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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. 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).

His books detail his main thesis in the shift from modernism to postmodernism. McHale claims that the former is characterised 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 provids readings of James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Pychon's Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, Umberto Eco's In 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 institution. 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 Vice-President of A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

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