Peter Turchi: Theater of the World (January 2002)

How, Peter Turchi asks, can we use our necessarily limited vantage points, our own limited mental maps, to open onto something larger, something like the “theater of the world”? Turchi considers the ways modernism, and its strategies for depicting the complexity and chaos of individual perspectives, persists in contemporary fiction; he looks, for examples, at Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Delillo’s White Noise, the film Memento and Heather McHugh’s poem “Not a Prayer.”