Metafiction and Parody to the Classical Detective Story: Critical Views on Postmodern Narrative Stances and Contemporary Cultural History in John Fowles’s “The Enigma”

Resumo

When teaching at the Master’s Course on Cultural History at USS, Vassouras, I have directed my researches to Cultural Studies and its intercrosses with contemporary History, Literature and Cinema. In this realm, I have highlighted the conflictive relationship between the conceptions about ‘the Cartesian subject’ and ‘the postmodern subject’. In “The Enigma”, many of these topics are portrayed within metafictional narrative stances which problematize not only man’s condition nowadays, but that also parody structuralist literary theory through a revising critical thought which replaces the concept of discourse as ‘an enclosed and self-centered writing piece’ for the token of ‘a culturally contextualized corpus’.  Departing from self-reflexive considerations and by parodying the Classic Detective Story, I expect to demonstrate how John Fowles fictionally problematizes power relations discussed by post-structuralist theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, the manner in which he approaches the postmodern subject’s condition, and the way he depicts Great Britain’s multicultural  complexity, typical of present history.