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Mr. Squishy posted:Does anyone mind scanning a few pages from Tristram Shandy? My second hand copy... the guy must have splashed all kind of crazy inks on the page! Some people are so careless. That is a good gag
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Oct 22, 2015 18:35
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this is a great thread; I love this type of stuff and several posts in here have turned me on to some new authors I wasn't previously familiar with. I'm curious what you folks think of haruki murakami: does he fit into this category? any authors who haven't already been mentioned who have a similar vibe?
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May 15, 2016 00:01
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Not sure if it's a measure of postmodernalousnessity buy I feel he keeps writing the same book over and over.
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May 15, 2016 15:30
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blue squares posted:Can you elaborate on why you like this and what you think DeLillo is saying? It's a good point for discussion about what it means both for the book and for "postmodernism in general." Sterne and Swift were already openly mocking "Enlightenment assumptions" well before philosophers got around to it—Nietzsche was a hack and his most influential works are practically book reports on the satire of the previous century. Paradox employed both as device and structure has characterized great poetry continuously since at least Ovid. Artistic fragmentation, too, was pioneered by Sterne and expanded upon by Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and presumably tons of other non-post modernists. The only really distinguishing feature of literary postmodernism as people have tried to describe it is a particular narrative conceit involving stories-within-stories and plots that require long attention spans to puzzle out. It's not a "literary movement," it's just a cool way to engage an audience.
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May 15, 2016 22:11
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anilEhilated posted:Not sure if it's a measure of postmodernalousnessity buy I feel he keeps writing the same book over and over. i have heard that said, yeah. i'm reading my first book by him ("Hard-boiled Detective and The End of the World") and enjoying it quite a bit. from talking to friends who have read several of his other books but not this one, i think it's possible that this book may be the odd one out, as it doesn't seem to match the themes they've described, but i won't be able to say for sure until i experience the other books myself or someone who's read them all can give their opinion here.
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May 18, 2016 04:46
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Every murakami book is about the cool japanese man protagonist listening to albert ayler records, drinking cutty sark and having a sexy teen want to gently caress him.
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May 18, 2016 09:34
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Every author just writes variations on the same book.
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May 18, 2016 10:21
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Murakami does have the protagonist problem that a lot of authors have (How often is the protagonist a literature professor at a prestigious university considering adultery?), but his the things that happen around said character are pretty different. I haven't disliked anything I've read by him, and I thought that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was fantastic.
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May 18, 2016 21:28
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Murakami does have the protagonist problem that a lot of authors have (How often is the protagonist a literature professor at a prestigious university considering adultery?), but his the things that happen around said character are pretty different. I haven't disliked anything I've read by him, and I thought that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was fantastic. I just finished Wind-Up Bird recently, too, and I adored it. Something about the way he describes the blandness of everyday life in the context of these incredibly surreal circumstances really pulled me in.
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May 18, 2016 21:35
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A human heart posted:Every murakami book is about the cool japanese man protagonist listening to albert ayler records, drinking cutty sark and having a sexy teen want to gently caress him. this described the chapters i read last night *to a t* so i think you're on to something here
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May 19, 2016 01:12
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Mr. Squishy posted:Every author just writes variations on the same book. i feel like this insight metaphorically applies to life as a whole
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May 19, 2016 01:12
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Are you high?
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May 19, 2016 01:21
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CestMoi posted:What/'s good by Barthelme? He's my favorite writer. His short stories are what he's known for. Sixty stories contains most of his most famous stories. If you Google him you'll find a website called jessamyn which has a few of his stories.
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May 24, 2016 09:36
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newtestleper posted:He's my favorite writer. His short stories are what he's known for. Sixty stories contains most of his most famous stories. Do you like audiobooks or podcasts? Because The New Yorker Fiction podcast has a bunch of free episodes of writers reading their favorite Barthelme stories and then exploring their tbemes and ideas.
