Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The European Society for the Study of English 2024 Conference, Lausanne, İsviçre, 26 - 30 Ağustos 2024, ss.169
Modernism can be viewed as the cradle of crisis in its multifaceted forms. In literature, it is commonly the crisis of the modern hero who has lost their sense of direction, which mainly results from their condition of having been left alone, without a superior guide, to find their way in this new world. Things have fallen apart, and the centre cannot hold. The modern hero is now in the dark, left in an agony of being unable to piece together the fragments of what would a century earlier be called a unified whole—the universal reality. Much of the postmodernist fiction likewise puts its hero in labyrinths, leaving them alone with their own faculties only to rely on to figure out their escape. Added to all this is the insertion of multiple realms of reality into the fabric of fiction. The reality is not only fragmented; but there are now multiple versions of it, all working at the same time. In the transition from modernism to postmodernism a newer crisis has come up, too; namely, the crisis of authenticity. The hero of the postmodernist fiction is reminded time to time again that they are lost amid a myriad of identical places, things, and persons, unable to tell what is authentic and what is not. In the light of all this, this paper intends to detail the development of crisis from its modernist contextualisation in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (i.e., the question of narratorial orderliness in fiction) to its postmodernist re-contextualisation in John Fowles’s The Magus (i.e., the question of fictional authenticity in fiction).