American literature - semináře - zápisy

Metafiction

• Is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus“

• Making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of disbelief"

• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Yolanda is poetess – she used the language to establish her own identity in USA – she is the main narrator because she uses language the most

Fabulation

• Relates to pastiche and Magic Realism

  • It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude

  • Challenges some traditional notions of literature

  • Mimesis – first type of art ever

    • Author is trying to copy reality → it is not used in postmodernism! – they want to make you question what the reality is

Poioumena

• A specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (writing)

• According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth.

Historiographic metafiction

• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

• Works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures

• The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung), and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures

Temporal distortion

• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

• It doesn’t go from A to Z → there is not a linear line

• Nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature

• Anachronisms – stories where Abraham Lincoln is using a telephone (impossible), different time zones, different perspectives → there is not one you should prefer, the choice is up to you, there is no single truth, no single ending – another feature of postmodernism – you can choose what you like

• Multiple possible events occurring simultaneously

Magic realism

• Literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner.

• The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality.

• The mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillfull time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable.

Technoculture and hyperreality

• Simulations have replaced the real – it is not easy to distinguish reality and simulation of reality

• In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real.