Postmodern Techniques Research Articles

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Not only does Highway justify forgery, he also happily engages in plagiarism— in other words, intertextuality. He often quotes his “uncles,” including Juan Sánchez Baudrillard, Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, and other famous figures. These quotations shift the atmosphere of the text depending on the reader’s degree of familiarity with these authors, but they are playful enough for us not to get confused even if we don’t get the erudite allusions. Luiselli’s novel is not only for those initiated into postmodern theory. It is the result of meaningful engagement not only with literary giants but with the real world as well, an engagement that connects this otherwise lighthearted and elusive little book to the ground, injecting fresh blood into postmodern techniques. As Luiselli explains in her afterword, she was originally commissioned to write a work of fiction for the exhibition catalog of an art gallery that is funded by a juice factory. Instead, she decided to write a novel in installments , in collaboration with the workers of the factory, located in Ecatepec, outside Mexico City. The exposure of collaborative efforts involved in making this book would not be complete without making the translator ’s presence explicit. Luiselli’s translator , Christina MacSweeney, contributed a delightful timeline that is just as helpful as it is disorienting: besides giving signposts (political and literary events that took place during Highway’s lifetime), MacSweeney also added some random, insignificant events. Other insertions in the book include mottos by philosophers of language, aphorisms taken from Chinese fortune cookies, and a collection of photos of artwork as well as buildings and scenes in Ecatepec taken by factory workers. A fundamental openness and curiosity make Luiselli’s work fresh and exciting. She is serious in her engagement with art, literature, and society without being arrogant or sententious—she is part of all those games, and is happy to acknowledge it. The topic she explores—fiction enhancing the value of an object—is quite pertinent in an age when the fate of so many people depends on hyperbolic personal statements, résumés, or news items. Ágnes Orzóy Budapest Anthony Marra. The Tsar of Love and Techno. New York. Hogarth. 2015. 332 pages. After the signal achievement of Anthony Marra’s first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), one returns with pleasure to Chechnya and Russia for more memorable characters, conflicts, and absurdity. This time, from the Russian perspective, there is less fatality in the air than individual deaths and disappearances, understood well enough so that those who adapt quickly might survive. If one is clever , one can even maintain certain constancies behind a chameleon exterior. One functionary has “ascended to the rank of commissar by welcoming the lunacy the world so graciously handed him.” There is a deputy curator whose art museum has been destroyed, with its best paintings sent to Moscow, who keeps damaged paintings in his apartment. In his new position as tourist director, he restores Grozny, rated the most devastated in the world, by painting word-pictures of buildings that were once standing for Chinese tourists. Or the former art student, now a leading censor of photographs, carefully airbrushing out disgraced persons from historic pictures, sometimes extending background, sometimes replacing the face with an unknown or anonymous person. His constancy consists in the face he repeatedly inserts, his brother at various ages, an unknown man who was executed, supposedly for being too religious. Naïm Kattan Farida Norman Cornett & Antonio D’Alfonso, tr. Guernica Editions Naïm Kattan places his sensual and passionate love story in a situation rife with conflict in Iraq before the advent of World War II. Religious, political, and cultural clashes are juxtaposed with intense matters of the heart as Farida, a Jewish cabernet singer, embarks on an ardent, tortured romance complicated by jealousy and ambitions. Kattan’s simple yet lush prose, ably rendered by Norman Cornett and Antonio D’Alfonso, draws the reader into this compelling tale set in a unique environment. Philippe Jaccottet The Pilgrim’s Bowl (Giorgio Morandi) John Taylor, tr. Seagull Books Words, though imperfect and imprecise, allow Philippe Jaccottet to develop and explore his reactions to the artwork of Giorgio Morandi...

Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Tree: A Postmodern Analysis

In the age of technology, films have become the most popular form to convey the message of art. With this issue in mind, the present study has examined Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Tree (1994) from a postmodern perspective. The postmodern techniques used for this research are similar to those applied in literary studies. Through this investigation, it has been suggested that Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Tree has some common features with a postmodern novel. In this respect, both focus on the instability of meaning and the inadequacy of language to thoroughly exhibit the truth. Accordingly, Kiarostami has more focused on the process of filmmaking to convey his message. In conclusion, he has emphasized the significance of audiences’ involvement in a film by using postmodern techniques.

