Contemporary British & American Fiction

I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly redundant omniscient narrator. We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades.

Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself.

New URL: <https://alluvium.bacls.org/2012/12/09/insurgent-subliteratures-fictions-of-resistance/>
This article was reviewed by Louis Armand at 3.a.m. Magazine in his article Lumpenproletariat Writing: Attack/Antisystem/Subliterature’ (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/lumpenproletariat-writing-attackantisystemsubliterature/) and republished by Itchy Monkey Press (http://itchymonkeypress.com/2016/12/09/insurgent-subliteratures-fictions-of-resistance-by-mark-p-williams/).

"The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction by Paul Dawson argues that the omniscient narrator, long considered a relic of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, has reemerged as an important feature of contemporary British and American literary fiction. It further argues that the development of contemporary omniscience can be situated in relation to ongoing anxieties about the novel’s decline of cultural authority in the age of digital media. In this context the book identifies and classifies new modes of omniscient narration that are neither nostalgic revivals nor parodic critiques of classic omniscience, but the result of experimentations with narrative voice in the wake of postmodern fiction.

To address this phenomenon, the book reformulates existing definitions of literary omniscience, shifting attention away from questions of narratorial knowledge and toward omniscient narration as a rhetorical performance of narrative authority that invokes and projects a historically specific figure of authorship. Through a study of fiction by authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Martin Amis, Rick Moody, Edward P. Jones, and Nicola Barker, the book analyzes how the conventional narrative authority of omniscient narrators is parlayed into claims for the cultural authority of authors and of the novel itself.

In the course of its investigation, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator engages with major movements in narrative theory—rhetorical, cognitive, and feminist—to challenge and reconsider many key narratological categories, including Free Indirect Discourse, the relation between voice and focalization, and the narrative communication model. This challenge is framed by an argument for a discursive approach to narrative fiction that addresses the neglect of authorship in narrative theory.

Introduction: The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter One: Omniscience and Narrative Authority
Chapter Two: The Direct Address and the Ironic Moralist
Chapter Three: Prolepsis and the Literary Historian
Chapter Four: Style and the Pyrotechnic Storyteller
Chapter Five: Polymathic Knowledge and the Immersion Journalist/ Social Commentator
Chapter Six: Voice and Free Indirect Discourse in Contemporary Omniscient Narration
Chapter Seven: Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration
Chapter Eight: Real Authors and Real Readers: A Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model""

The article presents a personal account of Polish translation of Lawrence Norfolk’s novel Lempriere’s Dictionary. The commercially failed enterprise is analyzed from the point of view of conditions a translated work must fulfil to become a success. The case is presented in the context of Polish literary market in the 1990s and 2000s.

In fact—regardless of the countless debates across beer soaked bars or dinner tables packed with steaming dishes—the dumbing of America has led to a serious threat to creative standards throughout the once-great-and-free-and-brave land of the Stars & Stripes. Such freedoms in American writing, however, do not exist and are validated by the recently harsh but fair criticism by Nobel judge Horace Engdahl in “Creative Writing Courses are Killing Western Literature” (The Guardian, 7 Oct. 2014).