American literature - semináře - zápisy

• Whiteness

• Middle-class security

28. 11. 2018

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

• The book has 3 parts

• Up to date → back to childhood

• You have behaviour of people and you go back to past to find out what made them to behave that way

• From 3rd person narration to 1st person narration

• Yolanda is the main narrator – she uses language the most – that’s why she has so many names – Yolanda, Yoyo, Yo

• Language is significant for people to establish their identity – they were raised by their aunts, their maids used different language – different types of Spanish

• Guavas are metaphor – it is fruit of Dominican republic – she wanted the privilege to pick it by herself, she didn’t want it from maids

American postmodernism

Postmodernism = reaction to modernism

• A style or a literary trend which emerged in the post–World War II era – reaction to WW II

• Characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator

• Postmodern works are seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature

• The end of postmodernism? We are still living through it at this time

• Reader-response (readers are asked to cooperate to create the story – how you understand the text) and deconstructionist approaches (you try to look for the meaning of the story), as well as ways of subverting the implicit contract between author, text and reader

• Postmodern writers are seen as reacting against the precepts of modernism, and they often operate as literary "bricoleurs", parodying forms and styles associated with modernist (and other) writers and artists

• The questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature

  • Irony, playfulness, black humour (lots of authors were called black humourists)

  • Intertextuality Pastiche Metafiction Fabulation

Irony, playfulness, black humour

• Among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism

• John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman

• Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context

Intertextuality

• The relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history

• It can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style

• Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme

Pastiche = collage

• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents – there are 15 different stories

• Means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements

• This can be an homage to or a parody of past styles

• Can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society.

• It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity