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realism
Lectures 11 & 12
American Short Stories: From
Postmodernism to Dirty
Realism

John Barth on the short story
‘Less really is More… there are narrative ideas suitable only for a short story: quick tales, epiphanies that even a novella would attenuate…. You can hold a short story in your hand, like a lyric poem; see it whole; examine the function of individual sentences, even individual words, as you can’t readily do with Bleak House’.

Ihab Hassan: Modernism vs Postmodernism (from
The Dismemberment of Orpheus, 1971)

Modernism
Postmodernism
• Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open) • Purpose
Play
• Design
Chance
• Hierarchy
Anarchy
• Art Object/Finished
Process/Performance/
Work
Happening

Hassan: Modernism vs
Postmodernism (2)
Modernism
Postmodernism
• Distance
Participation
• Presence
Absence
• Centring
Dispersal
• Metaphor
Metonymy
• Selection
Combination
• Narrative/Grande Anti-narrative/
Histoire
Petite Histoire

Hassan: Modernism vs
Postmodernism (3)
•
•
•
•
•

Modernism
Master Code
Origin/Cause
Metaphysics
Determinacy
Genre/Boundary

Postmodernism
Idiolect
Difference/Trace
Irony
Indeterminacy
Text/Intertext

Peter Hansen on poststructuralism
The French poststructuralists ‘showed human interiority split apart, fragmented… into a decentred, dispersed and fluid subject, not so much speaking as being spoken by language.
Without a “genuine” or essential being, individuals were seen as constructed by the texts surrounding them’.

Fredric Jameson’s five key features of postmodernism (1)
1. The effacement of the old distinction between ‘high’ culture and ‘low’ or popular cultures;
2. The importance to postmodern art of new technologies linked to economic systems; 3. An emphasis upon artefacts as a simulacrum – or more precisely, a copy of a copy for which no original exists;

Fredric Jameson’s five key features of postmodernism (2)
4. The waning of
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