Postmodern writing & The Forty Rules of Love

Postmodern writing is depicted as a methodology that created in the time of post-The Second Great War. 'Discontinuity' is the acknowledgment of alienation of any person and is a noticeable component of postmodern writing. Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, John Barth and William Gaddis are some remarkable writers who have some association with postmodern writing. postmodern writing was officially started in 1972. Shafak's backing of a cosmopolitan, worldwide society, where public affiliations become old, conflicts with her open adherence to the requirements and style of the American scholarly market. 'Techno culture' is the mix of innovation with culture while 'fleeting mutilation' implies that occasions and activities in any account don't bring about sequential request, both of these attributes are utilized in postmodern writing. A connection between two abstract works is known as 'intertextuality' that is likewise a procedure utilized in postmodern writing. examine Elif Shafak’s novel The forty rules of love as an impression of her endeavor to rise above social limits through fiction. Postmodern writing addresses a culture which addresses postmodern life.

Postmodern writing & The Forty Rules of Love

Postmodern writing is depicted as a methodology that created in the time of post-The Second Great War. 'Discontinuity' is the acknowledgment of alienation of any person and is a noticeable component of postmodern writing. Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, John Barth and William Gaddis are some remarkable writers who have some association with postmodern writing. postmodern writing was officially started in 1972. Shafak's backing of a cosmopolitan, worldwide society, where public affiliations become old, conflicts with her open adherence to the requirements and style of the American scholarly market. 'Techno culture' is the mix of innovation with culture while 'fleeting mutilation' implies that occasions and activities in any account don't bring about sequential request, both of these attributes are utilized in postmodern writing. A connection between two abstract works is known as 'intertextuality' that is likewise a procedure utilized in postmodern writing. examine Elif Shafak’s novel The forty rules of love as an impression of her endeavor to rise above social limits through fiction. Postmodern writing addresses a culture which addresses postmodern life.

Memory and Testimony in Extraordinary Times

This paper analyzes two parallel and opposed testimonies of mass annihilation in World War II: Primo Levi’s report of his gruesome experiences in Auschwitz, in The Drowned and the Saved; the testimony of the fire-bombing of Dresden, that killed 130,000 civilians in 1945, recorded by a young American POW, private Kurt Vonnegut Jr, in his novel Slaughterhouse-five. It is basically structured along the phases of the historiographic operation proposed by Paul Ricoeur – testimony and recording of testimonies; questioning of the records and written historical representation of the past – with the objective of drawing conclusions about the role of literature in keeping alive memories that might prevent further atrocities. Steppingstones include the urge to bear witness, the paradoxical links between victims and perpetrators and the choice of literary genders to convey messages. References are made to René Girard’s concept of the scapegoat mechanism as an explanation for the eruption of violence in social groups.

The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of “high” and “low.”

Critical Suspension

This final chapter brings the historical argument to a close by examining forms of immanent critique in post-World War II American novels attempting to grapple with the geopolitics of the so-called “American Century.” Particular attention is paid to motifs of dangling, drifting, and “yo-yoing” in novels by Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon as well as relations between the irony of immanence and postmodern, postcolonial, and anti-imperialist re-imaginings of historical narrativization and representation. The chapter concludes by focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony in order to consider how the trope of “ground zero” first emerged in reference to the testing of the atom bomb in the American Southwest, and how the military-industrial development of uranium mining and nuclear power remain closely connected to concerns about American empire and cultural, ecological, and planetary survival in the post-9/11 era.

Notes from the Noodle Factory

Kurt Vonnegut compared a library to a noodle factory, noting that in a society where a majority of people do not really enjoy reading, “Noodles are okay. Libraries are okay. They are rather neutral good news.” Such indifference could be tolerated three decades ago when libraries still maintained primacy as central repositories of information. However, in this era of existential crisis, and as libraries scramble for “relevance,” the urgent question arises: “What new paradigms must be formulated to define the mission ofthe 21st-century library and delineate how that mission can better support both education and culture?

Vonnegut, Darwin, and the Tragical Satirical Arc of Human History in the Novel "Galapagos"

In 1985 Kurt Vonnegut produced a satirical novel entitled Galapagos, in which the author explored a possible earth set one million years in the future. Human beings “have quietly evolved into sleek, furry creatures with flippers, and small brains.”[1] Vonnegut posits a world in which human logic, derived from the functioning of three-kilogramme brains, has resulted in the downfall of the species, prior to the evolution of the seal-like creatures. This article explores the novel from an ecocritical perspective, including references to the work of Greg Garrard, Rachel Carson and Arne Naess. Charles Darwin’s work is also considered because the novel’s title and setting allude to his work on evolution. This article will argue that Vonnegut believes human beings should change their thought and behaviour patterns if we are to have an optimistic future. [1] This quote is from the blurb on the back cover of the Flamingo edition, 1994.

The emotional arcs of political narratives

"According to Reagan et al. (2016) all narratives follow the profile of some emotional arcs. The authors, who start from an idea of the writer Kurt Vonnegut (1995), distinguish between the concept of ‘plot’ – which captures the mechanics of a narrative –, and what they call ‘emotional arcs’, which capture the emotional experience that is evoked in the reader. In this article we propose a critical analysis of the concept of emotional arcs, and test the model of analysis with which the emotional arcs of a narrative are evaluated in the context of specific situations of political communication. The results suggest that for a better understanding of the emotional content of a speech we need to consider the emotional component of each type of semiotic resources that a political actor performs during a speech."