The Dominant (McHale)

Many of the pieces of literature that we have read have dealt with the splintering of the self into a multiplicity of identities, which then creates multiple discourses in which to look at each novel. And any one of these discourses can be a dominant within a Postmodern text.

For McHale the Postmodern is an extension of the epistemological questions of Modernism. Modernism is an epistemological questioning of the unanswered by the system of living. And in some ways as described before looking for the utopia in which all questions are answered by a single notion that balances it all out and things fall into place. And it is in turn the subject of these texts that construes reality and creates their own utopia that may answer their own issues of who what when where and why.

When the epistemological questions did not create the utopia that Modernism sought to create Postmodernism turned inwards to a more ontological form of reflection, in which it calls into question the essence of being in itself.

This I think I understand but what I really find interesting is the way in which the personal reading shifts the dominant reading of a text. Thus one can look at a text from both an epistemological and an ontological lens. And if I have this right this is what McHale would call the “transhistorical”. Which definitely enables a gateway between the modern and the postmodern.