Postmodern Traits Research Articles

Postmodern Elements in Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira (1988)

Purpose of the Study: This research paper intends to unravel and examine the postmodern elements in Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s anime film Akira (1988). This paper aims to analyze and critically study the postmodern elements as evident in the film and add more knowledge to the existing critical studies available on the film.
 Methodology: The primary text for this research is Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s anime film Akira (1988). Close textual analysis has been applied to analyze the text in view of the characteristics of postmodernism. The text is read in terms of postmodernism’s traits.
 Main Findings: Akira symbolically summarizes thoughts, ideas, and movements in post-WWII Japan. The film references many disaster texts from the repertoire of Japanese literature, cinema, and popular culture. The film exemplifies many postmodern traits such as discontinuity, pastiche, schizophrenia, hyperreality, cyberpunk, posthumanism, the cyborg et cetera.
 Application of the Study: This study will be beneficial to those who are pursuing research on anime and manga studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and postmodernism. Furthermore, this research will add more knowledge to the existing literature available on this anime film.
 Novelty/Originality of the Study: Ōtomo’s film Akira has evoked critical studies from a variety of critics and disciplines. However, a broader critical overview of the film’s postmodernism has always been lacking in the critical studies available on the film. Moreover, some specific issues such as posthumanism, the cyborg, postmodern paradoxes, glocalization et cetera have been overlooked by the critics. Therefore, this study will try to fill in the gaps of the previous studies.

Symbolic field of modern Islamism

The subject of this research is the key topoi of the discourse of Islamist propaganda and the mechanism of their representation by a number of unaccredited sources of the Russian-language extremist propaganda. The object of this research is the Islamist discourse covered by the “official” sources of the prohibited in the Russian Federation international terrorist organizations – “Islamic State”, “Dabiq” and “Rumiyah”, as well as a number of Russian-language sources of Islamist propaganda. The author examines such aspects of jihadist propaganda as the category of space, semiotics of Islamist propaganda; postmodern traits in the jihadist propaganda materials. Analysis is conducted on the category “Dawlah” (“state” from Arabic) as a sovereign concept in the discourse of “Islamic State” organization. Special attention is paid to the characteristic of Islamist propaganda as a phenomenon typical for the era of postmodernism. The distinctive features of the Russian-language Islamist discourse are described. Leaning on the analysis of textual and visual materials of Islamist propaganda, the author concludes on inextricable connection of the discourse of jihadist propaganda with the society of its function, despite the thesis on irreconcilable confrontation to the “Taghut” society declared by the ideologists of the international terrorist organization “Islamic State”. This thesis is proven by a certain symbolic set of Islamist propaganda, usage of symbols comprehensible to modern audiences, and significant attention given to the brand and style of the jihadists. After the defeat of the Caliphate as a proto-state entity (rather than a terrorist organization), the “Islamic State” substantially migrated into the virtual space. In an attempt to influence the audience, jihadist propaganda operates not only on the level of objective reality, but immerses the reader in an entirely virtual world. This work reveals the peculiarities of such process.

M.-A. Hamelin’s composing and performing style in the context of postmodern aesthetics

M.-A. Hamelin’s composing and performing style in the context of postmodern aesthetics

Postmodern Valencies in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre. Waiting for Godot

Abstract Postmodernism is still a landmark for theatre creators worldwide. Hard to define, it proposes, as Umberto Eco also acknowledged, a critical view of the past, filled with witt and irony, when referring to a disbalanced present, lacking value or perspective. It seems relevant, when talking about postmodernism, to yield Samuel Beckett’s writings, his prose and his theatre being stamps of change in the middle of the XXth century. We chose for analysis the play Waiting for Godot, which uncovers postmodern traits, and by discovering them, the text is better understood for the director or actor who is to stage the play or a character from it.

Rap Poetry and Postmodernism

This article observes several most significant rap albums of this decade within postmodern literature. Today rap culture ceased to be a sort of “outsider” in academic opinion, because of its influences on the culture and art innovations. We study albums as literary objects according to literary aesthetic theories and principles, display the main postmodern features they have, and analyze the role of rap poetry within postmodernism in general. The results suggest that rap poetry is postmodern not only musically, but also lyrically, as an object of literature. The rap music embodies all the postmodern traits and synthesizes them within the syntheses of music and literature and high art and pop culture.

