Papers by Maria Jesus Martinez
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 1999
This article proposes an analysis of Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee (1993) in the light ... more This article proposes an analysis of Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee (1993) in the light of two different dichotomies: Brian McHale's epistemological (cognitive) / ontological (postcognitive) dominant and John Vernon's garden / map dynamics. The House of Doctor Dee is constructed around a series of strategies closely related to the postcognitive worldview, strategies which have come to be associated with postmodernist aesthetics and which can as well be regarded as confirming and developing ideas and devices already present in previous works by the same author. Significantly, the techniques in what McHale calis the postmodernist repertoire can be said to be based on the same integrative principie that rules Vernon's garden, the latter being an image of wholeness which stands in direct opposiüon to the splitting rationale of the map. Vernon's dynamics of integration, together with McHale's ontological structures, become in my analysis the key to understanding Ackroyd's novel, while simultaneously suggesting an interesting perspective from which to approach postmodernist literature as a whole. For about two decades now, "postmodernism" has been a key word in the vocabularies of not only literary theorists but also political scientists, philosophers, artists, media theorists, sociologists, etc. 1 Almost twenty years ago, though, the American critic and writer John Barth (1966: 66) declared it to be a term "awkward and faintly epigonic, suggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the oíd art of storytelling than sometbing anticlimactic, feebly following a very hard act to follow". In 1980, the term was beginning to enter the full range of human sciences, and still carried clear aesthetic connotations.
Uploads
Papers by Maria Jesus Martinez