ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on three historiographic metafictions, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, Nigel William's Star Turn, and Ian Watson's Chekhov's Journey, which challenges Realist concepts of "subjectivity" as defined by humanism. "Subjectivity", in the sense is used by structural and post-structural theorists such as Catherine Belsey, Emile Benveniste, or Louis Althusser, does not have the connotation, as it tends to in traditional literary studies, of personal and private interpretation imposed on a text. Subjectivity is not a fixed, pre-linguistic essence however, an open process which, as Catherine Belsey explains, is "perpetually in the process of construction, thrown into crisis by alteration in language and in the social formation". In Problems in General Linguistics, Emile Benveniste discusses the specifically linguistic basis of subjectivity, drawing particularly on the structuralist formulations that language is a system of differences and that the linguistic sign is arbitrary. It deals with Realist conventions and their subversion through the representation of history.
