What I'm talking about are stories like Watchmen, which take common themes that appear in their genres and expose the underpinnings of them and how they would work in reality.

I know of a lot of movies of this nature, but I have trouble finding books.

Damn! I saw the thread title and was going to recommend Watchmen!

Tristram Shandy is a seminal novel from the late 18th-century, which deconstructs the very idea of a novel. After several hundred pages of supposed memoir, our narrator has digressed so far and so often that he has barely taken the story past his birth! It's very witty, but something of a slog all in one go (it was published in instalments over 10 years).

You could make a case for Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' books undermining science fiction; but that isn't their primary focus.

Catch-22 deconstructs war fictions by portraying war as not merely unheroic but entirely chaotic. And The Good Soldier Svejk is another very funny swipe at militaristic stereotypes.

On the graphic novel front, Neil Gaiman's 1602 does a similar job to Watchmen, this time by transplanting well-known superheroes to Elizabethan times. Very inventive.

I never heard of Tristram Shandy. Thanks.

I've heard of Hitchhiker's and watched the movie, but haven't gotten around to reading them. They're not at the local library (I don't buy many books. Even most of the books I own were from the free table.), so it might be a while.
I don't mind recommendations with only small elements of it, so this is a fine example.

I have Catch-22 (unread). I never knew it was a deconstruction.

That looks familiar, but only vaguely. Nice one.

Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend"? (If you've seen the movie then it's okay, the book is completely different and a million times better).

Franz Kafka "The Metamorphosis" - it's a short story, but still fits your criteria I think.

For graphic novels, you could try "Spiderman: Reign" or "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" which look at what happens when superheroes get old.

And I'm not sure if it quite fits your topic, it actually seems more like a reverse of what you're looking for (taking a fairly mundane theme and turning it into body horror), but Charles Burns "Black Hole" is a great graphic novel. The basic story follows the events surrounding the development of AIDS, but in the novel the STD is an infection that mutates part of your body so you're permanently branded as a freak. So not sure if it's what you're looking for, but it's still really interesting.

I was going to say Tristram Shandy but I see it's already been covered.

Terry Pratchett. He likes to deconstruct narrative devices and often uses the concept of "narrativium" to do that. Many great books but to start with I'd recommend Witches Abroad, which directly deals with fairytales, and Small Gods, which is about religion and also about the "historicity" of holy books (it also has a delicious scene where experimental philosophers test their axioms by racing tortoises and hares etc.).

ETA Don't read his books with your mouth full ...

Terry Pratchett recall to mind the late Robert Asprin who reportedly died in his bed reading a Pratchett. Possibly laughing. But I digress. There are numerous fantasy novels that at least make fun of the tropes of the genre, even tho I'm not sure if it counts as a proper deconstruction. Asprin's Myth Adventures is one such series, as is Lin Carter's Terra Magica; Jack L. Chalker's Dancing God books also started out as quite clever send-offs tho the latter ones tended to fall foul of Chalker's certain... ahem... obsessions.

tnjrp wrote:Terry Pratchett recall to mind the late Robert Asprin who reportedly died in his bed reading a Pratchett. Possibly laughing.

Some further ideas:

John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman for historical fiction.

Short stories by Jorge Luis Borges (for example "Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote").

Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch for an interesting deconstruction of linear narrative (it's basically a labyrinth of jumbled chapters). Cortázar is probably one of my favourites. There's a French writer, Georges Pérec, who took a different tack and constructed a novel according to the spatial plan of the building where it takes place (Life: A User's Manual) instead of temporally.

American metafictionalists (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover ...). I'm not a great fan myself but it's an interesting phenomenon for the theoretical issues it highlights and I did quite like Barth's short story collection Lost in the Funhouse.

Wikipedia has a nice list of metafictional works which seems like a good place to start, but it's probably next to impossible to list all those contemporary works that exhibit an awareness of the issues surrounding the construction of narratives, at least hinting at this became practically an obligatory, standard literary device in so-called postmodern literature.

If on a winter's night a traveller by Italo Calvino

Mr.Samsa wrote:Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend"? (If you've seen the movie then it's okay, the book is completely different and a million times better).

Franz Kafka "The Metamorphosis" - it's a short story, but still fits your criteria I think.

For graphic novels, you could try "Spiderman: Reign" or "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" which look at what happens when superheroes get old.

And I'm not sure if it quite fits your topic, it actually seems more like a reverse of what you're looking for (taking a fairly mundane theme and turning it into body horror), but Charles Burns "Black Hole" is a great graphic novel. The basic story follows the events surrounding the development of AIDS, but in the novel the STD is an infection that mutates part of your body so you're permanently branded as a freak. So not sure if it's what you're looking for, but it's still really interesting.

I read a few of the Kafka short stories. Very good.

ANyway, thanks and thanks ahead to anyone else that posts.

katja z wrote:American metafictionalists (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover ...).

