Review of The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium

Review of Wolfgang Funk, The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium
London: Bloomsbury, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-5013-0616-7

In The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium, Wolfgang Funkreads the literary landscape after postmodernism through the interrelated concepts of authenticity, meta-reference and reconstruction. These terms, he argues, can help make sense of how fiction post-1990 has “renegotiate[d] the relationship between experience and its representation in an attempt to truthfully re-enact experience through representation” (1, emphasis added). Funk is thus concerned to both articulate the difference between past and present modes of representing the authentic, and to shed light, through these readings, on changes in the cultural conceptualization and experience of selfhood, truth, and reality. Moving beyond such terms as “metamodernism,” and “digimodernism,” whose shared semantic root with modernism implies less of a break than an ill-defined continuation, and whose emphasis on specific constitutive elements risks obscuring the complexity of their interdependence, Funk instead argues the fruitfulness of attending to the interrelation in contemporary writing between self-referentiality, a search for the real, and the reconstruction of meaning through these.