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2015

Postmodernism

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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Metafiction As Genre Fiction, Jeremy A. Levine Oct 2015

Metafiction As Genre Fiction, Jeremy A. Levine

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Realism, the genre in which literature is expected to reflect reality, tends to act as the default setting for establish- ing the worth of a given piece. This paper contends that metafiction, a post-modern genre characterized by a work’s awareness of its own fictional nature, has been damaged by realism’s standards. Using a case study of two metafic- tional works, John Barth’s “Life-Story” and David Foster Wallace’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way against a historical and theoretical backdrop, the paper both isolates metafiction from realism while describing its deliberate artistic mission. This identity is based on open …


The Stag Head Spoke By Erina Harris, Joel Deshaye Aug 2015

The Stag Head Spoke By Erina Harris, Joel Deshaye

The Goose

Joel Deshaye reviews Erina Harris's book of poetry entitled The Stag Head Spoke.


George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando May 2015

George Saunders And The Postmodern Working Class, David Rando

David P. Rando

George Saunders peoples his stories with the losers of American history—the dispossessed, the oppressed, or merely those whom history’s winners have walked all over on their paths to glory, fame, or terrific wealth. Among other forms of marginalization, Saunders’s subject is above all the American working class. In the last twenty or more years, however, for reasons that include the fall of the Soviet Union, the impact of poststructuralist theory, conceptualizations of identity that more and more take race and gender into consideration alongside class, and the general cultural turn in class analysis, it has become increasingly difficult to write …


I Am With You: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Fans, And The Harmful Effects Of Californication, Alexander Macphail-Fausey May 2015

I Am With You: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Fans, And The Harmful Effects Of Californication, Alexander Macphail-Fausey

English Seminar Capstone Research Papers

This is my capstone paper from English Seminar and my English degree. The paper is an analysis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Californication and its relation to the fan base of the band. It explores the influences on the creation of the album within a postmodern context, using the theories of Katherine Hayles, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. Through these theories, the paper explores the postmodern impact on the Cult of Celebrity and the American Dream and how those affected the lives of Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante from the Peppers. Finally, the paper shows how the album …


Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols May 2015

Kenneth Koch's Postmodern Comedy Revisited, John Campbell Nichols

Masters Theses

This thesis describes and analyzes the postmodern comedy of New York School poet, Kenneth Koch and discusses the changes this comedy underwent throughout his lengthy career. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I explains the aesthetic of the New York School of poets as contrasted to the dominant New Critical compositional aesthetic embodied by poets such as Robert Lowell in the mid-century United States. Chapter II develops Koch’s comedy as expressing an emergent postmodernism. Chapter III discusses the various aspects of Koch’s comedy, sampling poems from across his career. Chapter IV traces the development and maturity of Koch’s …


A Redemption Of Meaning In Three Novels By Italo Calvino, Dominick J. Knowles Apr 2015

A Redemption Of Meaning In Three Novels By Italo Calvino, Dominick J. Knowles

English Honors Papers

In this thesis I present three readings of Italo Calvino’s later novels: Invisible Cities (1972), If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), and Mr. Palomar (1983). My primary aim is to defend Calvino against dominant scholarly interpretations that position him as a Postmodern nihilist, a literary trickster interested solely in toying with the mechanics of language. My analysis of Calvino’s work re-envisions him as a special breed of Postmodernist concerned with humanity’s ability to create spaces for meaning in spite of an indifferent cosmos. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, cognitive science, analytic philosophy, and phenomenology, I synthesize my own critical …


A Single Man Of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities And Consumerism In The New Novel Of Manners, Bonnie Mclean Apr 2015

A Single Man Of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities And Consumerism In The New Novel Of Manners, Bonnie Mclean

Dissertations (1934 -)

In my dissertation, I argue that the novel of manners, while sometimes considered a moribund genre, presents itself as a genre relevant to contemporary criticism of social change from consensus politics to privatization both at governmental and domestic levels. I establish both key terms, cultural and theoretical trends, and define the novel of manners in context as a historical genre and a contemporary one. I further explore the novel of manners as a commentary on social and moral problems, particularly in tensions between social morality and individual morality that emerge when manners break down, a concept originally highlighted by Henry …


The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo Mar 2015

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …


White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles Jan 2015

White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles

Tim Engles

No abstract provided.


"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros Jan 2015

"What, To A Prisoner, Is The Fourth Of July?": Mumia Abu-Jamal And Contemporary Narratives Of Slavery, Luis Omar Ceniceros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Writing from a specifically Black postmodern perspective, former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal composes his multimedia slave narrative as a postmodern Neo-slave narrative. From the Atlantic slave-trade to the United States prison-industrial complex, from Quobna Ottobah Cugoano to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the slave narrative exists as a critique against oppressive State powers and a collective affirmation of interiority and embodied significance. For Abu-Jamal, his incarceration is indicative of an ever-pervasive capitalist power-structure that in the past has, in the present is, and in the future will control designated groups of made marginalized masses in order that preeminent capitalist beneficiaries preserve elite …


White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles Jan 2015

White Male Nostalgia In Don Delillo's Underworld, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.


Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier Jan 2015

Consumer Mutations: Mediated Subjectivities Of The Incipient Digital Age, Aaron Duplantier

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that out of postmodernity, subjectivity has seen distinct mutations inflected by consumer technology. As postmodern mediators of ordinary people, reality TV, Facebook, and YouTube are steeped in concerns about authenticity. Reality TV, for example, cannot escape its authenticity problem because of the conventional hierarchy of production it maintains, a hierarchy that prompts consumer skepticism regarding its truth value. However, seemingly democratic Internet platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, promise consumer engagement in which users can break down those hierarchical barriers preventing authentic expression. Under the guise of presumed mediational accuracy, the resulting feedback loop between …


Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower Jan 2015

Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Making Thought Matter: Postmodern Models for Material Thinking, crosses disciplines to trace the aesthetic contexts of Postmodern American artists whose work employs the senses to make legible creative and critical modes of synthesis. I contend that in practicing a material thinking—the artistic mobilization of the intimate and affective qualities of conceptual and physical surfaces—these artists reinsert perceptual knowledge and bodily agency into Postmodernism’s “emptied” surfaces. Consequently, their work opposes late theorists of Postmodernity who characterized contemporary artistic forms as immaterial, abstract, and emotionally deficient. To assess contemporary syntheses I develop Philip Johnson’s late International Style Glass House into an analogy …


A Transnational Postmodernism : North Africa As A Locus For Postmodern Fiction, Steven Weber Jan 2015

A Transnational Postmodernism : North Africa As A Locus For Postmodern Fiction, Steven Weber

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Examining a 25-year period of literature about post-WWII North Africa by Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Kateb Yacine, and Pierre Guyotat, A Transnational Postmodernism describes the creation of a particular kind of postmodern literature that has been shaped by the concerns of its colonial/postcolonial context. Such a shaping introduces postmodernity as a problem. This problem—astutely identified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire—is that, at the moment of decolonization, as we move from modern to postmodern regimes of power and control, the typical elements of postmodernity (hybridity, et al) are no longer as necessarily liberatory as they once were against …