Postmodern Reading Research Articles

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad in the Time of the COVID-19: A Postmodern Reading

The study explores how Ahmed Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) could be related to the time of COVID-19 through a postmodern lens focusing on post-war issues. The study aims at exploring Saadawi’s characters who are used by the writer to represent post-war issues in Iraq. The characters suffer from a kind of hallucination and depression as seen in both their behavior and their routine, everyday lives. They show how their life has no meaning and aim. All this is symbolized by the monster which itself is only the creation of the minds of these depressed people. The study shows how people, who are suffering from postwar issues can also resemble people suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic. The hallucinations of Saadawi’s characters resemble those of real-life people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the paper tries to explore how Saadawi’s characters resemble humanity in the time of COVID-19. In general, little research has been conducted on the postwar issues represented in Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad, and how the characters themselves in the novel could represent humanity in post-pandemic times. The paper’s contribution is to fill the gaps of the previously made points.

“숙흥야매잠도” 퇴계 독서법의 창조적 계승

The reading method that he proposed in Sukheungyamaejamdo is a psychological reading method, in a word, to figure out the author's intention accurately. Figuring out the intention of an author that wrote a classical text means a reader understanding the truth that the author learned by reading the text. Toigye's psychological reading method is, however, very exclusive and singular and can hardly be accepted as a postmodern reading method to allow readers to interpret a text actively. If Toigye's exclusive and singular reading method is supplemented anew with an open and plural reading method, it will hold enough value to be inherited among modern readers. The most essential content of his psychological reading method that should be supplemented in an open and plural viewpoint is to recognize the structural system of a text and the diversity of encounters and conversations between texts and readers. If Toigye's reading method undergoes this procedure, it will still be valid today.

A postmodernist reading of the Epic Sci-Fi poetry, Adventures of Two captains

Among the works that consider political and social narratives, one can refer to the book "The Adventures of Two Captains," which also represents a kind of postmodern exploration. This work is intertwined with literary techniques, which is one of its prominent features, and serves as a bridge between science fiction stories, utopianism, and critical theories of international relations. However, it should be stated that the mentioned book aims at deconstructing modernist approaches to literature and the power structures that are used while defining global politics. The authors of this work, Elias Aghili and Paul John Amrod, while using epic storytelling intertwined with dystopian and utopian elements, have also used rich literary traditions from both Eastern and Western cultures in this direction. In this regard, this review analyzes the impact of the book on postmodernist discourse, exploring its noted literary techniques and broader thematic issues, especially its critique of power, identity, and narrative in terms of international relations.

The Examination of Stuart Hall’s Postcolonial Perspective on Displacement and Identity Discontinuity in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove (2007).

Displacement is a key concept in postcolonial Diaspora literature that interprets the transition from the motherland, native culture, traditions, and native language to a different setting. Such geographical, cultural and psychological transitions result in an identity crisis, fragmentation and discontinuity. The objective of this study is to investigate, in Fadia Faqir's The Cry of the Dove, the process of identity development amid displacement of a female Arab Muslim in a postcolonial setting. Using Stuart Hall's theory of Cultural Identity and Diaspora, this article applies a postmodern reading on the novel to discern how displacement affects the identity of the main protagonist Salma. Hence, Salma experiences a series of encounters following her transition from her original space to a new one that results in an identity crisis characterised by fragmentation, sense of alienation and uncertainty. In a postmodernist Stuart Hallian sense, Fadia Faqir’s female protagonist suffers from an existentialist, discontinuous identity characterized by skepticism, uncertainty, fragmentation and paradox, following a journey of physical and psychological displacement.

