Lost in Postmodernism

1. Lost in Postmodernism HUM 3285: British and American Literature Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao March 30, 2011

2. Postmodern Fiction? Moebius Strip I (1961) Moebius Strip II(1963) http://www.mcescher.com/indexuk.htm

3. Escher’s Relativity (1953) http://www.mcescher.com/indexuk.htm

6. New World Disorder September 11, 1991, George H. W. Bush’s idea of a “new world order,” after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1990, while the United States was involved in the Persian Gulf War, ten years before the 9/11 attacks (Heath 2781) “Writers are particularly sensitive to this chaos, and it is reflected in the work of many postmodern writers” (2782). “willingness to accept randomness and chaos as principles of contemporary life and therefore of the literature that reflects it” (2782). Chaos theory and systems theory to analyze Barthelme, Pynchon, and DeLillo—ideas of individual agency against systems (2782) Barth’s concern with history of literature “point to their own fictions as fiction, revealing (often humorously) the inner workings of their stories or novels” (2782). Postmodern self-reflexiveness and self-consciousness

7. New World Disorder Historiography—using history as the basis for fiction (2782): DeLillo’s Libra, Morrison’s Beloved “American writers of racial and ethnic minorities were modifying, reacting to, rejecting, or embracing postmodern techniques for their own ends” (2783). “It is clear even from this brief overview that chaos or heterogeneity reign in contemporary literature, but it is not necessarily true that ‘things fall apart,’ as the Irish modernist poet W. B. Yeats says in his poem ‘The Second Coming,” because ‘the centre cannot hold.’ The central assumptions of western civilization have always been less stable than they might appear. The very notion of what constitutes literature changes from time to time” (2785). “Younger readers who came of age around the time of September 11, 2001, regard literature differently than earlier generations of readers did. For these young readers, chaos, violence, diversity, and a resistance to stereotypical gender roles are nothing new” (2785).

8. A few of my favorite (postmodern) things • Heteroglossia, polyphony (multiple voices, no authoritative account) • Indeterminancies (gaps, ambiguities) • Fragmentations (collage rather than unities, cohesion) • Decanonizations (high/low culture divide reconfigured) • Hybridization (mixing genres, frame-breaking) • Metafictions (self-conscious, self-reflexive, fiction about fiction)

9. Funhousing Ambrose—13; Peter—15; Magda—14 Bildungsroman Independence Day Nineteenth-century fiction (2797), leaving blanks for names “The brown hair on Ambrose’s mother’s forearms gleamed in the sun like” (2798). Ulysses returns! Conventions of fiction (2800) Idea of memory Use of descriptions—lost in them: “What is the story’s theme?” (2801)

10. Is not fun? Too much memory for Ambrose—problem with memory in Clifton’s, Morrison’s works Uses of personal history “The diving would make a suitable literary symbol” (2803), deconstructs the line Presence of war—German U-boats, “browned out” “I’ll never be an author” (2805). “In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets up in the way” (2805). “No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgment from the other characters” (2808). “Fill in” (2808).

11. The sense of an ending Fame, madness, suicide as ends Diagramming the story (2810) “the plot doesn’t rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires” (2811). “What relevance does the war have to the story? Should there be fireworks outside or not?” (2811). “He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed” (2812).

12. Replenishing John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979) “The simple burden of my essay was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness. . . that artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work” (Barth, “Exhaustion” 205). Barth notes that many people, including Borges, “mistook [him] to mean that literature, at least fiction, is kaput; that it has all been done already; that there is nothing left for contemporary writers but to parody and travesty our great predecessors in our exhausted medium—exactly what some critics deplore as postmodernism” (205).