I was toying with mentioning Pynchon, wasn't sure if he exactly qualified for the thread, since his target is everything in particular.

I feel I ought to mention Gene Wolfe too (The Fifth Head Of Cerberus? The Book Of The New Sun?), and Christopher Priest (The Affirmation and The Separation are both excellent novels that adamantly refuse to be understood as coherent narratives).

You could even go for Cervantes' Don Quixote. It set out to undermine the romantic, chivalric stories around at the time by placing a foolish old idealist at its heart; though typically the reader comes away siding with the kindly Quixote rather than the cynical Cervantes! As well as that, it was written in two volumes, with a space of 15 years between. By the time the second volume came out, the first had been very widely read, so Cervantes has Quixote himself find a copy of volume one and read, with outrage, about his own adventures! This is a contemporary of Shakespeare, remember, writing ingenious metafiction!

Does the work of Albert Camus count? I'm struggling to understand what is meant by 'deconstructive tropes' and the given examples offered already, but books like The Plague, The Fall and the Myth of Sisyphus are about deromanticising heroism, duty and constructed narratives but largely still maintaining the inherent moral value of these virtues in the real world, so do they count?

The Plc wrote:Does the work of Albert Camus count? I'm struggling to understand what is meant by 'deconstructive tropes' and the given examples offered already, but books like The Plague, The Fall and the Myth of Sisyphus are about deromanticising heroism, duty and constructed narratives but largely still maintaining the inherent moral value of these virtues in the real world, so do they count?

I would guess his work is more of a reconstruction of those things.

I don't think anyone's working to a strict definition of 'deconstruction', The Plc. We're just sorta gesturing vaguely in the direction of books that defy the expectations of their genres. I can see why you'd pick Camus.

j.mills wrote:

You could even go for Cervantes' Don Quixote. It set out to undermine the romantic, chivalric stories around at the time by placing a foolish old idealist at its heart; though typically the reader comes away siding with the kindly Quixote rather than the cynical Cervantes! As well as that, it was written in two volumes, with a space of 15 years between. By the time the second volume came out, the first had been very widely read, so Cervantes has Quixote himself find a copy of volume one and read, with outrage, about his own adventures! This is a contemporary of Shakespeare, remember, writing ingenious metafiction!

This would also have been my recommendation, although, unless I'm getting my wires crossed here, my understanding was that during that fifteen year gap, the success of volume one was such as to inspire an unauthorised sequel supposedly by Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Torsedillas (it says here) "one of the most disgraceful performances in all literature.... utter betrayal of a great work.... filled with vulgarities and obscenities of which Cervantes would never have been guilty" (from the intro to my edition) and it is this "sequel" which enrages Don Quixote in the second volume. That said, there's a passage in the first one where they all return to the castle to perform an intervention on the Quixote (he's read too many romances) by going through his library, and of course the characters come across works of Cervantes, the guy writing them.

Only read this recently and I'm completely knocked out by it I must admit. It's probably something of a stretch to describe it as ancestral SF but the number of parallels found in Philip K. Dick is surprising, although there's a possibility I may have been looking too hard. I've seen it argued that Don Quixote is the very first modern novel, which makes sense to me.

The two books which immediately stand out in my mind when I think of deconstructed tropes are: 1) Martin Amis' Time's Arrow and Grendel by John Gardner. Barth's Lost in the Fun House is also a great example, but has already been mentioned.

Almost anything by Pynchon fits-the-bill, as does Kafka.

Did we mention Crime and Punishment?

The topics of "Meta-Fiction" and post-modern deconstruction techniques were part of my Master's thesis, so I'd also mention Will Self's Great Apes and My Idea of Fun along with almost everything else Self has written. Self's fiction intentionally takes the reader back to great satirists like Jonathan Swift ("A Modest Proposal" and Gulliver's Travels), and satire, by definition, is a way of deconstructing popular, cultural and historic tropes.

Along the lines of j mills mentioning Catch 22 as a deconstruction of "heroic war" ... I would include Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and "Conrad's Heart of Darkness (especially as a precursor to the movie "Apocalypse Now"). You might also consider All Quiet on the Western Front, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and the "Regeneration" trilogy of novelist Pat Barker (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road.

We'd also be re-miss not to mention the names: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot (I particularly love his poem "The Hollow Men".

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/

IMO, what's NOT to love about "The Hollow Men"?

The homage to "Mistah Kurtz--he dead" and, of course, the haunting and famous final lines:

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

--GA

Nice to see someone else appreciates Will Self. I was beginning to think it was just me. Just finished How The Dead Live as it happens...

