After the publication of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, however, the work of Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) received increasingly serious critical commentary. He emerged as a consistent commentator on American culture through the second half of the twentieth century. His short… Read More ›
Iconoclastic and irreverent, the postmodern novel is by definition a radical experiment that emerges when a writer feels the customary tropes of fiction have been exhausted. For the postmodernist, the well-worn genre of the novel is insufficient and no longer… Read More ›
The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form,… Read More ›
University of Calicut V Semester B.A. English Core Paper Methodology of Literature (EN5B03) Methodology of Literature PDF (To Download the Material Click on the Above Link) Topics Covered Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, Myth Criticism, Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Reader Response… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the… Read More ›
Shakespeare need not be abandoned by the postmodern world.Indeed; the postmodern world does and continues to embrace his works wholeheartedly. Hugh Grady rightly observes “we are now witnessing the emergence of a postmodernist Shakespeare through the development of critical paradigms… Read More ›
In his novels, Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) coaxes the reader toward greater sympathy for humanity and deeper understanding of the human condition. His genre is satire—sometimes biting, sometimes tender, always funny. His arena is as expansive as the whole universe… Read More ›
At first glance, Joseph Heller’s (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) novels seem quite dissimilar. Heller’s manipulation of time and point of view in Catch-22 is dizzying; it is a hilariously macabre, almost surreal novel. Something Happened, on the… Read More ›
Critics have placed William Gaddis (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) in the tradition of experimental fiction, linking him closely to James Joyce and comparing him to contemporaries such as Thomas Pynchon. Gaddis himself also indicated the influence of… Read More ›
In Robert Coover’s work, humanity is presented not as the center of the universe, the purpose of creation, but, instead, as the center of the fictions it itself creates to explain its existence. Only when people learn the crucial difference… Read More ›
Although John Barth’s (1930 – ) novels have ensured his eminence among contemporary American writers, his short fictions have been no less influential or controversial. In addition to his novels, he published a collection of shorter works, Lost in the… Read More ›
Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West…. Read More ›
The postmodern condition entails the treatment of time and space as finite or tied to the social context of their use. They are, from a postmodern perspective, no longer unproblematic media whose neutrality permits comparison and communications across diverse boundaries…. Read More ›
[Feminism] should persist in seeing itself as a component or offshoot of Enlightenment modernism, rather than as one more ‘exciting’ feature (or cluster of features) in a postmodern social landscape. (Sabina Lovibond, in T. Docherty, ed., Postmodemism: A Reader (1993).)… Read More ›
While motoring across the Californian desert, a young woman encounters a young male student engaged in the militant activities of May 1968. He is later shot by the police. Thanks to this encounter, her eyes are opened as to the… Read More ›
Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) is one of France’s most important and interesting intellectual figures. She excelled at being a writer, filmmaker and dramatist. After the Second World War she also worked for a number of years as a journalist for France-Observateur…. Read More ›
In a society dominated by production, Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) argues, the difference between use-value and exchange-value has some pertinence. Certainly, for a time, Marx was able to provide a relatively plausible explanation of the growth of capitalism using just these… Read More ›
The uniqueness of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) stems, in large measure, from the intersection of writing and lived experience. Born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka was the son of a prosperous self-made businessman. Although his parents… Read More ›
If the era of ‘postmodernity’ is increasingly seen as ‘a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself’ then poetry produced under this new ‘socio-economic mode’ might rightly be dismissed as another form of ‘postmodern’ candyfloss neatly packaged for… Read More ›
John Hawkes once divulged that when he began to write he assumed that “the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme”. Certainly many subsequent authors have done their best to sledgehammer these four literary cornerstones into… Read More ›
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