| Bakhtin defines the novel as a genre which parodies, challenges, incorporates and interrogates other genres. Coupled with a postmodernist skepticism in the primacy of overarching meta-narratives as sources of knowledge, and the resulting self-contradictory stance allows for the formulation of a postmodern epic novel. Postmodern epic novels, like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, juxtapose, within a postmodern narrative framework, fictional and empirical, literary and non-literary genres of discourse.;The effect of this encyclopedic form is to blur the traditional ontological distinctions made between genres of discourse, thereby creating a narrative field in which hierarchies of discourse are installed, undercut, challenged and destabilized. This highly self-conscious leveling allows a postmodern epic synthesis which reflects the classical epic's unselfconscious blending of myth and history, a condition which itself reflects contemporary culture's increasing blurring of the traditional distinction made between fantasy and reality. |
