Postmodern Fiction Exam
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- 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
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- inability of man to impose order on anything
- humiliation at lack of control
- disillusionment even from oneself - Form of the Sword
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- the question of fact vs. fiction - it is all fiction!!
- who is good, who is bad?
- the convulted reality, not knowing truth - Don Quixote
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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:
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- 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"?
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- 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?
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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?
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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