本文是一篇英语论文，本文以伊哈布·哈桑的后现代理论为基础，主要从含混、碎片化、杂合三个方面探讨了小说中运用的后现代书写策略，旨在探究作者对后现代主体困境的解构和重构，并揭示作者对后工业社会人类生存困境的思考及其对美好生活的向往。
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Focus of the Study
英语论文怎么写
Joshua Ferris (1974-), an American author, is best known for his debut novel Then We Came to the End published in 2007. This novel is a black humor novel about the American workplace, which is narrated in the first-person plural. The story is set at a fictional Chicago advertising agency that is slowing down near the twilight of the 1990s Internet boom. Many journals and publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Slate, and Esquire, gave Then We Came to the End positive reviews. This novel won the nomination in the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award the same year. The novel has been translated to twenty-five languages and been published. In many interviews and articles, Joshua Ferris mentioned the books and the writers he has read, such as Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Camus, Nabokov and Don DeLillo. So, it is safe to say that he has been influenced by many modernist and postmodernist writers. His works also show the tendency of modernism and postmodernism. He is good at depicting the alienation of postmodern people with unique writing techniques. He innovates the way of narrating and the management of the plot. His works often exhibit the features of deconstruction, fragmentation, indeterminacy and meaninglessness which are often seen as representative concepts of postmodernism.
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1.2 Literature Review
Joshua Ferris has published three novels and several short stories so far, of which the most award-winning debut, Then We Came to the End, has attracted the most attention. Since its publication in 2007, Then We Came to the End has been translated into many languages and has won many awards in America and Britain. In China, it was voted as “the 21st Century Best Foreign Novel of the Year 2008”, and got republished by People’s Literature Publishing House. There have been a lot of researches on it. At present, it mainly draws attention of foreign researchers, while the domestic research on it is still to be developed. There are many interviews and book reviews abroad to introduce and publicize it and some academic papers to objectively analyze it. Besides, there are some master theses and doctoral dissertations that refer to the novel and analyze it as needed. Domestic researches are mainly papers. Most of these studies explore its writing form, and a few analyze its themes. Besides, there are some other aspects of research, such as comparative study, interdisciplinary study and so on.
Firstly, there are several researchers exploring the theme and the meaning of Then We Came to the End. As the story happened in the office, many critics try to interpret the meaning of work and life in the office. Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler analyzes staff’s experience of the cubicle in “From the Open Plan to the Cubicle: The Real and Imagined Transformation of American Office Design and Office Work, 1945-1999”. He portrays the image of the cubicle that it gives staff social isolation. The cubicle is small and noisy and the staff suffer from lack of privacy and inpiduality which can be discovered in Then We Came to the End, too. In this novel, the tedious quality of the work is reinforced by the image of the office itself with its “flimsy” panel walls or “particleboard wrapped in cheap orange or beige fiber” (Kaufmann-Buhler, 2013: 176).
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Chapter Two Ambiguity: Deinpiduation in Postmodern Corporation
2.1 Metafictional Narrative Structure
Postmodern novelists often use anti-traditional narrative forms, so Joshua Ferris applied some unique narrative forms to make the text ambiguous. In Then We Came to the End, both the characteristic of metafiction and the ambiguity of the narrator reflect the ambiguity of narrative. The application of metafiction profoundly makes the structure of the novel complex. Metafiction deconstructs the reality of fiction. In Chapter Five of the novel, the appearance of book-within-book forms a maze of narrative. The authenticity of the story, characters, and narrator arouses the readers interests. The development of narrative before the chapter makes the novel a metafiction. The narrator is a special kind of narrator, i.e., first-person plural narrator. The identity of the narrator and the authority of the narrative lead to further uncertainty of the meaning of the text. The collective narrator’s superficial unity hides the inherent indeterminacy.
Then We Came to the End is narrated in the first-person plural, describing the joys and sorrows of white-collar workers in an office. Although the description of the characters seems authentic, there is instability and ambiguity behind the stability and reality. In order to deconstruct the authenticity and reliability of the novel, the author deliberately introduces the elements of meta-fiction in the construction of the story. American criticist Patricia Waugh thinks, metafiction is a concept for fictional literature that purposefully andmethodically calls attention to its role as an artifact, therefore raising questions about the link between fiction and reality. These works not only address the basic structures of narrative fiction, but also the probable fictionality of the world beyond the fictional text of literature, in a critique of their own creating techniques. (Waugh, 2001).
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2.2 Ambiguous Narrator “We”
In addition to the ambiguity of the narrative frame, the ambiguity of the narrator also brings indeterminacy to the narrative of the novel. The use of the tale within the tale causes the switch of the narrator and gives rise to the ambiguity of the narrator’s identity. The first-person plural narration in the novel also makes the identity of the narrator unreliable. Both the first-person singular narration and the first-person plural narration are limited by the learning of the narrator, so the first-person narration lacks the objectivity, reliability and veracity of the third-person narration. In addition, “we” narratives is unlike the first-person singular narration in that it is the agent of collective experience and the collective subject. Thus, it transcends the inpidual subject in the limits of the scope, time and space of knowledge. “We” narratives aren’t always intended to express collective thoughts. Therefore, the “we” narrative is more uncertain and unreliable than the first-person singular narration. Like other first-person plural narrators, the narrator “we” in Then We Came to the End is ambiguous in identity and authority.