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May 24, 2016 15:08
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I was wondering what were some goons feelings about Cervantes's Don Quixote being considered a post-modern novel? Is this just another way the stuffy literary establishment is trying to tack another gold-star on the forehead of the 400 y/o novel or do you think Cervantes' genius was genuinely timeless? (and all answers in b/w). The way I think of it is that while the novel may incidentally find itself using techniques we recognize as post-modern, it lacks the underlying ideology that motivated contemporary writers to write in the post-modern mode in the first place. But, like, look at all the post-modern flourishes of the thing. The story is told from the perspective of an arabic historian who stumbles upon an impossibly accurate chronicling of Don Quixote's adventures (as in, there is never a character said to be following Don Quixote who is even literate, let alone capable of chronicling every adventure he gets in) and the reader gets them third-hand once their translated from a dead language, into Arabic, and finally into Spanish. This kind of critical attitude towards historical fact paired with an awareness of its own place as fiction are so post-modern that I can't help but be impressed with just how timeless this novel has proven to be. On the other side though, there is a tradition of absurdly applying post-modern interpretations to famous works. I once had a professor describe Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors as a play that worked to show how mental illness was socially constructed. An idea that wasn't written about until Foucault in the 60s and not mainstream in academia for years after, and about a play that has slaves running around getting beaten up and making fun of women. So, what do you guys think? Don Quixote: the great post-modern novel, or simply, the great modern novel? EDIT: the filthy grammarian who lives in my attic decided the edit tag was worth changing a single word s7indicate3 fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 00:19
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It is interesting because before the novel became more codified there are things like Quixote and Tristam Shandy that seem to play around in the same way as post-modernist do. It's hard to be post-modern at the dawn of the modern novel but it it's always interesting to look back and see these ideas percolating long ago before they became more codified.
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Jun 20, 2016 04:21
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s7indicate3 posted:I was wondering what were some goons feelings about Cervantes's Don Quixote being considered a post-modern novel? Is this just another way the stuffy literary establishment is trying to tack another gold-star on the forehead of the 400 y/o novel or do you think Cervantes' genius was genuinely timeless? (and all answers in b/w). http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-Pierre-Menard.pdf If we're divvying books up into bins then I think Quixote is probably better categorized as "satire" but Tristram Shandy defies categorization. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 04:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-Pierre-Menard.pdf 'Satire' is a genre and post-modernism a cultural movement, they are not mutually exclusive. Tristam Shandy sounds rad. I never heard of it before now. If he's a character like Don Quixote then maybe we have a modern trickster archetype in Quixote and Shandy. s7indicate3 fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 05:05
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s7indicate3 posted:'Satire' is a genre and post-modernism is a cultural movement, they are not mutually exclusive. Tristam Shandy sounds rad. I never heard of it before now. Well, post-modernism can refer to a lot of things; a cultural movement, a literary genre, a set of critical theories, etc. If we're unrooting it from a specific time period then that sortof inherently unroots the concepts from their cultural milieu -- we can't really argue that Quixote was written as a departure from early 20th century modernism, for example. But yeah I don't want to die on this hill.
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Jun 20, 2016 05:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-Pierre-Menard.pdf My copy of Tristram Shandy categorises Don QUixote, Tristram Shandy and a few other books as part of the "literary Saturnalian tradition" which is a great phrase I have never heard any other person use
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Jun 20, 2016 05:22
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Postmodernism is also a time period. But whether viewed as a period or a movement, it doesn't really make sense to say that Don Quixote was part of it. Just because the book shares some traits with works that we call postmodern doesn't mean that it comes from the era or that it was any sort of reaction to modernism. However your followup question doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Whether or not Cervantes' genius is "timeless" has nothing to do with whether or not the book is postmodern. Since the book is still successful and influential today, I'd say sure, you can call it timeless.
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Jun 20, 2016 15:14
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god help us all, are people seriously arguing that a novel from the 17th century is post-modern?
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Jun 20, 2016 19:40
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It certainly contains elements that would later be identified as post-modern, but that sort of distancing from the narrative wasn't uncommon. Another famous example is Wuthering Heights, (much later novel, I know) which I don't think anyone would describe as post-modern, wherein we are reading the journal of a guy who is telling us the story he heard from his neighbors who is relating the story of someone who it turns out...
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Jun 20, 2016 19:49
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Frankenstein: A letter to a failed writer from her brother who, on a ship in the North Pole, met a dying weirdo.
