Postmodernism In The English Patient

In fact it was rather modernism, as its name implies ,that tried to awake from the nightmare of history, self-consciously setting itself against the past, and rejecting mundane forms of historical understanding. Modernism doesn’t wholely favoured the simply historic narratives rather find truth is not evolutionary and progressive but something requiring analysis. Tracing the works of the modernist poets, especially the works of early twentieth century it should be voluntarily marked as art after the first world war which in time recorded all the emotional aspects of this crisis of longing despair, hopelessness, angst, paralysis and moreover a sense

Reason and enlightenment played a dominant role during the period of the age of reason. Satirical and skeptical were the mode of their writing style. Emotions, feelings, instinct and idealism are key for the writer those emerged during the Romantic and Gothic period in American literature. Imagination and autobiographical elements dominate in the works whereas supernatural elements are blended in the works of the Dark Romantics. Autonomy and individualism are given preference by the transcendentalists.

Barry Lewis states that “The postmodernist writer distrusts the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories, and prefers to deal with other ways of structuring narrative.” (Stuart Sim (ed.) 2001: 127). In this essay, I shall attempt to show how the ‘wholeness and completion’ of the conventional Victorian novel is disrupted over the narrative of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman by drawing a number of examples out of the numerous that can be traced in the novel. The first distinct element that the reader notices in the narrative is the use of quotation references preceding the beginning of each chapter. The use of these epigraphs reinforces the Victorian ‘feeling’ of the story, and certainly, it also aims to recreate the Victorian context in relation to the current perspective.

Some of the recurring themes in works of postmodern literature turned out to be paranoia, minimalism, metafiction and twists on heroism. Heroism came to be a debatable topic in analysis of postmodern literature because of the arguable diversity between the novels. However, it’s sole purpose was not just to entertain, but like most art, for the author to express themselves in a way they haven’t been able to. As a result, Catch-22 presents Yossarian as an anti-hero used by its author, Joseph Heller, to introduce his opinion on war, war heroes and the current social status of the United States. The altered perception of heroism, believed to be present in only some works of postmodern literature, is used to convey the author’s state of mind to the reader in an

Freedom of Spirit in an Ambivalent Society – With Reference to Edith Wharton’s Select Novel K. Kalpana Karthi, Assistant Professor of English, PSG College of Arts & Science, Coimbatore Edith Wharton’s fiction which emerged during the period of Post-World War I is a social analysis, based on Culture, Class and Morality. Her characters reflect the ambivalences prevalent in the environment, sometimes as antimodernists and often as liberal cultural critics. They stand evident, acknowledging that the past was not utopian and the present and future are mired in unpredictable political and social follies. The paper is attempt to study how her female protagonists struggle in this unstable and oscillating society which evade ethics and responsibility to embrace the easy solutions of scapegoating, evasion, cynicism and denial of truths and facts. Her novels depict how women fit themselves into this society either by rejecting or by accepting the changes to construct their emancipated New Selves.

Postmodernism is a movement that was started in the late-20th-century that essentially focuses on the deconstruction and the undermining of institutions that possesses a tradition and an established reputation. Derrida’s deconstruction is interested in finding the hidden meanings of a text, or representations of any kind, which the author may have not intended it to have (Thompson 2004, p. 10). Such examples of which institutions that are the target of the postmodernist movement are the arts, literature and history—which consists as one of major themes of the postmodernist movement. Hence, the focal point of this essay will be the examination of the take of postmodernism on the subject of history, and its techniques, along with a close correlation

The first chapter of Fetishism of Modernities by Bernard Yack is, in essence, an exercise in the process of lumping and splitting discussed by Eviatar Zerubavel in Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social Classification. In his writing, Yack strives to come up with a way of defining the concept of modernity so that he can explore it further in his book. In the first chapter, Yack uses lumping and splitting to help define the complex idea of modernity and to outline a way to determine if things or ideas can be grouped with those things modern. Yack begins by wrestling with how language can make the understanding of the concept of modernity problematic. Zerubavel states that language is what “helps us carve out experiential continua discrete categories,”

Hybridity: Hybridity usually defined as “the creation of new trans-cultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonisation” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 2003). It takes many forms comprising cultural, political and linguistic. Ben Okri records a modification and addresses hybrid cultural models in The Famished Road. He connects the hybridity with structure that shapes the narrative. He states that “One of the strongest impulses which made me write The Famished Road is that I got tired of the traditional artifices and realism of the novel.

The allusions make part of the Gileadean language, which is intertwining with fiction and reality, as the Bible is an existing literary work. The word of God is deemed as correct, yet it has been altered. It foregrounds/foreshadows the idea of living in a repressive society. The language of the Bible is partially falsified in order to take up control of society. It is denying reality and is shaping the way in which people think.

Describe New Historicism and its application to Literature. How, for instance, might one apply New Historicism to Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”? New Historicism marks a critical moment in literary and cultural theory. The New Historicist discourse of literary investigation has broken down the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable in literary analysis; its essential premise focuses on how a literary text reveals the dominant ideologies of a society from a specific era in history. This essay will describe New Historicism and apply it to the short story, “The Demon Lover”, by Elizabeth Bowen.

Most of the stories readers read, many author used intertextual elements in their stories. The reasons why the author used intertextual elements is because they wanted the readers to use their scheme and asked themselves, why this is in this text? What is the purpose behind this? By having the readers used their scheme, they are able to find the meaning or connection between this text/passage related their everyday lives. In the story, As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, the author used many intertextual elements in each ‘chapter’ from each character’s point of view in the story.

“Goodfellas” isn’t the only film by Martin Scorsese that I will be analyzing, however his film “Taxi Driver” is based on a fictional character. Therefore I will compare that film more to his childhood in which, according to him, he witnessed a lot of gang activity. Apart from these deviations I will be following a structure of analyzing one film at a time, then comparing it the to historical data I have. After having done this for all three

Haunted by the aftermath of World War II, contemporary America conveyed its anxieties and sufferings through various forms of art, including literature, and turned to these art forms for a spark of hope or comfort in the midst of the dark, postwar era. Consequently, Contemporary Literature is not only a term that defines a certain time period in which literature is produced, but it also expresses a particular type of style and quality of writing. Much of this style has been influenced by the horrors of World War II, and the different perspectives and world views that derived from these horrors post-war. Two prevailing questions that the aftermath of war raised and that Contemporary Literature often reflects is whether there is an existence