Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Hans-Wolfgang Schaller: The Survival of the Novel: E. L. Doctorow's Escape out of the Postmodern Deadend

II The problems an author has to face in order to construe a good plot are considerable. Questions arise such as: what events depict a valid ethical problem of the time? where do the ethical norms for the proposed solution come from? does the culturally transmitted idea of coherence and meaning of life stand up to one's own changing experience? how do individual decisions touch the lives of others? On all these counts 24th century linguistic and philosophical theory has become increasingly wary, mistrusting inclusive world views such as religious concepts or ideological convictions of any sort. More radical, even, was the increasing doubt in man's epistemological faculty of really being able to understand anything which was not of his own making. Two distinctive phases of development can be discerned: Modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, at the beginning of the century, was concerned with epistemological problems as economic, political, and social changes disrupted traditional explanatory models of the world and authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, to name but a few Anglo-American representatives of the movement, stressed the necessarily individual perception of anybody and begun discussing questions of literary techniques such as perspective, point of view, and stream of consciousness, as a reaction to epistemological problems arising out of pragmatism and psychoanalysis. James' "house of fiction"

4, Eliot's "objective correlative"

5, Faulkner's "art is to arrest motion"

6, or Hemingway's "the real thing"

7 prove that the belief in language's referential potential still is intact. Most intriguing is James' image of the "house of fiction", which in its totality refers to the theoretically 4 Richard P. Blackmur, ed., The Art of the Novel, Critical Prefaces by Henry James, New York, Scribner's, 1934, 46. 5 cp. T. S .Eliot, The Sacred Woods, New York, 1920. 6 cp. Jean Stein, „William Faulkner", in: Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Interviews, New York, 1958, 67-82. 7 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, New York: Scribner's, 1932, 2. 89