Tracing Politics and Postmodernism in The Noise of Time

Aida Džiho-Šator

Abstract


With his 2016 novel The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes showed once again that he had not finished with postmodernist experimentations, nor with his interest in biography and history. This paper discusses the political and postmodernist elements of The Noise of Time. In The Noise of TimeBarnes embarks on a journey of exploration of the strains political repression has on an artist living and working in Stalinist Russia where everything was conducted under the directives of the political regime. Barnes intertwines the characteristics of both postmodernism and politicalnovel to render a fictional biography of Dimitri Shostakovich, a renowned Soviet composer who lived and worked through the oppression of Stalin’s regime and in the years of his successors. In his portrayal of the workings and implications that ideological artistic doctrines and forms of political power can have on artists, Barnes uses primarily intertextuality and historiographic metafiction, and this paper will mostly focus on these two postmodernist elements of the novel.

Keywords


political novel; postmodernism; intertextuality; historiographic metafiction; Julian Barnes; The Noise of Time

Full Text:

PDF

References


Bakhtin, Mihail (1985), The Dialogic Imagination, University of Texas Press, Austin

Barnes, Julian (2016) The Noise of Time, Jonathan Cape (pdf)

Barnes, Julian (2005), ˝When Flaubert Took Wing˝, The Guardian, 5 March 2005.

Barthes, Roland (1998), The Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, New York

Barthes, Roland (1981), ˝Theory of the Text˝, in: Young, Robert (ed.), Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 31-47.

Blotner, Joseph L. (1955), The Political Novel, Doubleday & Co, Inc, New York

Connor, Steven (1996), The English Novel in History: 1950-1995, Routledge, London

Fairclough, Pauline (2005), ˝Facts, Fantasies and Fictions: Recent Shostakovich Studies˝, Music and Letters, 86(3), 452-460.

Fairclough, Pauline (2007),˝ The “Old Shostakovich”: Reception in the British Press˝, Music and Letters, 88(2), 266-296.

Genette, Gerard (1997), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, University of Nebraska Press

Gifford, Henry (1977), Pasternak: A Critical Study, Cambridge University Press, New York

Hutcheon, Linda (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York and London

Jeffrey Brooks, Sergei I. Zhuk (2014), ˝The Distinctiveness of Soviet Culture˝, in: Dixon, Simon (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History

Jones, Elliott (2020), ˝20th Century: Introduction to Primitivism, Nationalism, and Neoclassicism: Dmitri Shostakovich˝, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-musicapp-medieval-modern/chapter/dmitri-shostakovich/, last accessed 17. 1. 2020.

Kovač, Nikola (2005), Politički roman: fikcije totalitarizma, Armis-Print, Sarajevo

Moi, Toril (ed.) (1986), The Kristeva Reader, Columbia University Press, New York

Lasswell, Harold D. (2011), Language of Politics: Studies In Quantitative Semantics, Literary Licensing, LLC

Oraić-Tolić Dubravka (1993), ˝Autoreferencijalost kao metatekst i onotekst˝, in: Oraić-Tolić Dubravka, Viktor Žmegač (eds.), Intertekstualnost & autoreferencijalnost, Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, 135-147.

Orwell, George (1980), ˝Why I Write˝, in: Nayar, M. G. (ed.), Essays of Orwell, Macmillan, New Delhi

Scruton, Roger (2007), The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 3rd edition, Palgrave Macmillan

Schabert, Ina (1990), In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction or Biography, Francke Verlag

Shentalinsky, Vitaly (1991), ˝The case against Mandelstam, poet˝, Index on Censorship, Volume 20, Issue 8, 18-25.

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.6337/2015.6337.Lunguage-Of-Politics_djvu.txt, last accessed 16. 03. 2020.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.51558/2490-3647.2022.7.1.201

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.