Hypertext of Duysebek Nakipov

In the given paper the aesthetic, stylistic, especially poetological features of D. Nakipov (famous Kazakh poetand writer) are studied, the main features of the author's discourse are also examined. They fit well within theparameters of postmodern literary techniques and style, for example: function codes and markers, symbolism,affectation syntax and quirky shapes, expressiveness and impressionism can be relegated. By analyzing theaesthetic component of the work, the characteristics of author discourse, conceptual characteristics and strategiesof the author, there is the conclusion that the novel of D. Nakipov is a sample of postemodern hypertext literaturein a new wave of Kazakhstan.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Grotesque Magical Realist Text

Since the 1960s magical realism has been a significant narrative mode used by postmodernist and postcolonial authors all over the world. Disregarding the conventional classical realism and its techniques, magical realist authors have used postmodernist techniques to achieve their postcolonial aims. Their attempts to find innovative techniques have resulted in embracing the Rabelaisian aesthetics and Bakthinian concerns in their works. Grotesque realism is considered a type of magical realism. Thanks to the embrace of the magical, the improbable and the profane, grotesque magical realist texts reflect a strong regenerative carnivalesque spirit and a general worldview in popular carnival forms. The most renowned exponent of magical realism from Latin America is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude , the Colombian author Garcia Marquez’s magnum opus, is generally regarded as the masterpiece of magical realism. One Hundred Years of Solitude employs carnivalesque-grotesque features and stands out for its carnivalesque spirit. To convey his message, Garcia Marquez mostly relies on Bakhtinian concerns such as folklore, folk laughter and carnivalesque. The aim of this study is to analyze the carnivalesque-grotesque features used in the novel and their contribution to Garcia Marquez’s meaning. Thus, this paper attempts to scrutinize One Hundred Years of Solitude as a grotesque magical realist text. Keywords: Gabriel Garcia Marquez; One Hundred Years of Solitude ; Grotesque Magical Realism; Carnivalesque-grotesque; Postcolonialism.

Apocalypse then: (altri) frammenti di impegno postmoderno tra fantascienza, humour ed ecologismo

This paper takes into account Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos (1985), Stefano Benni’s Terra! (1983), and the first volume (1979) of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as the expression of several social stances: distrust in the technological progress, antimilitarism, ecologism, critique of anthropocentrism. It tries to contextualize those themes in the light of their historical background; it shows, eventually, how those works’ projects rely on the peculiar devices of humour and postmodernist techniques.

Politics of Postmodern Multiculturalism in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival: Reconfiguring the Subject as a Nomad


 
 
 In Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), an intriguing 128-page wordless sequence of sepia-toned images marketed to audiences ranging from middle school-age children to adults,1 readers become visually engaged in the main character’s struggle to navigate a nameless constructed geographic space—an imaginary New World. Fleeing his serpent-infested Old World homeland and leaving behind two females usually interpreted as his wife and daughter,2 the migrant protagonist settles in a New World multi-ethnic community that seamlessly meshes elements of the real with the fantastic. Strange creatures jump out of familiar domestic objects, invented alphabets adorn the walls of a typical cityscape, and peculiar foods are served on the dining tables of an everyday household. As Tan suggests on his website in ‘Comments on The Arrival,’ such blending of the ordinary and the imaginary, together with the book’s genre merging, ‘plants the readers...in the shoes of an immigrant character’ (Tan 2009). Something like migrants, readers are positioned to leave behind common understandings in attempts to decipher the new society. I argue that the narrative strategies of defamiliarisation and genre blurring, in juxtaposition with the text’s deployment of further postmodern techniques (such as conflicting or mutually-exclusive symbolic referents), challenge constructions of the subject as a stable, coherent entity with a clear cultural and geographic affiliation, representing the empowerment of the ex-centric. Specifically, I show that The Arrival, as an example of a postmodern text engaged in the ontological enterprise of decentralisation, promotes the nomadic subject as defined by Rosi Braidotti —a fractured, polyvalent form of self not tied to a specific nation, place or ideology (Braidotti 1994). As such, the narrative encourages its readers to celebrate a consciousness that resists discriminatory normative practices, thus opening a space for traditionally disadvantaged subjects, such as immigrants.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

