How the Other Half Dies: Narrating Identities in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life (2006)

Authors

  • Sascha Pöhlmann

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.102

Abstract

Shelley Jackson’s first novel Half Life “(2006) creates a complex parallel world that is populated by Siamese twins who coexist with one-headed people. Using Brian McHale’s distinction of modernist and postmodernist fiction, this essay argues that the narrative strategies employed in Half Life“ conflate the epistemological and ontological, and thereby indicate one way of moving beyond postmodernism.

Author Biography

Sascha Pöhlmann

Sascha Pöhlmann is a lecturer in American Literary History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. He received his M.A. degree from Bayreuth University in 2004 with a thesis on identity and self in Ulysses “and Gravity’s Rainbow“, and continued to work there as a lecturer until 2007. His studies also took him to Trinity College Dublin and the University of Illinois at Chicago; he taught a term at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and visited the American Studies Center in Warsaw as a guest lecturer. He wrote his dissertation on “Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination.“

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How to Cite

Pöhlmann, Sascha. “How the Other Half Dies: Narrating Identities in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life (2006)”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 9, Mar. 2012, doi:10.5283/copas.102.

Issue

Vol. 9 (2008)

Section

Articles

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Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

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