The Dialectic of Past And Present in John Fowles’s "The Magus" Every Culture Cannot Sustain and Absorb the Shock of Modern Civilization. There is the Paradox: How to Become a Modern and to return to Sources. (Paul Ricoeur)

Mohammad Matarneh

International Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, 2015, vol. 4, issue 2, 49-57

Abstract: It is noticeably that one of the unresolved contradictions of representation in postmodern novel is that of the relation between the past and present .This issue generates a wide variety of critical hues, exploring how present circumstances shape a historical narrative. This article attempts to consider John Fowles's well-known novel The Magus Fowles (1965). This Article investigates the importance of historical texts produced in contemporary fiction and of being displayed in the act of narration. Fowles has not been tied down to one narrative technique, that he has winnowed the chained narrative of its conventional techniques. The past permeates the present, just as the present spins the representations of the past. Fowles thus traces the language, the texts and the material culture of the past to produce a critical representation of the past. Such novel disavows the traditional boundaries between historical fact and fiction. There seems to be a new desire to think historically, and to think historically in recent times is to think critically and contextually. Consequently, the meaning and shape are not in the 'events', but in the systems which make those past 'events' into present historical facts.

Keywords: Dialectic; Postmodern; Historical; Representation; Metafiction; Contradiction; Past; Present; Structure; Syntax. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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