It should come as no surprise that the Wachowskis elected to adapt David Mitchell’s 2004 tour de force Cloud Atlas into a film. Like Mitchell’s works, the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix is a part of a contemporary trend in which artists and writers such as Angela Carter, Paul Auster, and Salman Rushdie engaged in postmodern discourse, themes, and techniques without necessarily subordinating itself their visions to a postmodern worldview. 1 Mitchell received an M.A. in 1987 from the University of Kent in comparative literature focusing on the postmodern novel, and his first three novels employ the themes and problematic tensions raised by the theory dominant during the rise of continental philosophy in Anglo-American graduate programs during the 1980s and 90s. 2 Cloud Atlas engages theory ranging from overt metafictional winks, such as Timothy Cavendish’s disapproving mockery of “flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices,” which “belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory” (150), to more subtle uses of popular postmodern metaphors apparently drawn from the theory, as when Henry Goose poisons Adam Ewing with a fake medicine, thereby literalizing Derrida’s riff in “Plato’s Pharmacy” on Socrates’s claim that writing is a pharmakon, a word that means both “cure” and “poison” (759). Like the theory it interrogates, such engagements necessarily front language, speech, and writing as central thematic concerns. Mitchell’s work is systematic in its logic, self-consciously employing a kind of neostructuralist aesthetic, wherein the novels enact a series of tensions that provide a formal structure, distinct from Levi-Straussian structuralism, insofar as the author is aware of the binaries as useful heuristics rather than as necessary universals. As Mitchell told Adam Begley concerning a later work, “Black Swan Green is carefully structured—like all halfway decent books” (“David Mitchell”) and this structure is essential to his project. In this essay, I will use Cloud Atlas as a case study to demonstrate how David Mitchell’s novels explore the problematics of language using a systematic binary logic, resisting the Derridean deconstruction made

Historical and Contemporary Schrifttanz: Rudolf Laban and Postmodern Choreography

Since the late twentieth century, script has been used as a tool for initiating the creation of dance. Likewise, in their compositional techniques, postmodern choreographers such as William Forsythe often refer to Rudolf Laban's space theory. This article discusses the points at which Laban's ideas about space are linked to postmodern compositional techniques, revisiting his concept of Schrifttanz and examining the spatial concepts that informed Tanzschriften, especially in the period before the development of Kinetographie.

Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film by Heidi Schlipphacke (review)

