Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Periodizing the '80s: the 'differential of history' in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine

Thompson, Graham

Authors



Abstract

This essay examines how Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine shifts engagement with the details of the material world consistently onto the axis of temporality and how, in so doing, it fashions a theory of periodization in which historical and social trends and events are relegated in importance. Asking how the detail or moment might both alter an understanding of the general and spread time to infinite proportions, The Mezzanine casts doubt on the process of periodizing by way of metonymy and synecdoche and offers instead a contingent and improvised version of the 1980s.

Citation

Thompson, G. (2011). Periodizing the '80s: the 'differential of history' in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 57(2), https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2011.0048

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jan 1, 2011
Deposit Date Aug 17, 2011
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal MFS: Modern Fiction Studies
Print ISSN 0026-7724
Electronic ISSN 0026-7724
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 57
Issue 2
DOI https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2011.0048
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1011442
Publisher URL http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v057/57.2.thompson.html
Additional Information Copyright © 2011 Purdue Research Foundation. This article, "Periodizing the '80s: The 'Differential History' in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine," first appeared in MFS, Modern Fiction Studies, v. 57:2, 2011, 300-317. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations