From Postmodernism to Neo-realism in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert Parrot and The Only Story

As a dominant tradition in writing, postmodernism was widely embraced during mid and late twentieth century. Many contemporary authors, and in particular some British authors, deemed postmodernism as alien to their own traditional modes of writing. Julian Barnes, the contemporary British author who once hailed postmodernism in his writings critically challenged and opposed it. The present research is an attempt to critically and analytically investigate this shift from his postmodern work Flaubert Parrot, to his more recent neo-realistic work The Only Story through the lens of Jacques Ranciere.  The main hypothesis is that the late Barnes has truly grasped the dynamic of author-subject as indicated in his return to neo-realism from Postmodern grand narrative. To accomplish this goal the researchers have employed some of Ranciere’s concepts including ‘politics of aesthetics,’ ‘regimes of art,’ ‘distribution and redistribution of sensible’ to scrutinize the causes of this shift and his return to more essentialist and humanistic modes of thought and writing