Обыденное сознание и современная футурология

Futurological scenarios are important not so much the specific content of their “models of the future” as the way they reflect and Express the modern condition of ordinary consciousness. Study them from this point of view provides a platform for deepening our understanding of values and life-meaningful orientations of the modern ordinary consciousness. The role of ordinary consciousness as a prerequisite for futures-oriented creativity varies greatly depending on the type of futurist scenarios. It is especially important for scenarios “perspective plan”. They carry the personality traits of postmodernism, which is characterized by a return from the abstract forms of understanding the world visually to the neck; the weakening of the volitional beginnings in human activities, and the critical attitude.

Coping With Grim Dystopia: A Re-Reading of The Fire-Dwellers

Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s novel The Fire-Dwellers has long been critically dismissed as too paltry and insignificant to warrant in-depth treatment. This paper attempts to identify the novel as a significant one in theme and technique incorporating traits of postmodernism and expresses the need for a deeper critical evaluation of the work. Through the novel, Laurence records the terrors of the 1960s counterculture, one of the most turbulent times in recent history. She portrays the struggle of the individual to cope with the fires of an increasingly violent and insane dystopic world which fragments the self. Laurence, in the novel, develops an innovative narrative technique to recreate the protagonist’s fractured consciousness in the fragmented cultural context.

Substantial authenticity, (post/)modernity and transformation of otherness: the second trip of Camilo Jose Cela to the Alcarria

A review of literature on authenticity argues in favour of what is called here substantial authenticity, against objective, constructed and existential notions, argued as non-mutually exclusive. Several themes in substantial authenticity are found in Nuevo viaje a la Alcarria (New Journey to the Alcarria), a book by the Nobel Prize winner for Literature Camilo Jose Cela: nostalgia/hostility to modern society; social integration; autonomy from society; opposition to capitalism/commodification and opposition to pose/style/fashion. Besides the characteristically modern stance implied by some of such engagements with authenticity, Cela's work also presents postmodern traits (such as disregard for knowledge and ambiguity as to its own (non)-fictional status), prompting a discussion on the limits of the non-fictional text. The discussion is especially relevant because the authority of Cela as a famous writer (which he reinforces by concealing sources and suggesting mystical access to Otherness) enables him to apparently change the very social and cultural landscape in which he travels. This takes place both in the long-run (the region already contains markers of his first trip, which are likely to be reinforced by the second) and in the short-run (immediate transformative effects in the interaction between the author and local people).

The reproduction of intertextual relations in modern english literature translation

It has been proved that as far as intertextuality is one of the significant traits of postmodernism, the character of its rendering in translation depends on such considerable features as factors of translator’s background information in decoding of intertextual units. With reference to this fact there have been investigated ways of rendering intertextual units and criteria of optimal using of these ways in contemporary English literature

“Thinking” the Domestic Interior in Postcolonial South Asia: The Home of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, 1960 to 1998

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the domestic interior of the architect Geoffrey Bawa at 33rd Lane, Colombo, Sri Lanka, created between c. 1960 and 1998. This interior will be assessed in relation to the intellectual technique of “bricolage,” a term applied here to conceptualize the furnishing of the home as something that structures space, thereby making it meaningful. Previously, no sustained or critically engaged attempt has been made to assess his interior spaces as locations to “think” a way of living appropriate to the newly independent Ceylon/Sri Lanka. His later domestic interiors, such as his own home, combine “antique” colonial furniture with International Style furniture and contemporary Sri Lankan artworks. Through bricolage, Bawa evolved a new mode of interior design for the island that allowed for the articulation of different narratives, although these narratives were not progressive in the modernist sense–Bawa simply re-arranged what was already there. The interior of Bawa's home is both atavistic and inauthentic. Finally, the postmodern traits apparent in Bawa's home were used as a resource by his peer group to “think” the South Asian, postcolonial domestic interior and to reconfigure the space of home as it is, rather than making it anew.

Oscillation between Modernism to Postmodernism in Shakespeare‘s Hamlet

The universality and uniqueness of Shakespeare is his unyielding and resisting insistence on not surrendering to the fossilized logos and metanarratives. He has remained a genius, whose resisting and challenging views have surpassed time and place. This paper makes an attempt to show the dominant traits of modernism and postmodernism in Hamlet. The focal point of the study is to unfold the shift of modern and postmodern traits of the characters and as well as their oscillation between modern and postmodern world. By spotlighting Shakespeare’s modern and postmodern notions in his Hamlet, the study wants to put on show the affinity of Shakespeare with the 20th and 21th century generations, who vacillate between modern and postmodern world.

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: <i>A Novelette</i> and [<i>No Title</i>

The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and [No Title] Antonio Ruiz One of the most famous and polemic catalogues in postmodern theory was proposed by Ihab Hassan in his study of postmodernism: Modernism Postmodernism Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open) Purpose Play Design Chance Hierarchy Anarchy Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening Distance Participation Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction Synthesis Antithesis Presence Absence Centering Dispersal (Dismemberment 267–68) These often quoted dichotomies have always attracted my attention, particularly the first one, as it represents a Damocles sword constantly threatening the claim of originality promoted by the high priests of postmodernism. Even Hassan himself has recognized the avant-garde spirit of the concept he is trying to define: “But if much of modernism appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist. In this it recalls [End Page 101] the irreverent spirit of the avant-garde, and so carries sometimes the label of neoavant-garde” (Postmodern Turn 121). The case of Dada’s inclusion in the cataloguing of postmodern traits is significant. Dada was a movement of reaction against the rationalist tradition of Western thought (Rubin, 1967). Tzara said that “Dada doubts all” (Tzara 92). Similarly, deconstructive postmodern thought is seen by some as nihilistic: “it partakes of uncertainty and doubt, and accepts ambiguity” (Sanouillet 226). Like Dada, postmodernism is defined by rejection: “The rejection of all-encompassing, teleological theories of human and social change associated with Enlightenment ideas about reason and progress” (Locher, 1999). Postmodernism also strives to achieve other major goals: “linking claims about social life, human nature, and criteria of truth and validity with strategies of power; and replacing the emphasis on subject and consciousness with an emphasis on language as intersubjective” (Locher, 1999). Like David Locher, I also claim that these goals were previously proposed by Dada. The Dadaists, for example, believed that meaning was arbitrary. As language signified nothing, it could be manipulated in any way desired (Richter, 1965). They also believed that there is no absolute truth and abolished the distinction between the concepts of high and low (or popular) art and culture. As a matter of fact, most of the features assigned to postmodernism can also be applied to Dadaism (paraphysics/Dadaism, chance, antiform, play, anarchy, exhaustion/silence, performance, participation, deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal, combination, against interpretation . . .).1 My intention in proposing these parallels is not to suggest the lack of originality of prior proposals in the field of postmodernist theory but rather to reflect upon the debt that postmodernism, as also modernism, owes this avant-garde movement. Dada “was neither a school nor a movement but rather an essentially chaotic phenomenon that cut across art forms and national boundaries” (Tashjian xii). Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hanover are some of the cities that are usually mentioned in relation to Dadaism. However, “even before the highly publicized activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, a loosely organized collection of New York avant-garde artists offended the New York critics with their antics and their suspiciously foreign names—Benjamin de Casseres, Jean Crotti, Marius de Zayas, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia—” (Schmidt 92).2 These artists were associated with Walter Arensberg’s circle and connected with Stieglitz’s gallery and his magazine Camera Work. Eventually they founded several short-lived little magazines, including Picabia’s 391, de Zaya’s 291, Man Ray’s TNT, and Man Ray and Duchamp’s The Blind Man and New York Dada. These magazines preceded the release of other publications, edited by Americans, that flirted with Dadaism. I refer, for example, to Broom and Secession. In these magazines, writers like E. E. [End Page 102] Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy found an ideal forum in which to publish their most radical writing. The relation of Williams and Cummings with Dadaism is complex, replete with curiosities and contradictions. In the case of Williams—although it can also be said of Cummings—the desire to affirm his American identity—Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”—led him to take on the anti-art Dadaist attitudes and use them to break from structures and conventions...

