Aesthetics, Ideology and Postmodern Literature (David Foster Wallace’s Short Story Signifying Nothing, 1999)

Apstrakt

In the last decades many theories such as Marxist, some feminist and post-colonial emphasize the ideological and political function of the literary texts as well as the “politics” of representation. The literary text is understood as a cultural product and as equal to any other, non-literary texts and discourses while the text’s specificity, its artistic, literary and aesthetic quality are often suppressed and marginalized. Such approach to artistic texts as practised by the Marxists, Marxist feminists, and, for example, cultural theorists can be relevant for the study of culture but, in my view, not for the study of arts (literature) since one of the most important aspects of the literary and artistic texts—their aesthetic quality is suppressed and understood as irrelevant. In post and (post)postmodern literary works not only the above mentioned narrative strategies, but especially parody, irony, self-reflexivity and metafiction form the tools that create an aesthetic potential producing not only a relevant aesthetic message, but through which the authors both reflect the contemporary cultural condition and sensibility and re-write traditional myths associated with particular cultural traditions. In my paper I analyze the role of metafiction, parody, and irony in the production of meaning and aesthetic quality in the postmodern literary texts as manifested in David Foster Wallace’s short story Signifying Nothing (1999) as well as the way these means create the message on the current cultural condition in the USA In addition, I analyze the way how these narrative strategies foreground the ontology of a literary text through the treatment of the relationship between language, fiction and reality.