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Jun 20, 2016 20:13
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Toph Bei Fong posted:It certainly contains elements that would later be identified as post-modern, but that sort of distancing from the narrative wasn't uncommon. Metafiction is a trick that postmodern authors used. It's not at all what made their works postmodern. Their ideology is. Read the OP
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Jun 20, 2016 20:32
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blue squares posted:Metafiction is a trick that postmodern authors used. It's not at all what made their works postmodern. Their ideology is. Read the OP Is that necessarily true though? What difference would it make if the author was intentionally signifying post-modernity or whether the work just happened upon it? In the end, wouldn't both works signify the same thing regardless of intention? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent Believe me, I agree with what you're saying about post-modernism being an idea expressed through the use of a metafictional framing narrative, but a lot like how works before Kafka have come to be seen as Kafkaesque, can't we see Don Quixote as post-modern as well? Consider that one ideological tenant of post-modernity; the challenging of master narratives (this isn't my definition but Jean-Francois Lyotard's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition). Couldn't it then be said that if Quixote challenges master narratives that it, in fact, signifies post-modernity regardless of Cervantes' intention? Well, if you consider how Don Quixote blends reality and dream in a way that challenges Enlightenment age notions of reason and the legitimacy of history as I described in my last post, you'd be hard pressed to see Don Quixote as not challenging its fair share of master narratives. I won't go into point-by-point detail, connecting specific passages to examples so you're just going to have to take my word for it. If you've read it, I don't think what I'm saying here is that far of a stretch (but by all means tear me a new one). I'm not trying to be absurd in my interpretation here. A lot of authors who primarily write in the post-modern mode wrote in to a Guardian survey to vote Don Quixote as the greatest book ever written and I think its safe to say that that may be because its retrospectively recognized post-modernity has proven massively influential for contemporary post-modern writers. I'm just saying that life is stranger than fiction and sometimes someone writes a post-modern masterpiece in 1615. EDIT: A sentence got away from me
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Jun 20, 2016 22:42
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or maybe don quixote was an influential piece of work that helped shape the form and style of postmodern literature just a ,thought ulvir fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 23:24
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Nah, de Cervantes travelled through time and wrote a thinly veiled history of his travels when he returned to his modern day.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:34
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related, a while ago I read The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes by Stephen Marlowe and thought it was A Good Time. and also has many traits of postmodernism.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:42
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Cerventes version of Don Quixote's is not pomo, but the version of Don Quixote I'm writing where I strain real hard for the right word for me to write happens to be the same as the older text is.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:47
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Postmodernism is a hollow term that is applied to books published after 19XX that defy other categorizations. It's also florid and gay.
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Jun 21, 2016 00:03
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blue squares posted:Metafiction is a trick that postmodern authors used. It's not at all what made their works postmodern. Their ideology is. Read the OP What is their ideology?
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Jun 21, 2016 00:15
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blue squares posted:Metafiction is a trick that postmodern authors used. It's not at all what made their works postmodern. Their ideology is. Read the OP If you misunderstood my point, perhaps I didn't make it clearly enough. Just because Don Quixote contains elements very common to later post modern novels isn't enough to make it postmodern, because postmodernism refers to a specific style that hadn't (couldn't have) been devised when Cervantes was codifying what we now call the novel. Just because it contains unreliable narrators, distancing worthy of Eco, a disjointed and sometimes hallucinatory narrative that deliberately meanders, etc. doesn't make it postmodern, and many of those elements show up in other novels throughout the intervening period without said novels being "properly" postmodern either. However, if we choose to read it as a postmodern novel anyways, that can yield some interesting discussion. (I agree with you, to try and make this as unambiguous as possible)
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Jun 21, 2016 00:23
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A human heart posted:What is their ideology? That it's impossible to understand the world, other people, and sometimes even yourself. That's the very short version
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Jun 21, 2016 00:50
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I read The Recognitions last month (my first Gaddis), and it was fine I guess. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the DFW-Pynchon-DeLillo trifecta. I wrote about it here but generally I found it enforcing an extremely repetitive point that is somewhat difficult to connect with nowadays. But of course the bar and party conversations were great. I laughed out loud often. Also I have no idea what postermodernism truly means, find any explanation classified by authorial intent unconvincing and useless, and have no idea where it intersects with self-referential meta-fiction (Don Quixote part 2) or experiments in form, but Volume 3 of Danielewski's The Familiar series just came out and you might call that postmodern, maybe. I will be shocked if he makes it to Volume 26, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The story is engaging enough and what he does with imagery, typography, and space is enchanting.
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Jun 21, 2016 19:57
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ultrachrist posted:I read The Recognitions last month (my first Gaddis), and it was fine I guess. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the DFW-Pynchon-DeLillo trifecta. I wrote about it here but generally I found it enforcing an extremely repetitive point that is somewhat difficult to connect with nowadays. But of course the bar and party conversations were great. I laughed out loud often. Thanks for the link, I've been staring at Gaddis for a year or so now but haven't managed to get past the third chapter. quote:Also I have no idea what postermodernism truly means, find any explanation classified by authorial intent unconvincing and useless, and have no idea where it intersects with self-referential meta-fiction (Don Quixote part 2) or experiments in form, but Volume 3 of Danielewski's The Familiar series just came out and you might call that postmodern, maybe. I will be shocked if he makes it to Volume 26, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The story is engaging enough and what he does with imagery, typography, and space is enchanting. 26?!? I have all three so far and just began #1 yesterday. I had no idea he was claiming to plan 26. Maybe this isn't such a good thing to start reading until the year 2040 or whatever.
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Jun 21, 2016 20:20
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He's releasing them 2 a year, so yeah, like 2028? Actually I'm googling and it might be 27 volumes. I'm less concerned about the timeline and more like: not many people can possibly be buying these, can he really keep publishing? Volume 1 and 2 were right up front in one of the major indie bookstores in SF, but 3 was already stuffed in the back somewhere when I picked it up around release time. Going to look sweet on my bookshelf in the full library of the fictional house I own in 2028.
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Jun 21, 2016 20:26
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ultrachrist posted:I read The Recognitions last month (my first Gaddis), and it was fine I guess. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the DFW-Pynchon-DeLillo trifecta. I wrote about it here but generally I found it enforcing an extremely repetitive point that is somewhat difficult to connect with nowadays. But of course the bar and party conversations were great. I laughed out loud often. I appreciate what the guy's attempting, but I lack any urge to read him. I've only successfully read through The Fifty Year Sword, a decent short story marketed as a full-length book at a ridiculous price. It was pretty, but is done within an hour. I might attempt House of Leaves one day if I run out of other horror, but I just wonder 'Why not just concentrate on telling a good story instead of (what seems to be) disguising an okay story with weird book layouts and fonts?' A 26/27 book series just seems like self-parody at this point. Something like Sufjan Stevens's state album series goof, but more deadpan.
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Jun 21, 2016 20:55
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Franchescanado posted:I might attempt House of Leaves one day if I run out of other horror, but I just wonder 'Why not just concentrate on telling a good story instead of (what seems to be) disguising an okay story with weird book layouts and fonts?' I think what he was trying to do was create a book that was the sort of object one would encounter in a Borges story. Which I think is a fine goal even if he didn't pull it off entirely.
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Jun 21, 2016 21:05
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The basic premise is that there is a relationship between the presentation of the text/book and its content. At it's most simple: a character is stuck in a tight space so the text gets smaller or tighter to simulate it, or it's raining and this is important and the text is arranged as rain drops. To give a non-Danielewski example, the copy I have of Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays, which is a book heavily focused on nihilism/fatalism, there's huge pockets of white space intentionally placed to create a sort of page metaphor for the main character. I do a lot of UI design for my job, or at least oversee UI design on my products and the fonts used and various colors, spacing, etc do have observed behavioral effects, so it's not outlandish to think this would follow in novels. The Familiar volumes all have a Youtube video (represented across a few pages) towards the start and I think the visuals of youtube do give you a sort of visual-mental effect that goes beyond describing that what is happening is in video. At the very least, it's pretty to look at. Also, The Fifty Year Sword is by far the weakest version of this. I think he might have written it (and published?) as a regular short story first and all that crap got added later.
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Jun 21, 2016 21:15
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