Ohio State U. Pr.
The real, the true, and the told; postmodern historical narrative and the ethics of representation.
Beginning with a scene of alternate possibilities in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Berlatsky (English, Florida Atlantic U.) proceeds to examine definitions of postmodernism and identify texts like Kundera's as serving an ethical purpose in framing discourses once regarded as referential and objective. Still, the problem remains of the postmodern denial of objective representations of history and therefore, ethical responses to them. From readings of texts spanning Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1940) to Yann Martel's The Life of Pi (2001 ), he concludes that postmodern narratives are more dependent on concepts of history, reality and truth than generally acknowledged. Other authors discussed include Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, and Art Spiegelman. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
