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Postmodern Fiction Exam

Terms

undefined, object
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Who wrote Ficciones?
Jorge Luis Borges
What year was Ficciones published?
1944
What are some common symbols in Ficciones?
mirrors, labyrinths, books, relativity of time, indistinguishable reality and illusion, reaction against the ordered world, blasphemy, absence of gender and sexuality.
What are some stories that use the idea of the double?
Garden of Forking Paths, The Form of the Sword.
What stories focus around the idea of time?
The Secret Miracle
What is the major quote associated with the relativity of time?
How a minute can last forever and a year can pass unnoticed.
What stories center on idea that reality and illusion are indistinguishable?
The Circular Ruins, The traitor and the hero.
Death and the Compass
imitates the detective story to satirize the faith in reason which that genre epitomizes
The Circular Ruins
- inability of man to impose order on anything
- humiliation at lack of control
- disillusionment even from oneself
Form of the Sword
- the question of fact vs. fiction - it is all fiction!!
- who is good, who is bad?
- the convulted reality, not knowing truth
Don Quixote
- making fun of critics attempt to impose a structure on everything
- what we know is what we think we know
- biographical criticism, understanding the life
Library
- infinity vs eternal
- what do books mean?
- the search for something you can never find, desperation of the hunt
- wanting to impose order on something inherently disordered
- library is highly ordered, it needs to be chaotic to be true
- negative view of the active pursuit of knowledge
The South
- regional importance
- need for recognition
- the ability of stories of creating an illusory life, creating the romance and heroism of a man
- books = lack of reality, but his story will give him eternal reality
key terms for discussing postmodern literature:
- reflexivity
- intertextuality
- destabilization
- magical events
- omniscent narrator
- blasphemy
- the grotesque
Who wrote The Tin Drum?
Gunter Grass
When was it published?
1959
What is the basis of the chapter "Faith, Hope, Love"?
- rhythm is marked by an increased frenetic chaos
- kristallnacht (nov 9-20, 1938)
- traumatic memory loss
- focus on oskar's own narrative
- author is a perpetrator and cannot bring himself to be strsaight, too horrible, it would trivialize it more to tell it directly so he must be indirect
- 3 virtues of the Bible: faith, hope, and love
- this chapter represents the absence of all three
What is the time frame of the novel?
1840s - 1963
- last decades of slavery to just before the Civil Rights Movement begins
What elements does Grass employ of a postmodern nature?
- grotesque (soup, eels), blasphemy (oskar's baptism, Jesus drumming), politics (rostrum), sexuality (love triangles, incest, rape)
What is the significance of the cat Bismarck?
- otto von bismarck unified germany, caused 3 wars to scare city-states into unifiting
- both a founding father and machiavellian dictator
- made a cat who is bludgeoned to death but does not die.
- could suggest that whatever was wrong in germany has always been there because the cat doesn't die or that germany can persevere
Gender & Sexuality in Tin Drum
- she is in thee gray area (Poland and Germany fighting over territory)
- oskar sees the adult world and rejects it because of its corruption
- sexuality and decadence parallel the rise of nazism.
- women seem more powerful in relationships, interestingbecause men are viewed as these powerful army soldiers, but cannot stand up to women
Politics in Tin Drum
- the political turmoil mirrors the love triangle
- grass seems to think that both communism and nazism try to impose order on chaos and that is what is wrong with them
Religion in Tin Drum
- Protestantism, Catholicism and Judiasm fight
- Agnes is worried about her salvation, she confesses every week
- oskar is confused by religion, cannot hate jesus
- he is judas and jesus
- his voice can break any glass except church glass
oskar
- compulsion to explain the world in terms of his own authorship
- feels utterly out of control and so creates a world in which he has definite and absolute control over everything
- his life is central, not the political scene
- a perpetual member of the audience
- simply an observer of all events, pretending he is outside them while obsessed with affecting things: his voice, the stealing, the fates of those he knows
Who wrote Song of Solomon?
Toni Morrison
When was Song of Solomon published?
1976

Deck Info

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