Postmodernism in Literature Flashcards
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The key aspects of Postmodernism:
- the breakdown of metanarratives
- the very nature of knowledge
- new understanding of history
- de-centering of the world
= democratization
= relativization
= pluralization
The Collector
John Fowles
- Shakespeare’s The Tempest
The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography
Angela Carter
- involved in the feminist movement, yet she was never radical
Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes
- a keen Francophile
Who was called “the poet of perversity?”
Ian McEwan
- also “Ian Macabre”
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Money, London Fields, The Information
Martin Amis
- a loose “London trilogy”
London: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd
- non-fiction
Consequences for postmodern narratives?
1) challenging the narrative authority – whose story do we get?
2) unreliable narrator(s), games with the reader – detachment from the narrative
3) metafiction
4) intertextuality
5) challenging the metanarrative, the importance of telling stories vs. the Story → fragmentation
6) plurality of views, truths vs. the Truth, challenging of any totalizing view/knowledge
7) voice given to those on the margins/off-centres/minorities
8) new view of history: histories vs. the History → historiografic metafiction
9) plurality/mixing/incorporating of genres, artistic principles both ‘high’ and ‘low’
10) employment of parody and pastiche → literary parasitism
11) focus on the irrational
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Who wrote the biographies of “London/Cockney Visionaries?”
Peter Ackroyd
- he mostly wrote so-called “historiographic metafiction”
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson
Name the Postcolonial writers
Jean Rhys
Chinua Achebe
Anita Desai
Salman Rushdie
A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters
Julian Barnes
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
- Antoniette Cosway, known as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
- the traditions of Igbo society, an ethnic group living mostly in southeastern Nigeria
Clear Light of Day
Anita Desai
- set in the time after the partition of India in 1947
Midnight Children
- author + info o něm
Salman Rushdie
- book → a loose allegory of India’s transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of India
- combines magical realism with historical fiction
- the value of imagination is “one of the keys to our humanity”
- mistrust of official history, believes that history is a fiction created by the powerful → glorifies hybridity in his writing
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Angela Carter
