The Crying of Lot 49における都市

Time in Literature

Existentialism: Basic Writings

Ever since Frederico de OnÃ-z coined the label \"postmodernismo\" in 1934, its increasing appeal for criticism has led to a certain terminological inflation. A password in architecture, the visual arts, film, communications, music, and literature, it stands variously as a generic, typological, period, and cultural designation. Writers as widely diverse as Randall Jarrell and Jacques Derrida have been lumped under the rubric of postmodernism. Not surprisingly, such a popular usage is, for some, highly suspect on its face. Like other controversial and contested terms such as \"deconstruction\" or \"feminism,\" postmodernism names at once a critical carnival, labyrinth, and minefield. Fortunately, the recent University of Utrecht festschrift Approaching Postmodernism provides an indispensable map of the postmodern terrain. The volume comprises essays in theory and practical criticism by twelve contributors to a 1984 workshop on \"Postmodernism\" sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association. Especially useful, Hans Bertens's exhaustive introduction surveys the evolution of the postmodern epistÃ ̈me from 1934, taking into account its links to American counterculture in the mid-1960s and existentialist thought in the 1970s. By the 1980s, Bertens explains, the postmodern Weltanschauung in America underwrites a vast field of literary, critical, and cultural discourses. Quarreling with critics such as Frank Kermode who join modern and postmodern writings, Brian McHaIe uncouples them. Theorizing a fundamental \"change of dominant,\" McHaIe defines modernism as essentially an epistemological mode whereas postmodernism is ontologically grounded in existence and the projection of fictive worlds. For his part, Douwe Fokkema argues that postmodernism functions rhetorically to oppose modernism's penchant for hierarchic orders of meaning and value. Building on the work of critics such as Hassan, Lodge, and others, Fokkema provides a detailed semantic and syntactic analysis of postmodern

Approaching Postmodernism: Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism (review)

In this thesis, I examine absurd realism as a literary subgenre in postmodern American fiction. I define the concept of absurd realism, focusing on the features that characterize it as a postmodern subgenre. I also look at its relationship with other subgenres of literature such as realism, absurdism, magical realism, and satire. Through the analyses of three postmodern novels: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel, I illustrate how the features of absurd realism portray a postmodern world pervaded by boredom and chaos. I also consider how these texts convey the absurdity of human existence through the use of everyday characters, events, and setting. In summary, this thesis focuses on how the absurd occurrences and bizarre characters that exist within these books portray, in both literal and metaphoric senses, the complexity of the postmodern world.

Titilola Babalola

Papers

Absurd realism in postmodern American fiction: Wallace, Pynchon, and Tomasula