Contemporary Literary Criticism | Kroetsch, Robert (Vol. 132) - Martin Kuester (essay date 1992)

Martin Kuester (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: “Kroetsch’s Fragments: Approaching the Narrative Structure of His Novels,” in Postmodern Fiction in Canada, 1992, pp. 137-60.

[In the following essay, Kuester presents an overview of the narrative techniques used in Kroetsch's novels.]

In this age of postmodernism, the belief in a coherent world governed by logically derived laws of causality has given way to a cosmology seeing man in a shattered world of fragments. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the concept of postmodernism stressing the disorientation of the individual (and the artist) in such a fragmented world, was applied to literature by American critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Richard Wasson. For Wasson, the postmodernists represent a new sensibility: whereas for some modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, “experience was full of paradoxes and contingencies which the great poet ordered through metaphor,”...

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