3RD
B. A ENGLISH
3RD
C. A ASSIGNMENT
Paper:
PAPER: POSTMODERN SURVEY
REG.
NO. 1701711010047
Day:
Saturday
Date:
15/02/2020
I took the bus route no. 21G
from West Tambaram and had to walk for a short distance to reach the Anna
Centenary library.
The library from outside looks like a very vast building with beautiful architecture that is situated in a large area. As I stepped inside, the library looked very organized and clean. It had many floors and there were a lot of people who had come to visit the library and spend time with books, even during the weekend.
From small families to a huge set of students from a school, many people decided to make their weekend productive by visiting the library and gaining knowledge. There was comfortable lighting, study desks, and air conditioning to make the people who come to read very comfortable inside the library.
I did hear that there were seven floors in the library and I didn’t have the ample time to visit them all. However,
I did visit both the sections In the fourth floor. I loved visiting it because
there was a wide variety of books on both the area of subjects I had
liked-Criminology and English literature.
There were two sections in the
fourth floor of the library that I loved visiting. I just had spent a very
short amount of time in the A wing-where books on Law and Criminology were
there. The next section was the B wing in the fourth floor-a section completely
dedicated to the students of English literature. I saw so many books which I
was interested to read in the section and never had I seen so much of a variety
of books, in a single section of the library, especially for English literature.
Here below are the five books that I
accessed at the ACL and which I would like to recommend to others too.
1. God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
It is a story about the childhood
experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love
Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how
much." The book explores how the
small things affect people's behavior and their lives. It won the Booker Prize
in 1997.
This book is worth every minute
of the time you spend on reading it, as each page goes on,the more you fall in
love with the book and you reach a point where you cannot simply put this book
down without completing it. It gives you a broader perspective on the different
social stigmas faced by the people in the society.
2. A Tale of two Cities - Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities is an 1859
historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during
the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette,
his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live
in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is set
against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of
Terror.
One of the main reasons to read
this book is to explore the theme of duality, revolution and resurrection. The
political conflicts are highlighted too in this novel. As the beginning
paragraph.
That itself increases our interest in the
book, this paragraph also stand out even today as one of the most memorable
quotations of all times:
“It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it
was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of
hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing
before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the
other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some
of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
3. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The novel follows the character development of
Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book who learns about the
repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between
superficial goodness and actual goodness. Its humour lies in its honest depiction
of manners, education, marriage, and money during the Regency era in Great
Britain.
What makes this novel worth
reading is that it gives a take on how the society functioned in the great
Britain in that time period and gives and overall feel of Joy and happiness to
the reader when the protagonist gets a happy ending that she deserved.
4. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The story primarily concerns
the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and
obsession with the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan.
This novel is considered to be
Fitzgerald's magnum opus, what makes this worth reading is that it explores
themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval and
excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as
a cautionary[a] tale regarding the interesting concept of “American Dream”.
5. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre follows the
experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her
love for Mr. Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
What makes this novel worth
reading is its protagonist's moral and spiritual development through an
intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a
psychological aspect which is explored in
detail.
Ten
features of Postmodernism
1. Cultural relations or the
politics of culture
2. The End of
Reality: Baudrillard says it’s a society of simulations
3. Postmodern society is
multicultural and incoherent
4. Rejection of metanarratives
5. Postmodernity is
deconstruction: Derrida’s post-structuralism
6. Postmodern social identity
is constructed by images
7. Foucault: Knowledge-power
relationships are major attributes of post-modernity
8. “The Death of the Author”:
The slogan is the idiom of postmodernity
9. Goodbye to systemic approach
10. Unreliable Narrator
BOOKS ACCESSED AT THE ACL and
Post Modern elements found in them.
1. Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynch
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) has been
received as a canonical instance of postmodernism. The novel appears to subvert
traditional definitions of plot and characterization, yet the narrative retains
a nagging sense of order underneath the represented chaos. Simultaneously
evoking and undoing patterns on all levels of its narrative structure
2. If on the winter’s night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Aspects of If on a winter's night a traveler that mark it as a postmodernist
novel are the fragmented style of the novel (jumping back and forth between the
frame story and stories-within-a-story), the innovative and jarring narrative
style, the use of metafiction, pastiche (aka the copying or satire of various
literary genres with the stories-within-a-story), and the paranoia of the
narrators of many of the stories-within-a-story.
3. Infinite Jest - David Foster
Wallace, in the novel, is able
to use his story to comment on the ground-clearing nature of irony,
technological abstraction, and postmodernism, and suggest that the
post-postmodern future makes individuals catatonic.Wallace predicted many of
the ironic features of postmodernism because he lived and wrote in a generation
that came after postmodernism. Wallace identifies TV as quintessentially
post-postmodern, where meaning is neutralized through a Fredric Jameson's idea
of pastiche--a kind of irony that only seeks to reference itself.
4. The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
One of the major postmodern
paradoxes of the novel is breaking the boundaries between reality and fiction,
making the two worlds merge and, as a corollary, rendering the separation of
the real and the fictitious narratives undesirable, and even impossible. The
novel oscillates between two contradictory, metafictional tendencies:
establishing the illusion of reality and exposing its fictionality. The post
modern ending is the biggest example of postmodern elements where, Fowles
certainly ends the novel by showing Charles as a rejected lover, a jilted lover
condemned to evolve existentially in the sphere of freedom, away from Sarah and
their child.
5. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynch
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of
Lot 49 is one of the most recognizable and essential novels in postmodern
literature. Apart from the many thematic elements—paranoia, uncertainty, etc.
—that make The Crying of Lot 49 a postmodern text, Pynchon utilizes a unique
set of stylistic devices that are common in postmodernism.
6. The Life and Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Gentleman - Lawrence Stern
Sterne’s novel clearly exhibits
the postmodernist theory of metafiction, in which the writing self-consciously
points to itself as an object in order to question the relationship between
reality and fiction. Sterne was certainly not alone in critiquing methods of
narrative construction and exploring the fictionality of the external world.
7. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
The novel Pale Fire is highly praised as a postmodernist work and is the
trial fruit of imagination and form-exploring. The novel consists of four
parts: foreword, poem, commentary, and index, which are the stories of Shade
and Kinbote. The work also shows a unique style in fiction under the context of
postmodernism, and leaves enough space for critical thinking and study. Pale
Fire presents the postmodernist traits through innovative genre and the
assisting of narrative techniques, and as such calls for more critical studies.
This thesis uses concepts and ideas formulated by Hassan and Barthes, among
others, It first examines the novel’s narrative structure, and has found in the
novel-traits of meta-fiction, which contributes to the novel’s exotic style. Chapter
Three turns to the concept of "indeterminacy", discussing the
indeterminacies ranging from the indeterminate narrators to the indeterminate
identities of Kinbote and Shade, exhibiting the possible narrators and
analyzing the shifting roles of the narrator, to study the postmodernist
features in novel
8. White Noise - Don DeLillo
Generally speaking, postmodern
literature is fascinated by the trappings of contemporary bourgeois culture. In
particular, DeLillo is preoccupied with the rise of technology, the power of
images, and the pervasiveness of the media. Like many postmodernists, DeLillo
finds popular culture highly compelling, and celebrities, cult figures, and pop
icons appear frequently throughout his novels. In White Noise, the postmodern
condition is manifested as a kind of information overload, as the protagonist,
Jack Gladney, moves through a world increasingly submerged in marketing imagery
and media stimuli.
Throughout White Noise, Jack
Gladney, the narrator, constantly connects seemingly random events, dates, and
facts in an attempt to form a cohesive understanding of his world. Behind that
attempt lies a deep-seated need to find meaning in a media-obsessed age driven
by images, appearances, and rampant material consumption.
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia
A similar contrast occurs with
the narrative focus. In this novel moves from the self to other, from the
interior to the exterior, from stream-of-consciousness to more rational but
very subjective interior monologue to the limited, omniscient narrator who is
not a character in the story. It emphasizes differing modes of apprehending
truth and reality, and implies that objective truth and reality do exist, all
these features that can be found in the novel clearly shows the various post
modern elements that Gabriel Garcia wanted to bring out.
10. American Psycho - Bret Easton
Many of the postmodern elements
and their sub-elements such as an inconsistent narrator, black humor,
metafiction, or pastiche are found in American
Psycho and can be used as evidence for the novel’s postmodernism.
Fragmentation is best exemplified in the way the novel includes chapters that
completely "break" from the style of the previous ones. For example,
if one chapter contains the gruesome episode when Bateman is killing a woman,
the next chapter is dedicated completely to the artist Whitney Huston and
written in the non-literary form of a review. Fragmentation does not only
happen at the level of language in the novel, but also at the level of plot,
for example after the detective’s first appearance in the novel, that builds
expectations that Bateman will be suspected of the murder of Paul Owen and
imprisoned; however, the detective never appears again and Bateman never faces
trial. Patrick Bateman is called by Murphet as "one of the most
inconsistent narrative voices in contemporary fiction", since he has
proven to be an unreliable narrator. The murder of Paul Owen and the events
connected to it shows Bateman as an incredible unreliable narrator, starting
with the different descriptions of Owen’s apartment. In the "Paul Owen"
chapter the living room is described as: "… very spare, minimalist.
