---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: 'Chapter Two: Self-Canonisation, Literary-Historical Fictions and Aesthetic Critique'
date: 2015-02-22
image:
  feature: anxietyofacademia.png
categories:
- Literature
comments: []
---
A map, as of the 22nd February 2015, of Chapter Two of <a href="/2015/02/15/the-anxiety-of-academia-academics-legitimation-and-discipline-in-contemporary-metafiction/">the book I am slowly working on</a>.

Mimetic representation academy not only possible interaction
Intertextuality can be seen as academy-like function of (self-)canonisation

<h2>Tom McCarthy's <i>C</i></h2>
<pre>
	University English haunts text
	Public persona of author as popular literary critic
	Synopsis of <i>C</i>
	Inter-textuality key to novel and its marketing
		Thomas Pynchon
		Melanie Jackson as literary agent
	Novel situates itself within postmodern lineage
	Taxonomies
		Novel attempts to canonise itself
		Usurps supposed function of university English
	<i>C</i>'s metafictional histories are also literary histories
	<i>C</i> is not the only text to do this
		Bechdel's Fun Home
		Franzen's Freedom
		But good example of overlap with university practice
</pre>

<h2>Structures</h2>
<pre>
	“Difficulty”
	Ludic mode
	Micro-prolepsis
	Epistemic play (core to all novels)
	Differentiated repetition
		Intra-diegetic representation of text's own approach to literary history
		Proliferation of -modernisms as symptom
		Implies loops and alternative time structure but is actually linear
	<i>C</i> as historical novel?
		“60-year rule” (relative periodisation)
		“Accuracy” (generic conventions)
		“Experience” (research)
		“Suspension of disbelief” (dissonance)
	Flawed premises of historical novel
		Relative periodisation and research criteria incompatible with anti-humanism
		Generic conventions rely on historical imaginary
			Raises historiographic questions
		Epistemic isolation
	<i>C</i> is a literary-historical novel
		Tradition of Luddite fiction
		 Almost-repetitious/analogous;
		Almost-historiographic
		Almost-critical
</pre>

<h2>Signposts</h2>
<pre>
	<i>C</i>'s metatextual features
	The implied archive
		Kempf's dogfight
		The implied archive signposts (postmodern) historical fiction
	Mark Z. Danielewski's <i>House of Leaves</i>
		Academic prose style
		Subversion of verification
		Harold Bloom
			Anxieties of influence
			Canon wars
	Anagrams as ludic mode
	<i>C</i>'s signals of itself as metafiction
		Proto-facticity that implies the archive
		Linguistic play that generates metafictional awareness
</pre>
	
<h2>Plays</h2>
<pre>
	Woolf
	Pynchon
	Ballard
		<i>Atrocity Exhibition</i>
		Subjunctivity
	DeLillo
		<i>White Noise</i>
		Photography
		Realism
</pre>

<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<pre>	
	<i>C</i> is metafictional
	<i>C</i> situates itself in various lineages through intertextuality
	<i>C</i> has qualities of the historical novel
	This becomes a text about literary histories/histories of genre
	This self-situation has an academy-like function
		Or at least betrays an influential anxiety of academia
</pre>