Interrogating stories told about life after deconstruction, and discovering instead a kind of afterlife of deconstruction, Daniel Punday draws on a wide range of theorists to develop a rigorous theory of narrative as an alternative model for literary interpretation. Drawing on an observation made by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Punday argues that at the heart of narrative are concrete objects that can serve as "lynchpins" through which many different explanations and interpretations can come together. Narrative after Deconstruction traces the often grudging emergence of a post-deconstructive...

Although the body has recently emerged throughout the humanities and social sciences as an object revealing the power and limits of representation, the study of narrative has almost entirely ignored human corporeality. As this book shows, attention to the body raises uncomfortable questions about the historicity of basic narrative concepts like character, plot, and narration - questions that critics would often prefer to ignore. Daniel Punday argues that narrative itself is a concept constructed by modern-day critics based on assumptions about identity, desire, movement and place that depend...

While some cultural critics are pronouncing the death of the novel, a whole generation of novelists have turned to other media with curiosity rather than fear. These novelists are not simply incorporating references to other media into their work for the sake of verisimilitude, they are also engaging precisely such media as a way of talking about what it means to write and read narrative in a society filled with stories told outside the print medium.
By examining how some of our best fiction writers have taken up the challenge of film, television, video games, and hypertext, Daniel Punday...

This book analyzes assumptions about human corporeality implicit in common narrative concepts like plot, character, and setting.