“My text is no more than a pack of lies.” Fictional Pacts in William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams

Autori

  • Filippo Pennacchio Università IULM - Milano

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/11918

Parole chiave:

William T. Vollmann, Fictionality, Paratexts, Historical Novel, Metafiction

Abstract

The aim of the article is to ponder, from a narratological perspective, on the fictional pacts in William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreamsseries, i.e., on the virtual contract through which the author gives the reader, whether explicitly or not, instructions about the way in which his texts should be read, and that the reader, in turn, should follow to coherently process textual contents. By focusing on The Ice-Shirt, the first novel in the series, I will try to demonstrate how such a pact proves to be a problematic one, especially in that, throughout the whole text, fictional and non-fictional elements are constantly blended. Moreover, my aim is to address how on the reader’s part a ‘flexible’ approach, i.e., an approach that recognizes and builds on such a compresence of elements, allows him to navigate a text that reveals to be hybrid in nature.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by A.J. Krailsheimer. Oxford UP, 1991.

Christiansen, Peter. “William T. Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt: Updating Icelandic Traditions.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 38, no. 1, 1996, pp. 52–67.

Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 4, 1990, pp. 775–804.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. With a new preface by the author. Routledge, 2002.

Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. Routledge, 1996.

Genette, Gérard. Fiction & Diction. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cornell UP, 1993.

---. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky. Foreword by Gerald Prince. U of Nebraska P, 1997.

---. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Richard Macksey. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Hemmingson, Michael. William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews. McFarland & Company, 2009.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction: The Pastime of Past Time.” A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.

LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 38, no. 1, 1996, pp. 12–37.

Margolin, Uri. “Narrator.” The living handbook of narratology, 26 Jan. 2014, https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/44.html. Accessed 29 March 2019.

McCaffery, Larry. “A Conversation with William T. Vollmann.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 9–24.

---. “Pattern Recognitions.” William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews, by Michael Hemmingson. McFarland & Company, 2009, pp. 135–45.

McCaffery, Larry, and Michael Hemmingson (eds.). Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader. Thunder’s Mouth P, 2004.

Nielsen, Henrik Skov, et al. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–73.

Palleau-Papin, Françoise. “Introduction. Un Balzac Californien.” William T. Vollmann. Le roman historique en question. Une étude historique de The Rifles, edited by Françoise Palleau-Papin. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011, https://books.openedition.org/psn/7789. Accessed 20 March 2019.

Patron, Sylvie. “Discussion: ‘Narrator.’” The living handbook of narratology, 2 March 2013, https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/45.html. Accessed 29 March 2019.

Phelan, James. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. The Ohio State UP, 2017.

Savvas, Theophilus. American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Smartt Bell, Madison. “Where an Author Might be Standing.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 39–45.

Staes, Toon. “The Fictionality Debate and the Complex Texts of Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann.” Neophilologus, vol. 98, 2014, pp. 177–92.

Vollmann, William T. “American Writing Today: Diagnosis of a Disease.” Conjunctions, vol. 15, 1990, http://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/william-t-vollmann-c15. Accessed 25 March.

---. The Dying Grass. Viking, 2015.

---. The Ice-Shirt. Penguin, 1990.

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 151–94.

Wisner, Buell. “Vollmann’s Argall-Text: Neo-Elizabethan Form and the Literalist Past in Seven Dreams.” William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, edited by Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes. U of Delaware P, 2015.

Pubblicato

18-07-2019

Come citare

Pennacchio, F. (2019). “My text is no more than a pack of lies.” Fictional Pacts in William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams. ENTHYMEMA, (23), 82–97. https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/11918

Fascicolo

Sezione

«We Should Never Write Without Feeling». Studi su William T. Vollmann – A cura di Giuseppe Carrara e Marco Malvestio
Ricevuto 2019-07-10
Accettato 2019-07-10
Pubblicato 2019-07-18