In the past, researchers focused on the first-person singular and neglected the first-person plural. Brian Richardson, a famous American narratologist of “Unnatural Narrative”, thinks that the first-person plural narrative produces “impossible kind of telling” (Richardson, 2006: 37). He believes that the first-person plural narrator “we” always crosses the boundary between the first-person singular and the third-person narrative when describing the thoughts of other characters. Thus, these narratives are both first-person discourse and second-person discourse. They overtly or covertly cross the binary opposition between first-person and third-person narratives which is set in different ways by classical narratologists such as Stanzel and Genette. Uri Margolin states first-person plural narratives is “an unstable form” (Margolin, 2001: 242). It has a lot of possibilities and uncertainties in identity. The first-person plural narrator represents the collective voice and expresses the collective point of view. On the surface, the first-person plural narrator reproduces the collective consciousness of the “we” group. This is perhaps one of the main purposes of novelists using first-person plural narrators. Brian Richardson believes that “we” is a great tool for expressing the collective consciousness. The “we” in Then We Came to the End is a bunch of boring office workers.
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Chapter Three Fragmentation: Broken Experience in Workplace ........................... 29
3.1 Breakage of Working Hours ................................. 29
3.2 Perspective Transgression .......................................... 34
3.3 Collage of Working Matters..................................... 40
Chapter Four Hybridization: Representation as Introspection and Pursuit ........................... 45
4.1 Hybridization of Mass Culture ................................. 45
4.2 Parody of Americana ............................................... 53
4.3 Parody of Emerson’s View of Nature .............................. 57
Chapter Five Conclusion ................................. 61
Chapter Four Hybridization: Representation as Introspection and Pursuit
4.1 Hybridization of Mass Culture
英语论文参考
In postmodern society, the line between high culture and low culture is blurred. The postmodern writer often uses the mixture of culture to disintegrate the authority and the centralization. In Then We Came to the End, various forms of mass culture have emerged. The author constantly uses news, movie lines and characters, and religious terms, etc. The contrast between the news and the real situation shows the apathy of human relations. The use of characters and lines in movies reflects the boring and meaningless reality of people’s lives. Meanwhile, people can no longer find the heroic image and universal reliance that exist in reality. Religious terms appear constantly reflecting the lack of people’s faith. With the predicament of spiritual world of postmodern human, finding faith may be a new spiritual outlet. In this novel, Ferris mainly used the hybridization of the social and political contents, the topics of entertainment and the religious terms.
Firstly, as a black humor novel, the absurdity and irony in Then We Came to the End are very obvious. The author often uses serious objects to satirize reality, such as news reports and political figures and events.
The novel mentions a news report that the narrator has read and talked about for days. The news was that an employee in an insurance company had a heart attack and died at his desk, only to be found by colleagues four days later. In the clue before this chapter, the news was described as “THE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT” (Ferris, 2007: 159). The employee in the news works in cube like “us”, but is only discoveredafter his death due to the smell of decay. The narrator thinks it’s impossible. “We kept asking ourselves how could that be possible?” “…this poor jerk was the subject of not so much as a morning greeting from one of his cube neighbors. We didn’t know how that could happen” (Ferris, 2007: 160). In their opinion, there are many opportunities for staff in the office to talk to each other. It is inconceivable that no one speaks to the clerk after his death. In fact, in the narrator’s office, employees don’t give much care to their colleagues. The narrator claims to know everything and disseminate news but not out of concern about others.
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Chapter Five Conclusion
Then We Came to the End, as Joshua Ferris most famous novel, depicts the image of American employees and reflects the survival dilemma and spiritual confusion of contemporary people. The first-person plural narrative and the style of black humor bring the story irony and absurdity. Office life also began to attract the attention of writers. The life state of the staff has become the object of these novels. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the United States was in the period of the dotcom bubble. With the economic recession, the doom of layoffs also came to the employees. Stable work and peaceful life were broken, and the staff were generally shrouded in tension. Then We Came to the End describes the twists and turns of employees at this time.
Postmodern writing is the reflection of Postmodernism in literature. Postmodern novels show a trend of anti-tradition and begin to deconstruct the original unified world. The traditional narrative mode is abandoned and personal experience is fragmented. These postmodern writing features give the novel the tendency of indeterminacy and immanence. While deconstructing the crisis of postmodern subjectivity, the novel reconstructs the author’s ideal world. Based on Ihab Hassan’s postmodern theory, this thesis mainly discusses the postmodern writing strategies applied in the novel from three aspects.
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