Reviewed by: Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film by Heidi Schlipphacke Jacqueline Vansant Heidi Schlipphacke, Nostalagia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2010. 312 pp. In Nostalgia After Nazism Heidi Schlipphacke skillfully draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories in addition to recent work on nostalgia to frame her discussion of select works by the Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Menasse, the German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, and the German writer Birgit Vanderbeke. Distinguishing between “Euro-American” postmodernisms and belated or displaced German-Austrian versions, Schlipphacke illustrates how these German and Austrian artists deploy postmodern techniques in a distinctive dialogue with their nation’s history and as a means of critiquing any desire to deny that history. The place or “nonplace” of nostalgia in their works also sets them apart from their European and American contemporaries. Since nostalgia has been seen as engendering forgetting, it might seem totally out of place in a literature that deals with the burden of a National Socialist past. However, Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia” offers Schlipphacke a useful interpretive tool. “As a reflective emotion” it “balances melancholy and mourning” (19) and preserves a sense of loss or longing, which disallows forgetting. Through what she sees as a dialectic of entrapment and escape, Schlipphacke shows how some of the artists find a way to introduce a productive nostalgia that is always shaped by the weight of the National Socialist past and its legacy. As this review is for the Journal of Austrian Studies, I concentrate my remarks on Schlipphacke’s insightful interpretations of the three Austrian writers. In her nuanced readings, she explores how each writer formally as well as thematically conducts a dialogue with the past. She also shows how both [End Page 115] Jelinek and Menasse are in a dialogue with Austria’s literary history. Moreover, Schlipphacke uncovers a progression in the work of the three writers from what she terms “displaced nostalgia” in Bachmann to a “performative entrapment” in Jelinek and “transnational nostalgia” in Menasse. In her reading of Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragment Franza (1966) Schlipphacke pays particular attention to intertextual references to the Victorian detective novel The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. She suggests that the textual irony adds a new dimension to the concepts of nostalgia and utopia that are explored in the text. While not denying Bachmann’s oversimplification of the victim/victimizer dichotomy, Schlipphacke explores how Bachmann’s allusions create moments of “displaced nostalgia.” The figure of Percival Glyde, a villain in the Victorian novel, appears as an idealized father figure for the narrator in Franza. Franza associates her memories of him with the immediate postwar years and with “moments of the magic of alterity and hope” (51). However, the intertextual reference to Glyde, a sadist in Collins’s novel, and her later reunion with Glyde, who doesn’t remember her, ironize the memories and the nostalgic gesture. In the chapter on Jelinek, Schlipphacke uncovers an aesthetic in the writer’s work that precludes any space for nostalgia or affect. Stylistically, Jelinek repeatedly performs a type of entrapment “tied to history and to a fixation with erasing historical forgetting” (81) that suggests the inevitability of the return of Austria’s National Socialist past in some form. Schlipphacke also discusses the untranslatability of Jelinek’s works. Using Die Klavierspielerin (1983) as an example, she effectively argues that the difficulty of translating Jelinek’s syntax and language, her use of citation and neologisms, and the failure of some critics to understand or consider the cultural context have led to misreadings abroad. Seeing the novel as the product of a “disturbed” mind or “pornography,” American and British critics fail to see the implied critique of fascism. Schlipphacke also compares the novel to Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001). She points out how the filmmaker removes “the national and historical concerns” and endows the figures with a “level of interiority absent in the novel,” giving the personal relationship a depth not in the novel (119). Schlipphacke also refers to Jelinek’s indebtedness to Bachmann and illustrates how the roles in Bachmann...

English

The paper offers a postmodernist reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to verify the long-debated premise that postmodernism really departs from and even challenges the modernist philosophy. The state of epistemological skepticism that throws its shadows on our cognitive apparatus challenges the rationalist ideals; and the state of ontological uncertainty – both intratextually and extratextually – questions the claims of modernism as far as homogeneity, sound meaning and credible representation of the world are concerned. The focal point of this paper is examining Vonnegut’s concretization of the postmodernist theory in writing “an anti-war book” based on his personal experience as a prisoner of war in the second world war. Vonnegut has attempted to blend this serious theme in Slaughterhouse-Five with science fiction and humor. Through the choice of his protagonist – Billy Pilgrim – and the manipulation of various postmodernist techniques, Vonnegut exposes the atrocities of wars by uncovering the heroic facade by which nations mask their real intentions in launching wars, and manifests the moral vacuum that characterizes postwar western societies. Key words: Postmodernism, American novel, anti-war literature, Vonnegut.

