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Brian G. McHale is an American literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly those relating to postmodernism and narrative theory.

Career

Raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McHale is a Rhodes Scholar (Rhode Island 1974), D Phil from Merton College, Oxford, and B.A. from Brown University (1974). He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (2004), as well as articles on free indirect discourse, mise en abyme, narrativity, modernist and postmodernist poetics, and science fiction. He is co-editor with Randall Stevenson of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006).

Main Issues

McHale's books detail his main thesis in the shift from modernism to postmodernism. He claims that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. In charting this shift in the dominant from epistemology to ontology, McHale in his first book was able to show how the devices of narrative fiction are transformed when viewed in relation to this shift. In Constructing Postmodernism, McHale provides readings of James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, the fiction of Joseph McElroy, of Christine Brook-Rose, and of some of the contemporary writers who go under the label of "cyberpunk," most notably William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Walter Jon Williams. For critics who have been aware of McHale's work since long before Postmodernist Fiction , the two chapters on Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow have been instrumental in shaping McHale's critical construction of postmodernism. Additionally, McHale's second major text is a critique of his first, demonstrating its own dynamics of construction within postmodernist criticism.

Brian McHale is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand),among other institutions. McHale is Visiting Professor (2009–2011) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai, China. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is co-founder, with James Phelan and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at The Ohio State University. He is the President (2011) of A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

Chapters in Books

1. "Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing. In: Douwe Fokkema & Hans Bertens, eds., Approaching Postmodernism. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986. pp. 53–79.
2. "Some Postmodernist Stories". In Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas. Eds. Theo D'Haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam and Antwerpen: Rodopi/Restant, 1988. pp.13-25.
3. "POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM. In: Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. pp. 308–323.
4. "Whatever Happened to Descriptive Poetics?" In: Mieke Bal and Inge Boer, eds. The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. 1994. pp. 56–65.
5. "Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory". In The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory. Edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005. pp. 60–71. --Translated into Italian as "Fantasmi e mostri: sulla (im)possibilità di raccontare la storie della teoria narrativa". Neuronarratologia: Il futuro dell'analisi del racconto. Ed. and trans. Stefano Calabrese. Bologna: Archetipolibri, 2009. 169-86.
6. "Poetry under Erasure". In Theory into Practice: New Approaches to Poetry. Eds. Eva Müller-Zettelman and Margarete Rubik. Amsterdam & New York: Peter Lang. pp. 277–301.
7. "Afterword: Two Presents". In Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. Eds. R.M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo. SUNY Press, 2007. 255-64.
8. "En Abyme: Internal Models and Cognitive Mapping". In A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge. Eds. John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci. Routledge, 2007. 189-205.
9. "What Was Postmodernism? or, The Last of the Angels". In Identities and Alterities. Eds. Silke Horstkotte and Esther Peeren. Rodopi, 2007. 39-55.
10. "Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Long Poem". Poetry Criticism, vol. 80, ed. Michelle Lee (Detroit: Thomson Gale), 331-9. Reprinted from Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000).
11. "Speech Representation". Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 434-446.

Journal Articles

1. "Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts". PTL 3:2 (April 1978), 249-87.
2. "Postmodernism, or The Anxiety of Master Narratives". Essay-review of Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism; Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Diacritics 22:1 (Spring 1992), 17-33.
3. "Archaeologies of Knowledge: Hill's Middens, Heaney's Bogs, Schwerner's Tablets". New Literary History 30, 1 (Winter 1999): 239-262.
4. "Gravity's Angels in America, or, Pynchon's Angelology Revisited". Pynchon Notes 42 43 (Spring Fall 1998), 303 316
5. "Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Long Poem". The Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (January 2000), 250-262.
6. "Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry". Narrative 9, 2 (May 2001), 161-167.
7. "Poetry as Prosthesis". Poetics Today 21, 1 (Spring 2000), 1-32.
8. "Cognition En Abyme: Models, Manuals, Maps." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 4:2 (June 2006), 175-89.
9. "What Was Postmodernism?" electronic book review (December 2007). http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/tense
10. "1966 Nervous Breakdown, or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?" Modern Language Quarterly 69, 3 (September 2008): 391-413.
11. "Beginning to Think About Narrative in Poetry". Narrative 17,1 (January 2009): 11-30.