimetic and anti-realistic, toward comedy, irony, and parody. The relationship of author to reflexive fiction will often entail the problem of autobiography and lead to a psychological profile of the reflexive author--a profile which may emphasize the order and control afforded by reflexivity or brand the author as narcissistic, solipsistic, and impotent. The relationship of reflexive fiction to other literature may be pursued through the manifold formal features typical of self-conscious fiction (flat characters, disturbances of the prose surface, over- or under-plotting, stories-within-stories) or through its connections with poetry and with the comic and ironic modes.