Postmodern Literature Final In terms of the use of experimental techniques in the assigned readings this semester, I think I would judge Vonnegut to be the best and Ishmael Reed to be the worst. The simple criterion here is accessibility. There is no reason why experimental writing should be difficult or a chore to read. The constant emphasis on a surface level of linguistic novelty in Ishmael Reed makes the actual reading experience difficult. For example, we might consider a sentence like "A place without gurus monarchs leaders cops tax collectors jails matriarchs patriarchs and all the other galoots who in cahoots have made the earth a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves." This is the narrator's description of the town of Yellow Back Radio (itself already a frustratingly unrealistic name for a town) and the experimental quality of the sentence here gets in the way of apprehending its meaning. There is no particular reason for the lack of commas in the catalogue, and the jingling colloquialism "galoots who in cahoots" does not sit harmoniously with the sonorous solemnity of "a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves." Instead the mix of linguistic registers frustrates the reader, who frequently has to work to even understand what is going on. Vonnegut by contrast maintains a clear flexible prose style throughout, and the experimental method is largely one of digression. Rather than trying to impress on the surface with linguistic novelty, Vonnegut writes patiently as though...
Although at times the style of Breakfast of Champions verges on faux-naif (e.g., "Fucking was how babies were made"), at its best it manages to use the radical simplicity of the style to be experimental in a way that is consistently readable and engaging. If Vonnegut's simplistic hand-drawn illustrations are an example of an experimental technique, they are certainly one that is instantly available to any reader. Accessibility is not sacrificed.
" (Hendricks) Truth and culture are therefore seen to be created and destroyed by others for their own ends. In conclusion, the three literary works discussed above are in many respects very different but also indicate certain continuities of intention and discourse between romanticism, modernism and postmodernism. What links them all is the search for reality and truth that exists beneath the facade of everyday life and reality. As we progress
Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous authors of the modern era. In the tradition of Gabriel Marquez, Rushdie sweeps the reader up in his novel, Midnights Children, like the book by Marquez that obviously had a great deal of influence on Rushdie, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnights Children is a postmodern look at the modern fairytale that Salman Rushdie weaves for those who wish to pick up
Suturing in Film Theory and Other Narrative Practices On a very literal level, to suture something is to sew something back together, usually imperfectly, usually with a substance that is alien to the body that is being altered -- such as the doctor's suturing thread that stitches together an open wound. On a semiotic level, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, Miller's definition of suture (in a nutshell) is that the suturing process
Music, Art, Literature Trends From impressionism to pop art, jazz to hip hop, science fiction to beat poetry, artistic, musical, and literary expressions have varied considerably between 1870 and 2005. The period between the end of the nineteenth century to the current day can be generally described as the modern and postmodern eras. The beginning of the modern era, during the final decades of the nineteenth century, coincided with the Industrial
American History Final Exam Stages of the American Empire Starting in the colonial period and continuing up through the Manifest Destiny phase of the American Empire in the 19th Century, the main goal of imperialism was to obtain land for white farmers and slaveholders. This type of expansionism existed long before modern capitalism or the urban, industrial economy, which did not require colonies and territory so much as markets, cheap labor and
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge relies on rich multisensory imagery to achieve poetic goals in “Kubla Khan.” The sensory imagery Coleridge uses anchors the poem within the genre of Romanticism, as the poet evokes an idealized past based on the descriptions of the mythic Xanadu. Phrases like “stately pleasure-dome” (Stanza 1, line 2) also add evocative sexual imagery that coincides well with the imagery of the splendor of the natural world,
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