Fragment of a Case of Posthysteria: D’or Owns the Jewel

A major radical transformation from nineteenth-century hysteric to twenty-first-century posthysteric is a transformation in discourse and, of course, in agency embedded in that discourse. In this narration Dora becomes posthysteric D'Or. The French meaning of name is golden. Freud gave his star hysteric name of his sister's maidservant, Dora (O'Neill 80). Lacan refers to Dora and two other hysterical patients as mouths of for knowledge Freud gathered from them (Lacan XVII 99). It is said of name that: People with this name tend to initiate events, to be leaders rather than followers, with powerful personalities. They tend to be focused on specific goals, experience a wealth of creative new ideas, and have ability to implement these ideas with efficiency and determination. They tend to be courageous and sometimes aggressive. As unique, creative individuals, they tend to resent authority, and are sometimes stubborn, proud, and impatient. (www.sheknows.com/babynames/name/d'or) The name alteration indicates that posthysteric has gone beyond hysteric's positioning as a servant to Freud and psychoanalysis: in nineteenth century, tracks of psychoanalysis were laid on back of hysteric. In twenty-first century posthysteric drives a gold spike through these tracks and in so doing reroutes way and destination. In name alteration, missing a that changes Dora to is a of object a, truth position in Lacan's famous four discourses. Object a is embodied in as agent who occupies discourse positions of Master S1, Analyst a, and University S2, in addition to position of Hysteric $. This, of course, changes agent position of barred subject $ of hysteric to posthysteric position that blends structural positions of truth/agent/production/other into a new agency that can be written as a-$-S2-S1 and a new discourse: Discourse of Posthysteric. In presenting case of I take my utterances regarding case and assertion of my interpreted scenarios as reality; this is to say that what I in dominant position of Master ([s.sub.1]) detail about in subsection 4, Eighteen year old D'or, is presented as objective fact and I refuse to acknowledge that scenarios derived are constructed. I in position analyst (a) in subsection 5, D'or Owns Jewel: and Female Ejaculatory Agency, re-member is accomplished through postmodern techniques of queering and speed; what I in dominant position of Knowledge (S2) in subsection 5 reveal is techne of female ejaculation; and, what I in dominant position of posthysteric ($) bring forth in subsections 4 and 5 is an ownership of female phallus by providing blade for hysteric's double-edged sword questions: What is female organ? What is it to be a woman? (Lacan III 171). It is additional third question that asks, How to [female] ejaculate?, which reworks hysteric's two questions and in so doing not only brings the master to heel (Lacan XVIII, X, 11), which hysteric was capable of doing, but also brings psychoanalysis to its knees. A Matheme in which hysteric $/S1/S2/a becomes posthysteric a-$-S2-S1 This subsection sets out 1) formal structure of Lacan's Four Discourses, paying particular attention to vectors or arrows of circuit, 2) matheme of Lacan's Discourse of Hysteric, and 3) my matheme of Discourse of Posthysteric. Formal Structure (Lacan XX 17 and Lacan, Milan Lecture) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The one speaking, agent, addresses herself to other (arrow 1) from truth sustaining speaker agent (arrow 2). The truth through symptoms of daily life (slips of tongue, faulty actions) and also pathological symptoms addresses itself indirectly to other (arrow 3). …

"Let loose the dogs": Messiness and Ethical Wrangling in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

As Toni Morrison's 1981 novel, Tar Baby, draws to a close and the tension between the central characters, Jadine and Son, reaches its peak, the omniscient narration voices the questions that Morrison's readers have been grappling with since the novel's opening pages: One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing? (269). Much of the initial critical conversation concerning Tar Baby revolves around efforts to determine where the reader's sentiments should lie. Are we to sympathize with Son, a sensitive man deeply attuned to his ancient properties, whose concern with black folk values, community, and ancestral heritage are primary to his personal identity?1 Or, are we to invest in Jadine, the highly educated black model-the epitome of colonized beauty-who all but rejects her heritage and ancestry as incompatible with the fast-paced, modern, lifestyle that she associates with success? The conflicting forces at work within Tar Baby are, indeed, complex and frustrating. The novel's conclusion-in which Jadine returns to Paris, ostensibly to resume her glamorous lifestyle while Son runs, lickety-split, away with the mythic blind and naked horsemen on the Isle des Chevaliers-provides no definitive answers (306). The fates of Son and Jadine do not satisfy the desire for a final statement about the possibility (or lack thereof) for reconciliation between modern expectations of Western sophistication and black cultural tradition. However, the call for a clear resolution to the novel is reductive. Toni Morrison's postmodern technique is such that it never resolves.2 Rather, she consistently pushes her reader toward further ethical wrangling, insisting upon the reader's obligation to struggle with the moral issues at hand.3 With this in mind, Jadine may not only be read as exemplary of the challenges to black identity in a post civil rights moment of racial arrival-in which civil rights such as equity and equality in the work force, education, etc. are advertised and celebrated as having been completely attained-but she also allows Morrison to confront notions of racial that have been historically, and still remain, prominent within the African American community. It seems as though Jadine's final departure to Europe indicates a choice of selfishness and therein racial betrayal. However, selfishness is valenced throughout the novel in such a way that it requires Jadine and Morrison's readers to question whether selfishness in the name of autonomous selfhood is, in fact, synonymous with out. This disorienting contradiction allows Morrison to direct both Jadine's and her reader's continued ethical examination toward issues of racial and cultural re-approachment as opposed to reading Jadine's departure to Europe as definitive racial betrayal.Randall Kennedy closely explores the notion of the in contemporary Black America. He not only examines what it means to sell out, but also challenges common accusations of doing so in the name of achievement in the late twentieth century. Certain occupations, and certain requirements of some occupations, prompt accusations of selling out (64). Perhaps the greatest problem with the use of sellout rhetoric involves determining what constitutes the best interest of blacks and the best means for achieving controversial goals (72). Thus, in some situations, allegations of selling out are less than clearly defined. Taking care to note that Sellout rhetoric and its concomitant attitudes, gestures, and strategies can prompt excessive self-censorship, truncate needed debate, and nurture demagoguery, Kennedy calls for the maintenance of a black solidarity that regulates sellout rhetoric in such a way that stimulates a certain thoughtful consideration of racial betrayal (84). In Tar Baby Morrison signals a similar ethical dilemma, refusing to position Jadine definitively as a sellout. …

Joyce the Postmodernist: A Glance at Finnegans Wake

Postmodernism criticizes metanarratives. Modern metanarratives including Enlightenment, Hegelianism, and Marxism present general claims about knowledge and truth. Under postmodern condition metanarratives are damageable, criticizable, and finally negligible. In this essay metanarratives are explained and the incredulity towards them is traced. In Finnegans Wake, which is under postmodern condition, metanarratives are targets of Joyce's parody. In this novel, religion is bitterly criticized, Enlightenment is mocked, and Hegelianism and Marxism are disfigured. Joyce shows his incredulity towards metanarratives and employs postmodernist techniques. Finnegans Wake's world is postmodern.

Cut, Layer, Break, Fold: Fashioning Gendered Difference, 1970s to the Present

Cut, Layer, Break, Fold:Fashioning Gendered Difference, 1970s to the Present Shehnaz Suterwalla (bio) Create glitches, gashes, ruptures, punctures, gaps, edges.Disrupt the smooth operation that creates linear narrative.Stop the smooth flow of history.Revel in the fracture.Tear at the seams.Stare at the seam.Fetishize the seam. Become fascinated with the seam. —Rosetta Brooks, "Rip It Up, Cut it Off, Rend It Asunder" Countercultural dress that has used the body as the critical site of resistance since the 1960s has refashioned the personal and the political as well as the personal as the political.1 In particular it is through style as antifashion, as a rebuke to the fashion system, that evidence of the productive operations of dress in creating difference becomes pronounced (Wilson 1985; Polhemus 1994). Oppositional dress has challenged power hierarchies to expose issues of class, race, and gender, of history itself (Styles 1998; Hall and Jefferson 1976; Partington 1992). The way in which alternative or oppositional style has subverted traditional identities and politics has been heavily theorized (Hebdige 1979; Hall and Jefferson 1976), yet its meanings remain ever open to interpretation, to contradiction. Attempts were pioneered by subcultural theory, especially the scholarship coming from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in the 1970s, to decipher the codes of subcultural behavior and dress through sociological, textual, and semiotic analysis. [End Page 267] Despite their groundbreaking role, these soon drew heavy criticism for their antimaterialist position that tended to ignore subjectivity. The CCCS's approach had failed to empirically study the groups it sought to explain, claimed its critics.2 A new wave rejected the Marxist/class-based frameworks that ignored race and gender and seemed to create a self-referential, looping reification of the concept of subculture (Muggleton 2000; Gilroy 1993; McRobbie 1991). Critics called for an about-face. They rejected homogenous interpretations of groups. Instead, they prioritized the participant's view in subcultural quests for authenticity and paid attention to the individualistic, fragmented, and heterogeneous natures of subcultures (Muggleton 2000; Rose 1994; Grossberg 1992). Within these reconceptualizations it was for some the overemphasis on style that troubled. For scholars like David Muggleton (2000), postmodern views of subcultures highlighted individualism as opposed to group affiliation. The worry was that overemphasizing style fetishizes material culture and its consumption as indispensible dimensions of youth culture. My emphasis, however, is particularly on style in an analysis exploring how British women from subcultural and alternative groups since the 1970s have used style to resist mainstream ideals of femininity in subjective articulations of identity. I examine the postmodern techniques of subcultural style, such as do-it-yourself, cut-and-paste, bricolage, appropriation, parody and sign entropy, the raiding of fashion history. However I present a post-postmodern analysis that moves beyond postmodern theory's focus on image and spectacle, on surface, on hyperreality in commercial culture and mass media to locate behavior in situated bodily practice. The theory of the 1980s determined postmodernism in terms of "a whole pornography of information and communication" (Baudrillard 1985, 130), with the world becoming oversaturated with images. Reality and representation had therefore become impossible to tell apart. In fact in postmodernism's cut-and-paste techniques that layered image upon image, reality had become, according to Hebdige, "as thin as the paper it is printed on" (1988, 159). Within this situation the subject, in Jean Baudrillard's view, "becomes a pure screen, a pure absorption and re-absorption surface of the influent networks" (1988, 27). In other words an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an entity influenced by media, technology and the hyperreal. My analysis differs from this perspective by prioritizing embodiment. It is from the point of view of lived reality that I explore in this essay how [End Page 268] gender is manipulated and how gendered realities and women's politics of location have an impact on the way that style is embodied as gendered. Just as theorist Michel de Certeau problematized how tactics in everyday practice can become "clever tricks of the 'weak' within the order established by the 'strong,' an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf" (1984, 40...

