Richard Ford's postmodernist fiction: The Sportswriter and Independence day

Abstract

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and Independence Day respond to the methods of representation of modernist and early postmodernist fiction. Ford writes a subtler form of postmodernist fiction, one that is conscious of its fictionality yet relates to lived experience. In this thesis I contend that The Sportswriter and Independence Day are hybrids of modernist and early postmodernist modes of fiction. Unity of knowledge, totality of text, singularity of voice and vision mingle with uncertainty, multiplicity, and contingency in this new hybrid form. In the context of the literary theories of Brian McHale, Alan Wilde, and Linda Hutcheon, along with the novelistic theories of M.M. Bakhtin, I show that Richard Ford's novels contribute to postmodernism's evolving aesthetic. I demonstrate how the novels not only fit within a postmodern aesthetic but also how they advance a new direction for contemporary American fiction.