Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture ― The Politics of Self-development

Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture responds to a milieu saturated with technology, reactionary ideologies, and intellectual complacency. It does so by examining distinctive literary, musical, and cinematic narratives that seek to inspire critical thought and conduct through provocation, its central argument thus resting on the notion of such forms offering an antidote to the prevailing fictionality of lived experience. The development of both self and community, the study asserts, relies on the capacity to transcend habitual ways of occupying time and space. Liminal narratives provide maps through the largely uncharted territory on the margins of tradition, that paradoxically absent continuum of the everyday that rewards forthright inquiry.

Thomas Phillips is a Lecturer of English Literature at North Carolina State University, USA. He is the author of The Subject of Minimalism along with several novels and horror story collections. He is also known internationally as a composer of minimal electronic music.