Going Back to One’s Roots: The Revival of Oral Storytelling Techniques in The English Contemporary Novel

Abstract My paper examines the interplay between the sophisticated postmodernist techniques of intertextuality, parody, metafiction and a return to orality or better said of pseudo-orality, a simulated-oral discourse or what the Russian Formalists called “skaz”, brought about by much postcolonial, ethnic or feminist literature.

Maurice Gee’s Brilliant Borrowings of Maurice Gee and Significant Others: Realism and Postmodernism in Gee’s Books for Children and Adults

This paper examines the work of one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed writers, Maurice Gee, and the use of his children’s fiction as an experimental ground for postmodernist techniques further developed in his writing for adults. In particular, it considers Gee’s borrowings of his own and others’ non-fictional and fictional material, to produce richly literary, historical novels. The paper argues that realist and postmodernist features are woven into the children’s and adult books, but that the balance is differently skewed in each. It thus addresses an area largely atypical of the children’s novel, but one that should be of concern to children’s literature critics.

Recycling - A Contemporary Identity of The Past

When postmodernism decreed that art has lost originality and can only be repetitious as well as that it should change perspective from the external reality to the text, writers began focusing on previously written texts as the core subject matter of their work. From this point of view, focus is placed on recycling, seen as a postmodern technique used to construct a new identity for the past under its different forms - as history, as writers and as text(s). Thus, the past is integrated into contemporaneity while constantly being reshaped by the many contemporary novels that look back on writers, novels and literary movements belonging to the past. Moreover, this dynamic and multifaceted dialogue between contemporary novels and past ones is also considered a means of providing the latter with historical continuity (by bringing them into the attention of contemporaneity) and the former with perspectives of canonical inclusion.

Personal Entropy and the Satiric “Incorporation” of Characters in William Gaddis's JR

The twenty-year division separating William Gaddis's first encyclopedic fiction, The Recognitions (1955), and his subsequent novel, JR (1975), did little to diminish the writer's concern with the depiction of fragmented literary figures as representations for a prevailing human loss of self. But the experimental form of JR foregrounds fragmentation as a method of narrative discourse, making the novel's characters appear more severely dislocated than even The Recognitions's partial selves. As postmodern technique, however, Gaddis appropriates fragmentation in JR for an underlying neohumanistic purpose: to satirize the members of a corporate society proves the best means to their potential redemption, or at least returned wholeness.

