SOURCE: “‘Critifictional’ Epistemes in Contemporary Literature: The Case of Foucault's Pendulum,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 497-513.

In the following essay, Bouchard outlines the narrative development of the major points of Eco’s theoretical stance against deconstruction in Foucault's Pendulum, which, she says, ranks among the most representative works of the “critifictional” tradition.

This essay argues that Eco's second fictional work, Foucault's Pendulum (1989), participates in the genre of academic novels written from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s by British authors David Lodge and Malcom Bradbury. These novels, which genre theorists have labelled “critifictional,” combine fictional accounts of academic life with theoretical polemic directed against literary theorists—deconstructionists in particular. Often parodic and intentionally employing strategies that feature burlesque representation of their targets, Lodge's and Bradbury's novels have been the focus of extensive analysis in the current debacle of deconstruction—in the wake of...