Brian Mc Hale - Main Issues

Main Issues

McHale's books detail his main thesis in the shift from modernism to postmodernism. He claims that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. In charting this shift in the dominant from epistemology to ontology, McHale in his first book was able to show how the devices of narrative fiction are transformed when viewed in relation to this shift. In Constructing Postmodernism, McHale provides readings of James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, the fiction of Joseph McElroy, of Christine Brooke-Rose, and of some of the contemporary writers who go under the label of "cyberpunk," most notably William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Walter Jon Williams. For critics who have been aware of McHale's work since long before Postmodernist Fiction, the two chapters on Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow have been instrumental in shaping McHale's critical construction of postmodernism. Additionally, McHale's second major text is a critique of his first, demonstrating its own dynamics of construction within postmodernist criticism.

Brian McHale is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand),among other institutions. McHale is Visiting Professor (2009–2011) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai, China. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is co-founder, with James Phelan and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at The Ohio State University. He is the President (2011) of A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.