Brian McHale

Brian McHale (born 1952) is an American literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly those relating to postmodernism. Raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McHale is a Rhodes Scholar (Rhode Island 1972), D Phil from Merton College, Oxford, and B.A. from Brown University (1972). 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.

Brian McHale is a 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), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), among other institutions. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal "Poetics Today". He is co-founder with James Phelan, David Herman, and Frederick Luis Aldama of [http://projectnarrative.osu.edu Project Narrative] , an initiative based at The Ohio State University.