Postmodernism is the umbrella term used to denote the contemporary happenings. Primarily it is the period soon after post world war II worldwide. Secondly, the effect created by the war on human beings and their behavior. Third, its impact on human artifacts including art, literature, culture etc. Its impact on literature particularly finds expression in novels. The novels of this period are named ‘metafiction’ by Linda Hutcheon (1998) as they carry ‘meta-narratives’ rather than ‘grand narratives’. These fragmented narratives are caused by various types, one such type is the bricolage or mixture of genre. Eclecticism is the supposed best mode of finding solution to the contemporary issues. It is choosing the best from new and available sources as well. Rather than manufacturing individually, getting best parts of thing and assembling to get an assorted best out product is in trend. This can otherwise be called a compilation of fragments. Likewise in writing novel new mixtures are being experimented and turns out to be successful. In Indian writing in English Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate (1986), is a mixture of poetry and novel. It won Sahitya Akademi Award. This mixture can otherwise be called a bricolage. Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novels too are an outcome of posotmodern bricolage. Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People who Care (2011) fuses travelogue and fiction. As the blurb says: it is “A deft synthesis of travelogue and Bildungsroman, by turns antic and introspective …so satisfying” (Wall Street Journal). This mixture of fragmentary sensation is achieved in this novel. It is a perfect mixture of reality and verse. The narrator is a sports reporter who spends a year off in Guyana. It presents a land which is materially...
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...othered a child, they fall in love with each other, celebrate their consummation of love, indulge in ‘hurtsmanship’ and depart. The main cause of the breakup of their relationship is the unreliability. What this traveler wanted is a physical companion and this girl wanted somebody to spend for her and an escape from Guyana. The novel carries unabashed narration of sex as in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. Jan’s mother Savitri turned Anglican, and lived with the man who converted her. In the first part of the narration it is a travelogue and in the second part it is a fiction. But it is hard to label it as a pure form of fiction.
Works Cited
Bhattacharya, Rahul. The Sly Company of the People who Care. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2012. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction. Newyork and London: Routledge, 1998. Print.
In this instance the government regulation to keep the school safe is interfering with Rajiv’s fundamental freedom of conscience and religion stated in section 2 of the charter, and it is doing so unjustly. While the information given in the story was scarce, there were no reports of a Kirpan being used a weapon before, any problems with weapons, or any attempt to find an alternative instead of disallowing the Kirpan completely . In the case Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys The Supreme Court of Canada decided that the decision to prohibit the wearing of a Kirpan to be a violation of one’s fundamental freedom. This is important because a precedent has been set by the Supreme Court of Canada. After the Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys case the court decided that if that given the premise a student has not used the Kirpan as a weapon before, and sincerely believes that a metal Kirpan is essential in paying respects to their religion, it is within their rights to wear one. This important as it proves that the government regulation seized Rajiv’s Kir...
Macey, David. “Postmodernity.” The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin Books, 2001. 307-309. Print.
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a novel about how people’s pursuit of their own interests, influenced by the cultural and social contexts in which they live, ultimately determines their behavior. Through utilizing subthemes of self-preservation, the maintenance of social status/the status quo, and power, she portrays Velutha as the only wholly moral character in the story, who, because of his goodness, becomes the target of frequent deception. Roy argues that human nature is such that human beings will do whatever they feel is necessary to serve their own self-interests.
Starting from the late 19th to early 20th century, modernist writing has become widely spread as a way for people to express ideas and feelings that are written in a more isolationist form. The modernist literary movement was driven by the desire to transform writing from the classic views of the time period and begin to express the newly developed emotions that were going on at the time. Both The Guest by Albert Camus and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, are two modernist texts that strongly exhibit the feelings of emotional isolation and alienation throughout each book. In each story, the protagonist undergoes a sense of desolation, and although both characters experience the same sense of remoteness, each are isolated in different ways.
Her analysis of the metaphysics behind literature derived from Jean Baudrillard who proposed that reality has become an artifice in reality. His precise term for this occurrence is called hyper-reality and consists of society using motifs and signs in order to coincide for what is real, basically, that reality falls far from the understanding of Americans due to the “information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world”. Gonzalez uses this idea to make the argument that in literature we have lost our grasp with verity and reality; we’ve lost this perception by trying to recreate our pasts and never creating our "now". Moreover, we’re so obsessed with explaining the theories of our ancestors that we’ve created a “perverted” culture of intertextuality. Gonzalez’s most substantial argument stands in that the novel has lost its credibility today because contemporary authors seek to recreate and call the results “postmodernism”, hence, intertextuality. This theme has also been a recurrent one that seems to be the most compelling: people are tired of the same ideas bouncing from one generation to the next, tired of cliché themes, and tired of seeing the same thing in novels. She also portrays technology’s role in this issue with evidence of its threat to the future of the novel; basically, she argues that literature entirely is at risk because all technology does is create an epidemic that destroys present day aesthetic and ideas of the
Postmodernism movement started in the 1960’s, carrying on until present. James Morley defined the postmodernism movement as “a rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective anonymous experience.” In other words, postmodernism rejects what has been established and makes emphasis on combined revolutionary experiences. Postmodernism can be said it is the "derivate" of modernism; it follows most of the same ideas than modernism but resist the very idea of boundaries. According to our lecture notes “Dominant culture uses perception against others to maintain authority.”
Another important characteristic of postmodern literature is the mixing of styles. Many literary styles such as “[ . . . ] tone, point of view, register, and logical sequence; apparently random unexpected intrusions and [ . . ...
Another Country is possibly the only novel of its time in which every character suffers from a feeling of isolation. All the main characters share in the feeling of isolation. Whether the character's isolation is a result of race, economic situation, or even sexual orientation, each character's life is affected. The feeling of isolation causes the characters to lose touch with reality.
In conclusion, the use of elements of post modernism add a richness to literature and to the reading experience of the reader. Elements such as irony, magic realism and fragmentation cause people to think and make connections between the literature they are reading and how it relates to their own lives and the lives of the authors and other readers. The short stories studied in Ms. Reynolds 4U English class all contained many effective post modern elements that made students go more in depth with their reading and understanding of noted English literature. Perhaps some people were enlightened and adopted a postmodern view on the world.
Hoover, Jeff. “Towards a Description of Modernism and Postmodernism in Literature.” Cedar Rapids: Coe College, Sept. 21, 1999.
Intertextuality: Postmodernism often considered intertextual, which means it features a collage or grab bag of past styles and techniques, rather than a pure or simple form. What emerges from this menagerie of styles and grab bag of techniques is not an individual artist’s self-expression but rather a hodgepodge of different expressive forms from different periods and artists. Postmodernist art borrows images and sounds from
Where does truth lie? Postmodernism is a literary movement of the twentieth century that attempts to show that the answer to this question cannot be completely determined. Characteristics of postmodern works include a mixing of different genres, random time changes, and the use of technology that all aid in presenting a common postmodern theme that truth doesn’t lie in one story, place or person. The novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer encompasses these postmodern characteristics combining together show how the truth cannot always be attained.
In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...
Postmodernism attempts to call into question or challenge the notion of a single absolute unified master narrative without simply replacing it with another. It is a paradoxical, recursive, and problematic method of critique.
Modernism in literature was a new form of expressing one’s opinions that would go on to change the world and the many authors on it, forever. Modernists focused on new ideals on the world and the society that people live in and how it had many problems that people seemed to overlook. Modernists, in other words, looked for the areas of society and of human nature itself that weren’t always pushed out in front and showcased them all for the world to see. This almost cynical view of the world came from a variety of factors, the most prominent to many modernists being World War I. World War I...