Daniel Punday's Five Strands of Fictionality is a study of how fictionality functions across a set of diverse texts: postmodern literature, counter-canon texts, metafiction, science fiction, and role-playing games – multiple media of the last fifty years of American popular and academic culture. Throughout the book Punday focusses on these media in relation to their institutional position, his central premise being: ‘fictionality has had so powerful an influence on literary studies not because it is a cultural condition, but because it provides a way of talking about how disciplines produce knowledge and truth’ (22).
The five strands Punday outlines are “myth,” “archive and the imaginary,” “lying,” “style” and “assemblage.” These also form his chapter topics and at the end of the book he attempts to interweave these strands into the sixth chapter, a discussion of electronic literature. Each chapter focusses on one or two central texts: John Barth's The Friday Book (myth); Alice Walker's “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” and Andy Warhol's “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” (archive and the imaginary); Steve Katz's The Exaggerations of Peter Prince (lying); the film The Matrix (style); and the original 1970s version of Dungeons and Dragons (assemblage). Punday provides fertile close and cultural readings of each of these texts, excelling at drawing out the texts' fictional language. That said, the discussion of fictionality in each case is perhaps overly programmatic – each text shown to perform only one strand of fictionality. In the sixth chapter and conclusion the argument opens out, and finally Punday is able to mix and mash the texts and types of fictionality, redeeming prior narrow interpretations.
Implicitly, the major work of Punday's book seems to be in historicizing certain legacies of postmodernism that impact on cultural media throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. His subtitle to this book, “The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction,” is telling in this regard. Punday's focus is on what has come before the contemporary, the now (the year 2010); he does not write a book about very recent fiction, but helps draw out the established strands of fictionality that are remediated in contemporary fiction works.
In the conclusion Punday reveals the relevance of his reading of fictionality to the current concerns of literary institutions, namely the fate of literature in the digital age:
new technologies do not immediately produce new forms of fictionality … the definitions of fictionality created in print culture do more than just persist into electronic textuality; they provide the basis for thinking about what it means to tell a made-up story in these new forms. (217)
This book offers a rear-view-mirror perspective on contemporary fictionality – giving the reader a good look back affixed by a quick glance forward. It does useful work in reminding readers about continuities, building on the work of Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann and many others, to assert what there is of the old that may be found in the new.
