Narrative Being Vs. Narrating Being

Book excerpt: This edited volume focuses on Anglo-American modernist fiction, offering challenging perspectives that consider modernism in the instances in which it transcends itself, moving, broadly speaking, towards postmodernist self-irony. As such, the contributions here discuss issues such as being in creation; narrativizing being and creation; the relation between being and narrative; the situation of being in narrative time and space; the relation between authority and narrative; possible authority over narrative and the authority of narrative; interaction between narrative and the other; the authority of the other over and within the narrative; and the inter-referentiality of text and author. Divided into two parts, “Towards High Modernism” and “After Modernism”, the book allows the reader to chronologically follow how authors’ relations to literature in general evolved with the changing world and new perspectives on the nature of reality. This book offers an insightful contribution to the on-going discussion on the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of author, narrative, and being, and will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field.