Anyway, at the other end of the scale, Fred & Geoffrey Hoyle's Seven Steps to the Sun opens with a scene wherein our hero (a writer) meets a scientist who proceeds to berate science-fiction for being so lacking in decent science (whilst missing the point that a decent story is also helpful from the reader's point of view). Ironically, I'm not sure the time travel featured in the rest of the novel is exactly great science, although I've still about 70 pages to go.

ohn Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman for historical fiction.

Despite having a degree in literature I'm not entirely sure what deconstructor means in the OPs frame of reference tho others seem to ....please enlighten.

•••

What I'm talking about are stories like Watchmen, which take common themes that appear in their genres and expose the underpinnings of them and how they would work in reality.

From my guess - is the author is exploring a meme and pulling the curtain back from the good doctor in OZ??? In which case you must include the Wiz.

If that is the case, John Fowles The Magus is remarkable in that way and actually nailed our 4th year Engish Literature Criticism prof - he bought one of the memes hook line and sinker and fought us for weeks when we told him that it was not the heart of the novel. We won, he apologized. He takes I recall 4 world views and subtly exposes the shackles they present to those that buy into them.
Having the prof admit he was wrong was a growing up experience that stays with me.

Looking at some of the novels Grendel stands out as a POV meme buster take on Beowulf ( Grendel is superb - a few images still haunt)

In that frame tho would one not have to include Thomas Covenant novels and the rise of the anti-hero in literature - even Jude the Obscure comes to mind in that frame set against "heroic" fiction of the time???

a bit unconstructed I am - help me out

Macdoc wrote: If that is the case, John Fowles The Magus is remarkable in that way and actually nailed our 4th year Engish Literature Criticism prof - he bought one of the memes hook line and sinker and fought us for weeks when we told him that it was not the heart of the novel. We won, he apologized. He takes I recall 4 world views and subtly exposes the shackles they present to those that buy into them.
Having the prof admit he was wrong was a growing up experience that stays with me.

Looking at some of the novels Grendel stands out as a POV meme buster take on Beowulf ( Grendel is superb - a few images still haunt)

And therein lies the rub (and the inherent "problem" with the OP's original question /choice of topic) ... in other words, there are SO MANY different ways to read; deconstruction is simply ONE of them. In fact, any form of literature can be "deconstructed" and "read" according to the individual reader's agenda. It's just that some forms are more obvious, more accurate, and make more sense than others. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that "Jane Eyre" can be deconstructed according to a Feminist point-of-view, or that "All Quiet on the Western Front" is an anti-war novel, or that "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" is anti-slavery ... the fun comes when the lines are blurred more profoundly (as in Macdoc's "The Magus" example above).

Along with studying mass quantities of Literary Theory, I read two simple, straight-forward books during my graduate studies that helped me clearly understand and expand the ways in which I read: 1) was John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" and the other was 2) Thomas Foster's "How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines."

Neither text is difficult. The first came very early in my graduate career, the second came almost too late (and I wish I had had it much earlier on in my studies). When I was teaching high-school English in America, I recommended both books to students who I knew were preparing to enter college or university.

IMO, they should be "Required Reading" for ALL college freshmen, but that's not to say that they're the only ways in which to understand literature, art or ways of reading. In fact, there are a multitude of ways of "getting there" ... broadening your horizons, deconstructing literature, honing your Critical Thinking skills, etc. I think each person arrives there at a different pace and through different means of understanding ... the sad thing is that some people don't arrive there at all.

(INSERT POLITICAL COMMENT: And, in America, we call these people The Tea Party)!

--GA

Nice to have a current expert insight.
Was fun with my daughter who also took a literary degree to revisit some concepts.
Think we need the OP input.

From reading it - Grendel as an out take on Beowulf ( which was a wonderful conceit...a thoughtful monster ) would seem a model as well as Wizard of Oz tho it itself has now become a meme to mock

Too many Russian dolls to burrow through.

•••

BTW The Magus was seminal for me in freeing me up to make my own "game" in life and that no one WAS watching and not to get hooked in someone else's meme ( having just escaped fundie land ).
Have you ever taught it?? Seems would be a nasty bit of quicksand for students.

The line from TS Eliot "whence we came and know it for very first time" is really remarkable and worked so well in the Magus and in my life.

Like finding out my first wife was gay 17 years after we divorced - didn't that just have the "know it for the very first time" re-ordering of reality

Others have mentioned the usual suspects: Borges, Beckett, Joyce, Calvino, Perec. Great ones all. (Special mention: although Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler may fit your category better than his others, I'd also recommend his Invisible Cities. Pretty much unclassifiable. One of the most purely beautiful books I've ever read.)

I'd also recommend looking into the Oulipo. (Perec and Calvino were members.) Lots of juicy stuff there.

And a predecessor of the Oulipo, Raymond Roussel. (They would call him an "anticipatory plagiarist".) His Locus Solus is a lot of fun. A strange ride.

And Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. But maybe not if you're claustrophobic. Or agoraphobic. (Effective, that one is.)