Critical Disability Studies, Corporeality and Child Maltreatment: Theorising the Somatechnics of Self and Other

This paper presents a bespoke postmodern reading of the corporeality and somatechnics of self and other. It situates itself within the transformative transdisciplinary space of critical disability studies. Therein, it reflects upon the speculative boundaries between self and other, in the context of childhood disability and child maltreatment. As such, how the intervals and convergent space of self and other are engendered by technologies and techniques that both safeguard and endanger disabled children, is interrogated with classic postmodern scepticism. The context is, that international evidence places the prevalence of child abuse and neglect at significantly increased levels for disabled children. This is an enduring international problem in which disabled children continue to experience rates of abuse and neglect that far surpass those for non-disabled peers. Concurrently, safeguarding efforts are undermined in ways that are grossly dissimilar to majority population peers, including significant problems in the way that disability is conceptualised and understood. Selective reading of somatic and corporeal, as well as agentic and attitudinal dimensions of the problem, hinge on the theoretical binary of self and other. The intention is to broaden the ways in which the significant problem of safeguarding of disabled children is understood. Assistive technology, surveillance techniques and temporalities, and varied relational technics of safeguarding, all help to embed a more complicated understanding of disability and child maltreatment.

The centre and pathology: Postmodernist reading of madness in the oppressor in contemporary fiction

The centre and pathology: Postmodernist reading of madness in the oppressor in contemporary fiction

The Simpsons: A Postmodern Reading for the Position of an American Family

With analysing The Simpsons, the following paper aims at clarifying the ideology of postmodernity and how this literary work exposes and confronts them. The paper analyses the text according to the postmodern techniques and strategie; intertextuality, hyper-reality, and fragmentation. The Simpsons, a popular cartoon comedy in the USA and worldwide, is intended to show the values of damaged American families. The Simpsons’ postmodern techniques have established it as one of the most significant shows. Throughout The Simpsons, readers get to see a variety of characters. This work shows essentially every element of North American society. Finally, almost anybody who has viewed The Simpson the least once in his\her life will find that it presents predictions which have received the corresponding traction. The Simpsons has become a routine dependency on subconsciously predicting actual events.

Technoculture and the Propaganda: A Postmodern Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This paper examines the role of technology in spreading propaganda through a postmodern lens, by studying Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. Drawing from postmodern theory the paper argues that technology has become a powerful tool for propaganda dissemination and manipulation, and that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction in the media-saturated environment. Through an analysis of the novel’s depiction of a dystopian future society where technology is used to control and manipulate the masses.

Postmodern intertextuality: Teachers' perceptions about the challenges and implications for EFL learners in literary texts analysis

The purpose of this study was to understand postmodern Intertextual perceptions of college-level teachers, the contribution of Intertextuality in comprehending a literary piece of work, and certain challenges facing Saudi EFL learners in meaning construction during the reading process examined in this research. The subjects were five professional teachers from two different colleges who were interviewed in a certain time framework. The researcher analyzed the teachers’ personal experiences, explanations about postmodern reading intertextuality, and its intricacies in learners’ comprehension emerged as dominant themes. The findings show that during teachers’ semi-structured interviews, their meanings, and contents indicated that cultural background, lack of intertextual awareness, stereotype approach, and lack of postmodern literary knowledge can provide impediments in textual analysis and interpretation. Further research is needed to explore more avenues in postmodern intertextual areas and to look into viewing intertextuality from deeper perspectives.
 Keywords: Canterbury tales; English teachers; intertextuality; pastiche; postmodernism

Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

“Tokyo Cancelled” A Postmodern Reading of Rana Dasgupta: A Review

Tokyo Cancelled, the debut text of the award-winning author Rana Dasgupta, who also won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for his brilliant second novel Solo (2009), seeks to connect the contemporary techno-cultural world and the eerie world of myth, fantasy, magic, and imagination. Dasgupta chooses new ways of representing the world with his postmodernist experimentation Tokyo Cancelled as he continues to do in Solo as well. In a contemporary anonymous international airport, Dasgupta makes thirteen stranded passengers tell thirteen stories which in turn transport the reader to the realms of magic and fantasy. While rejecting the conventional mode of narration, and going away from the traditional concepts, Dasgupta creates a pastiche of postmodern events, occurrences, events, and characters. The author celebrates the elements of irony, paranoia, fragmentation, parody, dark humour, magic realism, and techno-culture which hold the very essence of a postmodern society and its habitants. This paper, thus, from a postmodern perspective, attempts to analyze the contemporizing of the fantastic elements existent in the text Tokyo Cancelled.