Some Remarks on the Re-buliding of the Category of Essence and the Reflective Modernity

If modernity is manifested as essentialism, postmodernity is manifested as anti-essentialism. Modernity is, in essence, human beings’ discovery of their own power, and is based on rational knowledge that has grasped the essence of things. In fact, in the discourse system of modernity, the various concepts of “essence” connote nothing but people’s imaginative constructions and rational conjectures about objects. In the past, our order, be it internal or external, was in essence guaranteed by God. Afterwards, all “essences”, as essences, must rationally prove the reason for their existence. In the postmodern context and discourse system, God, and also the “human being” who has created essence, has “died”. We should not simply resume the belief in traditional essence, but should reconstruct, on the basis of a full understanding of the intellectual meaning of postmodernity’s challenges, some historicity, practicality, and the concept of essence that accords with the historical as well as communicative rationality. We must realize that the essence of things is the essence of particular things in a particular stage of development, internally containing infinite differences and variety. Only things with postmodern traits contain modernity, and only the concept of essence that conceives difference accords with time.

The Company They Keep

Page 18 American Book Review The Company They Keep Jeanetta Calhoun Mish of constructing an anthology for use as a textbook in a course on Native literature or as one of several texts in a women’s literature course by choosing “depth over breadth,” including several stories by each of the fifteen writers, and by severing stories from novels so the instructor could squeeze them into an undergraduate course which could not possibly discharge Almanac of the Dead (1992) during a single semester. The weaknesses of the anthology are directly related to the compromises necessary to achieve the form of an undergraduate textbook. Several of the stories are frustratingly truncated and do not accurately represent their author’s storytelling abilities. The informational and definitional footnotes to the stories are vaguely irritating and repetitious. Also, if a regular reader of NativeAmerican literature opens this collection hoping for new stories from his or her favorite authors, he or she will be disappointed; with the exception of one story each by Paula Gunn Allen, Kimberly M. Blaeser, and Patricia Riley, all the works by established Native women writers are reprints or excerpts. The anthology does present previously unpublished stories by three emerging writers: Misha Nogha, Beth H. Piatote, and Reid Gómez. The most intriguing aspect of Reckonings is its meta-storytelling— most of the stories are stories about the power of stories. Despite the problems associated with its function as a textbook, the compelling and powerful stories in the collection make it worth reading and rereading . Paula GunnAllen’s previously unpublished story, “Burned Alive in the Blues,” is wryly magical and poignant. It captures the West Coast urban Indian experience in the 60s, and will surely find a home in collections of 60s stories and music tales. Beth E. Brant’s contributions, “Turtle Gal” and “Swimming Upstream,” and Patricia Riley’s rural character study, “Damping Down the Road,” reveal the difficulty of contemporary Native life, the torn and ragged fabric of almost-forgotten cultural traditions, and the possibilities inherent in the conscious reconstruction of family, tribe, and tradition. Janet Campbell Hale is not as well known as other Native women writers of her generation such as Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and Leslie Marmon Silko—all of whom who also contributed to this volume—but Hale’s “Claire,” an emotionally satisfying and pitch perfect story of a wise grandmother who escapes from the confines of an “old people’s home” then finds her way back to her tribal homeland, will surely gain for the writer a renewed and expanded appreciation of her talents.Anita Endrezze contributes two entertaining, contemporary re-fashionings of tribal myths, and Kimberly M. Blaeser’s entry, “Growing Things,” would make an enchanting film treatment for a NativeAmerican romantic comedy . Anna Lee Walters muses on the importance of names in “Buffalo Wallow Woman” and “Las Vegas, New Mexico, July 1969” and the vulnerability of raced, gendered poverty in “Apparitions .” Linda Hogan’s “Descent” is a quietly transfixing and ultimately righteous story of a girl’s kinship to a panther. As most readers would expect, the stories by Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich are brilliantly conceived and masterfully wrought. However, the pieces by Silko and Erdrich suffer somewhat from the loss of their original context, but perhaps readers who have not encountered the authors’novels would not be aware of the diminution. Of the established writers’stories, only Diane Glancy’s selections fail to stand up to the company they keep; they are neither as fierce nor as mesmerizing as other stories in the collection. The three emerging authors, Gómez, Nogha, and Piatote, are fine writers. Nogha’s two stories display postmodern traits; they resist narrative, relying on imagery and inference to effect the experience of living in two oftentimes antagonistic worlds. Gómez’s terrific linked tales of Native women resisting Western psychiatric medicine’s mistreatment of cultural and spiritual sickness stay with the reader long after the book is closed, and Piatote’s “Life-Size Indian” honestly calculates the alienating effects of exoticism on Native Americans. In the end, the outstanding writing overcomes the irritations of the anthology’s weaknesses. For a seasoned reader of...

