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.

Stephen Dixon's Novels: Autobiographicality as Transgression

The idea advanced in the paper is to theorize the mechanisms of autobiographicality in Stephen Dixon’s novels that are viewed as a radical renewal of autobiographical narrative, where the modality of disappearance/return of the subject produces a new mode of life-writing. We propose the term “autobiographical transgression” to capture the essence of this renewal started by three representative figures – John Barth, Stephen Dixon, and Joseph Heller that can be reduced neither to autobiography as a genre, nor to “transgressive autobiography” as its generic variant. Dixon finds a new form for representing autos. He creates the character with the name-deixis I. that personifies a fiduciary subject, thus, suggesting a provocative restatement of postmodernist generic problems. In the novels I. and End of I. the autobiographical hero I. exists simultaneously as a metaphor of the author’s presence in the text, as the subjective author’s I and as a character in the novel − an objectified, semi-functional, distancing I. The transplanting of life experience manifests itself in a special kind of repersonalization and double coding of the traditional autobiographical subject.

‘Reverse-Thinking’

Starting from Hayden White’s Metahistory, this chapter considers how what White called a ‘retroactive’ style of writing becomes naturalized in postmodernist aesthetics. The first section ranges widely over contemporary US fiction, and it also considers antipodean influences on the music of Philip Glass and John Cage, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the video installations of Christian Marclay. The second section tracks this reverse-thinking through celebrated postmodern fabulists John Barth and Salman Rushdie, showing how their playful narratives address changing social conditions. The third section discusses the shift away from progressive sequence in the films of David Lynch and Michael Haneke, indicating how this relates to surrealism, psychoanalysis, and geographical displacement. The final section analyses contemporary Australian fiction in terms of its spatio-temporal recalibrations, exploring how the planetary turn common to the fiction of Tim Winton, Gail Jones, and Christos Tsiolkas has become characteristic of postmodernism more widely.

The Planetary Clock

The theme of The Planetary Clock is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc, from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective, with a special emphasis on issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene, The Planetary Clock offers a wide-ranging, revisionist account of postmodernism, reinterpreting literature, film, music, and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework. By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives, it suggests how an antipodean impulse, involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions, has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets, The Planetary Clock ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth, Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Richard Powers), while bringing the US tradition into dialogue with both its English (Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray, Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle), the visual arts (Hockney, Blackman, Fiona Hall) and cinema (Rohmer, Haneke, Tarantino), The Planetary Clock enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first century.

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo

Exhaustion of Possibilities: Harold Rosenberg, John Barth and Susan Sontag

The chapter examines dominant postmodernist structures of feeling with respect to their internal contradiction. If its declared assent to the mode of exhaustion of aesthetic possibilities, articulated in its penchant for self-referentiality, intertextuality, and metafiction, gives an impression of a full-fledged embracement of doing nothing, this insight might actually be misleading. A careful look at postmodern manifestos – by Harold Rosenberg, John Barth and Susan Sontag – suggests that the appropriation of the limit-trope of doing nothing as postmodernism’s very own is in fact artificial. Rather than realizing the counter-normative potential of the trope of doing nothing, The chapter argues that the dominant postmodern rhetoric nullifies it by rephrasing productivity in terms of hyper-productivity and hyper-engagement. In Harold Rosenberg’s theory of Action Painting and John Barth’s notion of ultra-productive weariness with tradition, for example, modes of inactivity such as passivity or disinterest are revitalized as modes of heightened cognition. Thus, rather than inaugurating a “new” representational and ethical regime, postmodern manifestos are quite reactionary in that reiterate the ideologically troublesome Romantic notion of the artist’s active role in the process of artistic production.

John Barth and David Foster Wallace: An Abortive Patricide

David Foster Wallace initially saw himself as a late postmodernist; indeed, he literally wrote a text in the margins of his copy of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. Later on, probably under the influence of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, he wanted to become one of those “strong poets” who need to commit a literary patricide so as to clear imaginative space for themselves. What has been more or less overlooked so far (or perhaps simply taken for granted, given the widespread recognition and influence of Creative Writing Seminars in the U. S.) is that Wallace used the model of teacher and student to create his own relationship between Author and Reader, turning the story into a battleground between them. This essay attempts to show that Wallace’s “homicidal” as well as “fawning” attitude towards Barth actually raises the status of the author he means to succeed.