Five Post Modern Theorists and
an Introduction To each of them
1. Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
was a French philosopher and cultural analyst who started his academic life as
a Marxist sociologist interested in consumer society (he completed his Ph.D.
thesis in 1966). He concluded that what was formerly a society of production
had now (after World War II) become one of consumption. On Becoming slowly
dissatisfied with Marxism, he went on to incorporate structuralism and
semiology into his analysis, seeing the objects we consume as a system of signs
that had to be decoded, this system being embedded in structures of consumption
and leisure that he felt could be analysed sociologically. He laid out his
semiotic analysis of consumer society in his books The System of Objects (1968), The
Consumer Society (1970), and The
Mirror of Production (1975). His most important earlier work is For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign (1972), in which he rejected Marxism as the only valid way of
analysing consumer society. In the 1980s and 90s, Baudrillard turned away in a
large degree from Marxism and structuralism to post-structuralism. He became
the high priest of postmodern culture, turning toward an extreme version of
McLuhan's communications theory - he was fascinated by how media affect our
perception of reality and the world. He concluded that in the postmodern
media-laden condition, we experience something called "the death of the
real": we live our lives in the realm of hyperreality, connecting more and
more deeply to things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality
games, or Disneyland, things that merely simulate reality.
2. Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was a
prolific French philosopher best known for his 1968 magnum opus Difference and Repetition (Deleuze
1994), which developed an approach to metaphysics derived from a principle of
difference, and his two-volume work in political philosophy, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze
and Guattari 1977, 1987), which he co-authored with Félix Guattari, a militant
psychotherapist. Deleuze also wrote a series of influential studies of figures
in the history of philosophy, including Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant,
Nietzsche, and Bergson, as well as a number of works on literature, film,
painting, and the arts, which gave him a wide readership outside the field of
philosophy. He eluded easy classification as a philosopher: although he
characterized himself an empiricist, expressing equal admiration for William
James and Bertrand Russell, he nonetheless admitted his even deeper
indebtedness to the rationalism of Spinoza and Leibniz, and he considered the
question of the conditions for the production of novelty (Whitehead) or
creativity (Bergson) to be one of the fundamental issues of contemporary
thought on post-modernism.
3. Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was
the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary
and philosophical texts but also political institutions. Although Derrida at
times expressed regret concerning the fate of the word “deconstruction,” its
popularity indicates the wide-ranging influence of his thought, in philosophy,
in literary criticism and theory, in art and, in particular, architectural
theory, and in political theory. Indeed, Derrida’s fame nearly reached the
status of a media star, with hundreds of people filling auditoriums to hear him
speak, with films and televisions programs devoted to him, with countless books
and articles devoted to his thinking. Beside critique, Derridean deconstruction
consists in an attempt to re-conceive the difference that divides
self-consciousness (the difference of the “of” in consciousness of oneself).
But even more than the re-conception of difference, and perhaps more
importantly, deconstruction attempts to render justice. Indeed, deconstruction
in post modern texts is relentless in this pursuit since justice is impossible
to achieve.
4. Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French
historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist
movements. He has had strong influence not only (or even primarily) in
philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific
disciplines.
5. Pierre-Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari, (born
April 30, 1930, Colombe, France—died August 29, 1992, near Blois), French
psychiatrist and philosopher and a leader of the antipsychiatry movement of the
1960s and ’70s, which challenged established thought in psychoanalysis,
philosophy, and sociology. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Guattari worked during
the 1950s at La Borde, a clinic near Paris that was noted for its innovative
therapeutic practices. It was at this time that Guattari began analysis with
the celebrated French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose reevaluation of the
centrality of the “unconscious” in psychoanalytic theory had begun attracting
many disciples.
Works Cited
Pynch, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Viking Press,1973.
Calvino, Italo. If in a Winter’s Night a Traveller. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
Foster, David. Infinite Jest. Little Brown and Company,
1996
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Little
Brown and Company, 1969
Pynch, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. J. B Lippincot &
Co., 1965
Stern, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy
Gentleman. Anne Ward(vol.1-2), 1761
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1962
Delillo, Don. White Noise. Viking Press, 1985
Garcia, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper
& Row, 1970
Easton, Bret. American Psycho. Vintage Books, 1991
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. Manchester University
Press, 2002
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