Exploring Image Culture: A Study On The Narrative In Jennifer Egan's Fiction

In literary theoretic approach,narrative is usually defined as a fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly with the reader.It is a vital human resource in making sense of the world and also in illustrating the world itself.Indeed,narrative has been called a metacode or a human universal,with story-making now as widely thought of as metaphor as a basic mode of humanistic sense-making.Narrative reflects one of the key design features of the language faculty.It is also astonishingly various and heterogeneous in forms and functions.Narrative has been conceived from its earliest days on as a project that transcends disciplines and media.The major paradigms of Internet-based new media have attracted the interest of researchers in numerous disciplines in recent years,with a richness of fresh issues and phenomena for investigation.Contemporary culture has grown from a word culture to an image culture.Images are objects of study in disciplines from art history to neuroscience,from political science to cultural studies.The ubiquity of visual imagery is only half the story of contemporary image culture,given that there is a whole family of graphic,optical,perceptual and mental imagery.In cultural studies,image culture refers to the current culture that emerged and developed under the influence of mass media.The term alludes to the overall impact and intellectual guidance exerted by the media(primarily TV,but also the press,radio,cinema,phone and computer and so on),not only on public opinion but also on tastes and values.Jennifer Egan,winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award,the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and other forty literary awards for the fiction A Visit From the Goon Squad(2010),is a contemporary American fiction writer with popular appeal and a novelist of ideas noted for the elegance of her style.Her writing defies fixed characterization,with each fiction taking on new structures,characters,moods and narrative strategies.Egan utilizes narratives including not only traditional narratives but also postmodern ones,especially new media narratives in her fiction.However,despite the diversity of playing with literary techniques,the central concerns of Egan's fiction remain constant.Fascinated by the American obsession with image,she ties her narratives to the profound exploration on the real culture.Image culture and its ramifications absorb her and connect with other interests,such as self-invention or reinvention,losses and regrets as people change with time,personal redemption,the exploration of the role of technology in our lives and so on.Through a chronological order beginning with her debut fiction The Invisible Circus(1995),her second fiction Look at Me(2001),her mid-career fiction The Keep(2006),to A Visit From the Goon Squad(2010)and her latest fiction Black Box(2012)and focusing on the primary narrative techniques in each book,the present dissertation tries to uncover techniques applied in her fiction and to examine how Egan seeks the narrative experiment and how narratives reflect the image culture from various aspects.Utilizing various narratives in her fiction,Egan has always been not only seeking the narrative experimentation but also exploring issues in and around image culture.Following the variations of images across the 1960 s countercultural movement,the model image and terrorism,the modern way of communication in Gothic genre,the goon squad of time in music industry,PowerPoint narrative and the Twitter narrative,Egan explores image culture from every aspect and she reveals her concerns with the issue almost in all her fictions.By mainly employing internal focalization to reflect Phoebe's elder sister Faith who represents the 1960 s generation,The Invisible Circus begins to look at some of the issues around the image culture and to examine the role of media representation in the 1960 s counterculture.It also probes into the question of how to create “identity” from outside,which sees ourselves as images to affect who we really are.In Look at Me,Egan adopts alternative narratives between first-person narrative and third-person narrative to tell the stories of characters.In the process of first-person narrative,Egan uses unreliable first-person narrative to tell the story of the protagonist.This fiction deals with the issues around image culture in depth.It demonstrates eloquently how often fiction,in its visionary form,speaks of truth.Renovating the Gothic tradition by applying a male voice to narrate the story and by leaving the story an open ending in The Keep,Egan revitalizes the Gothic fiction and at the same time makes it her own because she sustains awareness that the text is being manipulated by its author.The metafictional narrative in the story is signaled by the interruptions of another character's voice into the ongoing narrative of the main story.Egan's tactics,however,do not come at the expense of character and story;all the characters in this fiction are imprisoned either physically or mentally.Whereas in Look at Me,Egan explores image culture in depth,The Keep takes a bird's eye view of the issue.Besides metafiction and alternative narrative,Egan utilizes more unorthodox narratives in A Visit From the Goon Squad including multi-lineared polyphonic narrative,anachrony,parody,black humor,PowerPoint narrative and so on.By using such various narrative strategies,it is in this book that Egan fully realizes her vision of the impersonal tyranny of a mass,ethicized society.She successfully fulfills themes closely related with image culture such as losses and regrets as people change with time and highly-developed technology,as well as glimpses of personal redemption and transformation,fearing of age and cultural irrelevance,changing technology and music,memory,pauses and so on.Notable for the completeness with which it surrenders formally and artistically to the textual dictates of Twitter,Black Box is probably the most triumphant and fully-fledged fiction written in the form of new media.Through the experimental serialization of Twitter narrative from the second person's perspective,Egan expresses her concerns and worries about the security of the American society as well as the whole world in the post-“9·11” period and she embraces virtues and pleasures of traditional storytelling delivered through a wholly new digital format under the influence of highly developed image culture.The “you” narrator brings the reader to participate in the plot.This fiction can be treated as the boldest experiment and direct exploration of the contemporary image culture.The dissertation concludes that Egan is such a great writer who is not only assiduously seeking innovations in narrative forms but also using new forms to present her concern about the present digital world to our life and to express her attitude toward the effects.Her greatness lies not only in her persistent efforts to write fictions in innovative way but also in pointing out a new direction for the development of narrative form in the post post-modern social and historical context.Egan's writing provides a powerful example of postmodern hybridity that blends the old with the new,the familiar with the unfamiliar,and in so doing she has created a contemporary form of storytelling that not only pays homage to the storytelling tradition but also concurrently subverts and reinvents recognizable genres.However,literary text is not the only domain form from which Egan draws aspiration artistically.Her innovation in literary forms is not just to pursue something novel and unconventional,but is bestowed with rich ideological and cultural connotation;her affinity with culture and historical background is also evident in her writing.Egan's concentration on the contemporary and future world,particularly her consistent and assiduous exploration on image culture has great,profound,lasting and realistic significance to the promotion of outlook of the contemporary intellectual society.