The Tempest: A Postmodern Reading

The works of William Shakespeare have a universal influence and are considered representatives of all times and all ages. Critics, scholars, academics, and students have been rereading, reexamining, retelling, and restaging his plays century after century. This dissertation proposes to examine The Tempest as a postmodern text. The postmodern elements: ant-formality, pastiche, intertextuality, paranoia, irony, playfulness, puns, wordplays, conspiracy theories, temporal distortion, and supernatural elements, create an atmosphere in The Tempest, which can be described as postmodern. Focusing on Ihab Hassan and Brian McHale's definition and characterization of postmodernism which have created an opportunity to have a postmodern approach to The Tempest, this paper illustrates how Shakespeare deconstructs the formal properties of the text and uses pastiche that projects a postmodern connotation of the play. The dissertation also explores the religious, mythological, geographical, and historical references of characters and their names, events, incidents, locations, and places that construct intertextuality and insert paranoia into the play. In identifying postmodernist elements— particularly the presence of a supernatural and dreamy world—this paper examines binaries: natural vs. supernatural and reality vs. dream, which are pivotal postmodern concepts. Based on Foucault's The Eye of Power, the study also discovers the Panoptical Gaze of Prospero, who has assigned Ariel—as surveillance to keep an eye on everybody and everything on the island. Finally, this paper aims to reread The Tempest—as a postmodern text.

Wagar and Motley “Archaic” Vestiges: A Postmodernist Reading of Contemporary Somali Fiction

The advent of the modernist dream resulted in the universalisation of culture, which entails deliberate effort to abandon traditional ways of life that foster difference and instead embracing national cultures to bring different communities together. Colonialism in the Horn of Africa, for instance, brought different Cushitic communities under single political entities and most of them adopted Islam to find a common ground. Other communities in East Africa had to convert to Christianity to find a universal cultural bridge. This has resulted in the assumption that most African peoples are homogeneous given that past traditions that elevated difference have been eradicated by unifying factors such as modern states and conventional religions such as Islam and Christianity. A critical reading of some literary texts, however, demonstrates that such claims are partly unfounded because there exist aspects of pre-Islamic Somali religion along with the fundamental beliefs of Islam, which bolster difference. This article is a postmodernist reading of selected contemporary Somali fiction to investigate the influence of pre-Islamic Somali religion on contemporary Somali culture. Using the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Joseph Campbell, the study demonstrates the impact of myth and the ancient traditions on migration and contemporary culture in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy and Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets.

A Genetic Interpretation of the Preface of The Genealogy of Morals

Traditional interpretations of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (GM) argue that the work is a treatise on, or a straightforward account of, Nietzsche’s moral thinking. This is typically contrasted with what has become known as the postmodern reading, which holds that the core of GM is an attack on the very notion of the truth itself. These two interpretations are often taken to be non-coextensive and mutually exclusive. However, I argue, using a genetic form of argumentation that tracks the development of the text through archival evidence, that both are partially correct, since Nietzsche sees all fundamental problems hitherto as moral questions in service of the ascetic ideal and the will to truth. According to Nietzsche, all the hitherto fundamental questions of philosophy are not value-free but are deeply value-laden. To put this more precisely, Nietzsche rejects the fact-value distinction itself. Questions of morality are not separable from epistemology, questions of epistemology are not separable from morality, and both subjects have worked in service of the ascetic ideal. Further, I provide new evidence on the debate about the counter-ideal to the ascetic ideal. I claim that Amor Fati embodies that ideal. I argue for this using a section from the preface that was added but then removed. This section was removed because it gave away the conclusion of the work, that all fundamental problems, including questions of truth, are based on moral prejudices.

El martirio como forma narrativa, signo, y mito en Cóndores no entierran todos los días y Estaba la pájara pinta sentada en el verde limón

The genesis of the fictions of Gustavo Álvarez and Albalucía Ángel is demarcated in ‘el 9 de abril’, name given to the social outburst that occurs in Colombia after the magnicide of the politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1948). The notion of martyrdom is assimilated in the literary works as a sign and a myth to depict the disproportion of violence under the frame of the bipartisan conflict. In the fictions martyrdom is implemented as a narrative device and an artefact to revisit the past and reflect on the nation. By adopting postmodernist readings in fields such as ‘biopolitics’, cultural sociology, and concepts like ‘culture hybridity’ proposed by Homi Bhabha, we find that disfigurations of original Christian myths take place in the fictions with a subversive purpose. Although modern martyrdom is rooted in Christianity, the phenomenon erases the borders between politics and religion, given that its secularization is manifested through social movements and the cultural construction that rises around the martyr. Nowadays, ‘el 9 de abril’ not only commemorates the magnicide, but it has established itself as a National Civic Day to pay homage to all the victims of the armed conflict.

Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel

Gina Apostol is a Philippine-American writer whose novel, Insurrecto, gives important insights into the political fictions of colonialism and the nation-state. Using postmodern readings of metafiction and historiographic metafiction, as well as postcolonial readings of hybridity and postcolonial doubles, this paper will unearth the political fictions that were used by the United States in rationalizing the Philippine-American War, and the political fictions used by the Philippines in rationalizing extrajudicial killings. This paper follows the argumentation of Ania Loomba, who argues that nation-states have used the same violence as those used by colonizing powers, and that after the colonizing powers left, the nation-state excluded and silenced marginal peoples. Philippine-American Literature distinguishes itself against Asian-American Literature because it discusses the Philippine colonial experience under the U.S., lending itself to important reflections regarding hybridity, historiography, and solidarity. This paper will use the postmodern theories of Patricia Waugh when it comes to metafiction, Linda Hutcheon’s and Michel Foucault’s theories regarding historiographic metafiction and suprahistorical history, and the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldua regarding hybridity.

Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

A Postmodern Reading of Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This paper explores Ron Hansen''s demystification of the Old West and its (demystification''s) relation with the present culture of America that situates the discourse of the author in historical contexts. It focuses how Ron Hansen rereads past historical events related to Jesse James and his contemporaries and how his new understanding of the West functions as a strategy to grasp the historical continuity between past culture and present culture. This paper wants to suggest how we can position his discourse in our postmodern socio-literary contexts established historically. The representation of the West Ron Hansen presents is a historical discourse that rereads and rewrites part of American history. It resists the ideology of the existing discourses that have (re)constructed the mystification of the West and Jesse James; his method of demystification persistently decodes the structure of dominant socio-cultural discourses that are (re)produced, circulated and operated in American commercial culture, which has mystified the West and the Jesse James gang romantically. Ron Hansen''s narrative is polysemous. It has a possibility that the text can be endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted by the reader. This possibility comes from Ron Hansen''s literary ability of contextualizing the text that interrogates the mystification of the West with discursive practices that represent history. (Chungnam National University)

Representing the Incomprehensible

Criticism of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (2015) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) can be divided into two mainstream interpretations. On the one hand, they are both marked as psychic trauma texts. Herr’s writing of Dispatches can be read as a therapeutic process that allows him to deal with his trauma experienced as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. The intimate and domestic trauma in DeLillo’s Falling Man focuses on the disconnected lives of a couple and their child in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. On the other hand, critics have aligned each text with the national trauma narrative. This article aligns itself with the latter interpretation. I propose, through a postmodern reading, that the national trauma narrated in both Dispatches and Falling Man is an example of Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxix). I argue that both texts represent the failure of the metanarrative of American Exceptionalism; the ideology that defines the essence of America as the embodiment of “supremacy” and “power”. Narrative fails in each text when the nature of each conflict deconstructs this metanarrative of national identity. This deconstruction arises from the way conflict appears to alienate Herr as author, and DeLillo’s characters from preconceived notions of knowledge. As a result of this, both authors explore the fictive nature of the human condition to present the national trauma caused by each conflict.

Прецедентные имена в постмодернистском дискурсе Б. Вербера: коммуникативный аспект

This article reveals the peculiarities of the use of precedent names in the novels "Empire of Angels", "The Breath of the Gods" and "The Last Secret" by the contemporary French writer Bernard Werber. The communicative aspect is traced in the interaction of the cosmopolitan postmodern worldview of different peoples. Particular attention is paid to myths and the postmodern reading of ancient Greek myths in the author's works. The phenomenon of "speaking names" is also examined and their use in some works of French literature is traced.