A Lie of Omission: Plagiarism in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

A Lie of Omission:Plagiarism in Nella Larsen's Quicksand Erika Renée Williams (bio) Nella Larsen, one of the Harlem Renaissance's most critically acclaimed writers, had authored two novels, Quicksand (1928), and Passing (1929), when her short story "Sanctuary" called into question her legitimacy as an author. Purportedly, her story, which appeared in the January 1930 issue of Forum, too greatly resembled one by Sheila Kaye-Smith, which had been published in the January 1922 issue of Century. Larsen was supported by her publishers, to whom she provided the four detailed drafts of her manuscript believed to confirm her innocence. Yet as many critics have noted, the shadow of criminality haunted her and likely hastened the demise of her literary career: she published nothing after the controversy. The probability that Larsen borrowed from Sheila Kaye-Smith has been well documented, but I have discovered another instance of plagiarism by Larsen: her nearly verbatim copying from the opening passage of John Galsworthy's short story "The First and the Last," in order to formulate the opening passage of her novel Quicksand.1 In some of the most recent analyses of Larsen's copying from Kaye-Smith's story, her textual appropriation has been recast as something other than plagiarism— namely, a kind of aesthetic innovation.2 Such defenses of Larsen and her plagiarism implicitly contribute to a prevalent critical discourse that plagiarism in general no longer proves viable in the wake of postmodernism's deconstruction of conventional authorship.3 In contrast, I believe that no rhetoric of formalist innovation can mitigate the error of an author's verbatim copying from another author, especially when it involves pointed linguistic echoes. Indeed, as I will go on to detail, Larsen's appropriation of Galsworthy's text is too liberal—and too literal—to constitute a successful literary adaptation or allusion—especially when placed in the context of her capacity for genuine allusion that did not involve verbatim linguistic repetition. Moreover, there is trouble to be gleaned from the fact that Larsen's appropriation of Galsworthy appears as a secret to unearth and not a treasure to cull, as Larsen neither cited Galsworthy as a source, nor signaled her invocation of him in any palpable way. Although it was a known fact that the Harlem Renaissance writer admired the Edwardian author, who first came to the American literary scene as a playwright and is best known for The Forsyte Saga, the extent of Larsen's admiration for and emulation of Galsworthy is perhaps greater than what has previously been understood. Indeed, my desire to posit a fuller history of Larsen drives me—despite misgivings and regret about revealing a second instance in which she likely plagiarized a text—to proceed with such delicate and potentially damning information about an author whose contributions to African American literature I continue to cherish. I am compelled to disclose as well as analyze what I learned about Larsen for a number of reasons. First, I think it germane as a matter of literary history—especially given that my discovery of another instance of plagiarism by Larsen troubles the recent inclination to read Larsen as a misunderstood practitioner of inter-textual poetics. It suggests a pattern of unattributed borrowing on Larsen's part. Indeed, as scholars and critics of Larsen, we benefit from having the fullest possible picture of this complicated author and her body of work, even if that picture disturbs us. Second, as I have said, I resist the claim of some contemporary theory that postmodernism's disavowal of the sovereign text precludes all charges of plagiarism. [End Page 205] In fact, the plagiarist, by obfuscating some of the history of her own text, actually denies the diverse sources that furnish the proof of its multivalent nature. The high modernist and postmodernist techniques of pastiche and inter-textual allusion call forth the reader's recognition of them, and also rely upon a critical delineation of the aesthetic protocols by which they might be legitimately employed by an author. In contrast, the plagiarist's illicit and derivative use of source texts exploits her fellow authors by enacting violence upon their texts, whose fragments she lifts only...

Recycling History and Assembling Counter-Histories of the Shamsi Community in M.G. Vassanji'sThe Gunny SackandThe Book of Secrets

History pursued and interpreted through anecdotes is counter-history. Fictional narratives juxtaposed with historical facts succeed in delivering embedded and hitherto concealed records. This is indeed one of the recent postmodern and new historical techniques assimilated for creating the archives of counter-historical narratives from individual and collective memories. The fictional instances limned in Vassanji's works synchronise well enough with the factual events to describe the backdrop and contextual information for imaginary domains.