Radical Orthodoxy and Post-Structuralism: An Unholy Alliance

The article points to similarities between Radical Orthodoxy and the Post-Structuralist critique of rationalistic secularism together with a shared appraisal of aesthecism. However, although the people of Radical Orthodoxy are sympathetic to the modern experience of immanence, they criticize the flattened immanence which seems to result from a post-structuralist perspective, and claim instead that immanence has to be appreciated as creational (and therefore participating in the divine) in order to withstand the threat of nihilism. Thus, Post-Structuralism is only an ally up until the point where it tends to undermine the foot-hold in pre-modern tradition and the commitment to revealed truth. Yet, the way in which Radical Orthodoxy appeals to the better myth (contrary to the ontology of difference pertaining to Post-Structuralism) still carries with it traits of postmodernism and thereby risks the relativism it strives to avoid.

From classlessness to clubculture

This article surveys the field of British youth cultural analysis since the development in the 1950s of a so-called specific identity and distinctive set of experiences for young people. It outlines the main trajectories of sociological research, from the early positing of a classless youth culture, via various investigations into delinquent solutions, through to the establishment within a cultural studies discipline of a ‘new wave of subcultural theory’in the 1970s. It also examines the challenges to this orthodoxy in an era of ‘new times’ and the recent return to sociology and ethnographic fieldwork. In so doing the article traces the main theoretical traditions from the initial influence of American subcultural theory, through symbolic interactionism and the reinvention of the problem-solving approach in the language of Marxism, to how the field has recently been reconstituted upon the terrain of ‘post-subcultural studies’. It concludes by critiquing some current calls for the replacement of the subculture concept and argues that, while reports of the death of subculture are greatly exaggerated, the continued use of this concept in future research is perhaps likely to emphasise certain CCCS connotations of group coherence, consistency and commitment in addition to the postmodern traits of flux, fluidity and hybridization that are seemingly constitutive of certain youth cultural forms and activities in the new millennium.

Amorphous Identities, Disavowed History: Shimada Masahiko and National Subjectivity

“I am my own, independent (hitori no) Tower of Babel,” proclaims Akuma Kazuhito, the protagonist of Shimada Masahiko’s (b. 1961) Boku wa mozōningen [I am an automaton] (1986).1 This essay reads a sampling of Shimada’s narratives written between 1985 and 1989 as a set of discursive forays into dominant modern Japanese models of individual and national subjectivity, forays that unsettle the practice of marshaling Japanese literature to complicity with those cultural models. His characters persistently inhabit the interstices of identifying categories, bartering their erotic bodies in the contemporary global market economy. These 1980s texts are liberally peppered with postcolonial and postmodern jargon and concepts, such as that of in-betweenness. Because of these and other attributes U.S. Japanologists frequently designate (and dismiss) Shimada as a “postmodern writer.” I want here to rethink how these postmodern traits signify—as not mere reproduction of but as politically informed commentary—in these

Augusto Roa Bastos's Trilogy as Postmodern Practice

Augusto Roa Bastos's most recent novel, El fiscal (1993), completes the author's trilogy on the "monotheism of power," which the novel constitutes in conjunction with the prior works Hijo de hombre (1960) and Yo el Supremo (1974). These novels form a larger whole by virtue of the way in which they attempt to define Paraguay's identity through the nation's history. Hijo de hombre focuses on both the Chaco War and a series of Paraguayan civil wars; Yo el Supremo concentrates on the nineteenth-century dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia; and El fiscal presents both Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship (1954-1989) and the nineteenth-century War of the Triple Alliance (during the dictatorship of Francisco Solano López). Moreover, each novel approaches history in a way which is postmodern. This study both discusses the controversy surrounding the term "postmodernism" and analyzes the way in which these novels carry out some of the characteristics attributed to postmodernism by various critics. These postmodern traits help to unify the three novels and justify their status as a trilogy.

Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordism?

This article examines attempts by Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to explain the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism by the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. They argue that the movement of advanced industrial societies from standardized mass production to diverse flexible production has created a new culture that stresses difference, superficiality, and ahistoricality. But in their attempts to portray a synchronous development of economy and culture, these thinkers ignore the uneven developments between and within each realm. I argue that in the United States the popular arts like automobile design developed postmodern traits long before the high arts like architecture. Instead of this change in popular culture resulting from post-Fordism, it dialectically influenced this economic change.

Claiming the Treasures: Patricia MacLachlan's Organic Postmodernism

Claiming the Treasures:Patricia MacLachlan's Organic Postmodernism Roberta Seelinger Trites (bio) Patricia MacLachlan's novels display a variety of postmodern characteristics which appear to stem naturally from the topics about which she writes.1 She seems especially interested in how individuals come to perceive themselves as "subjects," that is, as the actors of their own agency. Her novels define subject-formation—the creation of "subjectivity"—as a matter of process: individuals continually (re)shape themselves and are (re)shaped as a result of interactions with other people.2 Moreover, MacLachlan employs paradox, metafictionality, and intertextuality to encode her texts with premises that assume the reader's agency. Finally, MacLachlan affirms the process of subjectivity by using narrative structures that parallel her thematic interest in the life cycle. Especially prominent in Arthur, for the Very First Time, Unclaimed Treasures, and Journey, these postmodern traits inform MacLachlan's texts in particularly interesting ways. From the start of her career in publishing for children, MacLachlan has been subtly incorporating the tendencies of postmodernism into her stories. Even her first novel, Arthur, for the Very First Time, displays several postmodern characteristics. Most noticeable is the book's focus on the subject-creation of the protagonist, Arthur. He is a ten-year-old boy whose mother is going to have a baby. His parents send him to spend the summer at his Great-Aunt Elda and Great-Uncle Wrisby's farm, and while he is there, he explores his own identity. Arthur has long perceived himself only in the "object" position, as the recipient of other people's agency: "For Arthur, everything happened one way or another, either the way it should or the way it shouldn't with no help on his part" (64). Arthur's playmate, Moira, reinforces his passive self-perception by refusing to call him anything but "Mouse" because she doesn't think he takes action or "really see[s] what's going on around" him (38, 53). The motif of "seeing" things that runs through the book demonstrates one way that Arthur learns to take agency in his life. His Uncle Wrisby sometimes looks through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars because that way "you see just as well. . . . Sometimes better" (15). Arthur experiments with the binoculars and eventually begins to internalize the alternating perspectives of seeing things as either closer or farther away. Once, "his binocular eyes turned inward on himself: a small boy, sitting on a hay mound with a russet chicken" (30). Later, he recognizes his parents' sending him away as a way of "getting close . . . but only so close," like looking through "the far away end" of the binoculars (54). Another time he "lets his eyes unfocus" to gain a new perspective on his uncle's garden (61). The binoculars provide the boy with a metaphorical way for putting himself both in the subject and the object position; when he recognizes that he has the ability to put his vision of himself into a wider perspective, he is acting as the subject of the action of gazing and as the object of that gaze. The idea of perspective also ties closely to the book's formulation of art as a means for the individual's creation of self. Aunt Elda reads Randall Jarrell's poem "The Mockingbird" to Arthur. He is fascinated by the dual vision of the poem: "Look one way and the sun is going down, / Look the other and the moon is rising" (qtd. 22). The poem describes how the mockingbird imitates everything around him so well that it ultimately becomes impossible to distinguish the mockingbird from the world. Arthur intuits the meaning of the poem: looked at one way the bird is imitating the natural world in the creation of art; looked at another way, the bird's art is the natural world. From one perspective, the bird is a creating subject; from another, since his song is indistinguishable from his identity, he is himself the object of his own creation. Having made this connection, Arthur turns to the creation of music. He buys a recorder, and when he shows Moira, she comments, "Why, Mouse. . . . You are really doing...