Strategies Of Interpreting Small World

David Lodge (1935-) is a famous contemporary British writer who has achieved significantly in both literary criticism and novel writing. His works can be divided into two main categories: literary criticism and novel. In the field of criticism he is particularly noticed for his study of structuralism, Bakhtin, etc. His novels usually focus on the environment he has known best, with intellectuals as his fictional characters and academic life as the background, which have received acclaim from literary critics and welcome of common readers. One of his trilogy of campus novels, Small World, has aroused wide attention since its publication in 1984. It is regarded as "the funniest and nastiest novel of academic satire since Lucky Jim" and wins the nominee for Booker Prize.As the masterpiece of Lodge's campus novel, Small World has been labeled as a typical postmodernist work. While it is undeniable that the novel bears some postmodernist features, e.g. the articulation of the crisis of representation, the use of collage and parody and the like, still, it will be too hasty to categorize it as a postmodern novel. This dissertation attempts to interpret Small World from realistic, modernist, and postmodernist perspectives, reaching the conclusion that it is a mixture of realism, modernism and postmodernism with realism as the dominance. Besides, the dissertation applies Jakobson's theory on metaphor and metonymy to confirm the idea that it is a metonymic text.The dissertation contains five parts. The first part differentiates the difference among realism, modernism and postmodernism as modes of writing. Realism concentrates on the representation of the external reality of certain social group, featured by chronological order, omniscient point of view, closed ending, external characterization and so on; modernism's focus shifts to the consciousness and subconsciousness of mankind, mythical archetype, stream of conscious, anti-hero, open ending have been used frequently by modernists; postmodernism serves as a break as well ascontinuity of modernism, similar with modernism, it rebels against any pre-established rules and pays attention to innovations in form, but it emphasizes absurdity, playfulness and the crisis of representation in postmodern society, the blurring of high and low literature, collage, parody are the favorites of postmodernist.Part Two interprets the novel from realistic perspective. Lodge selects the academic circle as its subject matter, arranging the miscellaneous information by chronological order through an omniscient narrator, the characters are portrayed from outside with proper background. Lodge addresses serious subject with a comic tone.Part Three interprets Small World from modernist perspective. Its subtitle An Academic Romance gives a hint of Lodge's use of mythical archetype. Like Eliot's The Waste Land, Small World depicts the barrenness of modern literary criticism based on the model of the Grail quest. Other modernist techniques include anti-hero and open ending.Part Four takes the perspective of postmodernism. Influenced by postmodernist theory which he must be familiar as a scholar, Lodge reflects his concern with the crisis of representation caused by the indeterminant nature of language.Part Five applies Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy to Small World. The contextual coherence, linear structure, and characterization through contiguous details prove it as a metonymic text.To sum up the forgoing interpretation, the author reaches the conclusion that Small World is basically a realistic novel but bearing modernist and postmodernist elements. According to the classification of Lodge, his writing belongs to antimodernism(realism), which is in consistent with his pendulum theory about the history of modem British literature.