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
still relevant possibility of representing life as a whole but which nevertheless is unattainable in practice as each author stands at his individual window and looks down an the procession of life revealing itself to him in the perspective offered by the particular window. But what he sees still transcends his subjectivity and the subject - object relation still is valid. Literary art, therefore, is believed to produce epistemological insights and to enhance understanding. This is exactly where postmodernists disagree. Depending on Ferdinand de Saussure, who early in the century (1916) in his Cours de linguistique générale developed a theory of language in which he states the discontinuity of language and reality 8. Language, he claims, is mere form and not substance, it is a system of signs representing not a name and the named thing or object but signifies only an idea and an accompanying sound 9. Under the influence of the French philosophers of language such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan postmodernism in the 1960's and 1970's assumes that reality in itself has no meaningful ontological status but acquires meaning only in so far as human experience assigns specific conceptual ideas of meaning to it. Therefore there is no reality our system of linguistic signs portrays there is only a fake-reality our seemingly referential system of linguistic signs arbitrarily construes 1 0. Raymond Federman even announces that "life is fiction" and consequently proclaims: In the fiction of the future all distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between the conscious and the subconscious, between the past and the present, between truth and untruth will be abolished. All forms of duplicity will disappear. And above all, all forms of duality will be negated —especially duality: that double-headed monster, which for centuries now, has subjected us to a system of values, an 8 cp. Ferdinand de Saussure, Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, ed., Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2nd ed., 1967. 9 cp. Joseph C. Schopp, op.cit., 38-39 1 0 cp. Ulrich Horstmann, "Parakritik und Dekonstruktion. Der amerikanische Post-Strukturalismus", in: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Bd.8 (1983), Heft 2, 145-158. 90
