The paper sets out to analyze Julian Barnes"s novel England, England (1998) in the light of Jean Baudrillard"s concepts of simulation and hyperreality. According to Baudrillard, what we experience in today"s world is a simulation of reality superseded by signs and images, and therefore we are living in a hyperreal world. Barnes"s book offers a representative sample of hyperreal world in which Martha, the protagonist, finds herself troubled. Although initially she is impressed by the glamour of the theme park named England, England later on she loses interest in it when she comes to realization that everything about it is fake. This condition, making her think of her own identity and true self, finally leads her to leave the theme park and settle in the village of Anglia where she hopes to discover her true nature and regain her lost happiness.

The modes of narration in postmodernist fiction are not identical with those of modernists and realists. They contravene readers' expectations, making them most often astounded and baffled. This study sets out to discuss some of the techniques used by the American writer Robert Coover in his story collection; Pricksongs & Descants (1969) which are associated with postmodernist fiction. These strategies including metafictional techniques, fragmentation, ontological concern, and temporal distortion, will in the subsequent sections of this paper be explicated and elucidated. In this regard, the term postmodernism will be first defined and elaborated, and then some of the salient features of Coover's selected work stated above, will be examined in order to demonstrate the title-mentioned claim. Not all the stories of the collection will in this study be provided an analysis of, but those which are of greater significance and are noticeable in incorporating postmodern strategies. Coover, it is argued, in the above-mentioned work, depicts events and situations most of which at odds with what readers are used to being provided with. Readers in Coover's are thus no longer passive recipients of the created world of the author, but active during the narratives and are invited to make things out and come to a conclusion about the plausible outcome of events.

He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.

ABSTRACT. The modes of narration in postmodernist fiction are not identical with those of modernists and realists. They contravene readers' expectations, making them most often astounded and baffled. This study sets out to discuss some of the techniques used by the American writer Robert Coover in his story collection; Pricksongs & Descants (1969) which are associated with postmodernist fiction. These strategies including metafictional techniques, fragmentation, ontological concern, and temporal distortion, will in the subsequent sections of this paper be explicated and elucidated. In this regard, the term postmodernism will be first defined and elaborated, and then some of the salient features of Coover's selected work stated above, will be examined in order to demonstrate the title-mentioned claim. Not all the stories of the collection will in this study be provided an analysis of, but those which are of greater significance and are noticeable in incorporating postmodern strategies.

The present paper intends to analyze and put under scrutiny Brian Dillon’s memoir In the Dark Room (2005) in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theories of house as an intimate space explicated and expounded on in his magnum opus The Poetics of Space (1964). Since Bachelard’s ideas are often associated with phenomenology which accentuates the significance of the manner in which phenomena appear to us and are given meaning, the house and objects in it as a place of intimacy are of paramount importance to him. The spaces along with objects are not merely possessions which can be lived in or owned by individuals, but rather they express and suggest human emotions and human soul. They also have the power to transport us back into a distant past and evoke deeply buried memories and feelings. The house, says Bachelard, protects both daydreaming and the dreamer and allows one to dream in peace. Moreover, it provides a restful place in which imagination and thought are both stimulated. The title-mentioned work can be investigated in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theories to provide proof for the above claim. The narrator of In the Dark Room is surrounded with objects and places which are capable of taking him back to the past arousing his interest and making him conjure up bygone days. Not only does the house function as a metaphor for evoking memories, but also the street and the place in which Dillon’s mother was hospitalized are accentuated. Hence, in the subsequent sections of the current paper, first phenomenology will be defined and elaborated on, then Brian Dillon’s selected work will be scrutinized based on Gaston Bachelard’s house-related theories and notions in order to demonstrate the association of the house and its objects with human soul and imagination.