Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks: The Paradigms of Fiction (Mediated Fictions)

This book offers a detailed analysis of all mainstream novels of Iain Banks. It explores the question of mediation, the process of a semiotic (re)construction of the world on the part of Banks’s characters, with reference to the four directions of fictional worldmodelling, i.e. the four types of relationship between the individual and the world established by the author’s first novel, The Wasp Factory . In order to give justice to the extremely eclectic novelistic production of Iain Banks, the analysis of fifteen of his novels contained in the present study employs diverse interpretative «tools», fusing elements of various methodologies: structural-semiotic analysis supplemented by a mythographic approach along with psychological and gender specific theories. Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks: The Paradigms of Fiction thus develops a critical paradigm capable of uniting the extremely versatile mainstream production of this Scottish writer. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: The Case of Iain (M.) Banks CHAPTER 1 Ab Ovo. The Wasp Factory as the Blueprint of Fictional Worlds 1.1. Model ONE: Alternative Worlds 1.2. Model TWO: Community Worlds 1.3. Model THREE: Mythical Worlds 1.4. Model FOUR: Apocalyptic Worlds CHAPTER 2 Alternative Worlds Walking on Glass, The Bridge, and Transition 2.1 Language, Literature, and Multiple Reality in Walking on Glass 2.2. Into the Subconscious: The Dream Worlds of The Bridge 2.3. Across the Multiverse: The Many Worlds of Transition CHAPTER 3 Community Worlds The Crow Road, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, Espedair Street, and Stonemouth 3.1. The Wor(l)ds of Magic, Memory, and Truth in The Crow Road 3.2. Gardens of Love and Communities of the Heart in The Steep Approach to Garbadale 3.3. The Land of Music and the Music of Homeland in Espedair Street 3.4. Big Movies and Private Narratives in Stonemouth CHAPTER 4 Mythical Worlds. Whit, Canal Dreams, and The Business 4.1. Into the Unholy Lands: the Pilgrimage of a Goddess in Whit 4.2. A Female Samurai’s Journey to the Centre in Canal Dreams. 4.3. The Virgin, the Mother, the Crone: the Return of a Mythical Woman in The Business. CHAPTER 5 Apocalyptic Worlds. A Song of Stone, Complicity, and Dead Air 5.1. King Arthur in Distress: Post-apocalyptic Transgressions in A Song of Stone 5.2. From Virtual Reality to the Waste Land: Public Apocalypse and Post-traumatic Syndrome in Complicity 5.3. On-Screen Catastrophes and Post-apocalyptic Romances in Dead Air CHAPTER 6 Coda: The Quarry CONCLUSION Bibliography Index «Katarzyna Pisarska's Mediating the World is a pioneering attempt at a structural-semiotic analysis of Iain Banks's literary fiction considered as a single oeuvre. All Banks's fictions, she argues, are organized around the question of mediation between character and world, whether the mediation be social, impersonal and objective on the one hand, or individual, personal and subjective on the other. This insight gives rise to a typology of four different kinds of 'world modeling'. All four, she argues, derive from The Wasp Factory, but thereafter one or other is dominant in each of the later novels. The result is a powerfully productive methodology for reading Banks.» (Andrew Milner, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Monash University, Melbourne) «Depicting the variety of Iain Banks's multiple fictional realities, his escapist dream worlds, lands of music and of memory, the universes of the past and of the future, mythical regions and apocalyptic quarters, Katarzyna Pisarska's thought-provoking inquiry presented in Mediating the World exposes the full scope of Banks's oeuvre characteristics: its paradigm of postmodernist fiction, its roots in Scottish literary and cultural tradition, its interest in history and, self-reflectingly, also in the story telling. The survey of the fifteen novels demanded from its author not only superior interpreting talent, but also outstanding erudition and remarkable industry.» (Andrzej Zgorzelski, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Gdańsk).. All Her Faculties focuses on the perpetuation and reflection in literature of particular representations of the female mind that are entrenched in conservative notions of womanhood. The study highlights literature's incontrovertible power to create myth - the myth of woman as body, not mind - through social practice as well as discourse. This is accentuated in the divergent yet related roles women as scholars play in a number of fictions that have entered, to a greater or lesser degree, the cultural consciousness of the twentieth century. What emerges is that the female scholar does not portra The book offers a detailed analysis of all mainstream novels of Iain Banks. It explores the question of mediation, the process of a semiotic (re)construction of the world on the part of Banks’s characters, with reference to four paradigms of fictional worlds established by the author’s first novel, The Wasp Factory.