Toward Post-Postmodernism. About Alasdair Gray's 'Glaswegians'

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, course: Dubliners and Glaswegians, language: English, abstract: Despite often being described as the prototypical author of postmodern literature, in a letter to Dietmar Böhnke, Alasdair Gray has this to say about postmodernism, 'Post modernism seems the creation of scholars acquiring a territory to lecture upon.' - thus ridiculing his status as a postmodern writer. In this paper, I'll work closely with Gray's short story collection, Glaswegians, and will interpret whether it is modern, postmodern, or post-postmodern. To assist my determination, I will investigate the history of the postmodern, dividing it into its philosophical and cultural vocabularies. The result of my investigation and interpretation is that Glaswegians is a post-postmodern work because, despite the play with what could be called a postmodern elements, it provides the reader with answers to postmodern dilemmas and points to something 'outside the text'.

I am a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group. I did my graduate studies at the University of Tübingen, where I was a member of the Philosophy of Neuroscience Group at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience. I specialize in the philosophy of cognitive science, empirically-informed philosophy of mind and phenomenology. I am currently exploring questions regarding the nature of cognitive experience, including insight, metacognition, and cognitive phenomenology