Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg, eds. The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction.

Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019.


Sample chapter


Table of contents

Vanessa Guignery, École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and Wojciech Drąg, University of Wrocław

Introduction: “The art of the fragment”


Part One: Forms of fragmentation: past and present

Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina at Asheville

“What is fragmentary fiction?”

Mariano D’Ambrosio, University Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle

“Fragmentary writing and polyphonic narratives in twenty-first century fiction”

David Malcolm, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw

“The short story: fragment and augment”


Part Two: The fragment and the whole

Marcin Tereszewski, University of Wrocław

“The architectural fragment: ruins and totality in J. G. Ballard’s fiction”

Gerd Bayer, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

“Fragmentary transtextuality: David Mitchell and his novel”

Alicia J. Rouverol, University of Manchester

“Fragmentary writing and globalization in Ali Smith’s Hotel World”

Teresa Bruś, University of Wrocław

“Lives, etc: fragments of lives in short stories by Julian Barnes”

Maria Antonietta Struzziero, Independent Scholar

“‘Make it new’ to return as rupture and difference: a study of Jeanette Winterson’s

The Gap of Time”


Part Three: Fragmentation in the age of crisis

Wojciech Drąg, University of Wrocław

“Collage manifestos: fragmentation and appropriation in David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel and David Shields’s Reality Hunger”

Jarosław Hetman, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

“Fragmentation in David Foster Wallace’s fiction”

Caroline Magnin, University Paris 4 – Sorbonne

“Trauma and the mechanics of fragmentation in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer”


Part Four: Multimodal and multimedial fragments

Grzegorz Maziarczyk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

“Singularity, multimodality, transmediality: fragmentary future(s) of the novel?”

Zofia Kolbuszewska, University of Wrocław

“From Wunderkammer fragmentation to alternative history in Hexen 2.0 by Suzanne Treister”

Côme Martin, Independent Scholar

“Unbox the story: a look at contemporary shuffle narratives”

Deborah Bridle, University of Côte d’Azur

“Fragmentation as building practice: the literary and musical collaboration between Thomas Ligotti and Current 93 for In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land”


Alison Gibbons, Sheffield Hallam University

Afterword: “Fragments of a postscript”