Catastrophe and image, international post-modern fiction

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

11 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

04/15/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction
The characters in postmodern stories
Allende's 'And of Clay We Are Created'
1. The character-narrator and the dying little girl
2. The narrator's account of Rolf's interiority
3. The narrative focus on Rolf
4. An opposing interpretation of Allende's short story
The dangers posed by the exchange of image for meaning
The lack of a self-conscious narrator-character
Heinrich Boll's short story 'The Laugher'
1. Laughter and purposelessness
2. The image of gaiety
Baudrillard's brief summary of Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan
Feng Jicai's short story The Street-Sweeping Show
1. One interpretation of the mayor's words
2. The mayor's role in his city
The stories analyzed: Exhibits of critiques of communism, capitalism or consumer society
Conclusion
Works cited

Abstract

I have found two common, linked problems under scrutiny in three short stories by non-American authors. The three stories are "And of Clay We Are Created" (Isabel Allende), "The Laugher" (Heinrich Böll), and "The Street-Sweeping Show" (Feng Jicai), and the problems these stories share are those of mediation and the power of images. These stories deal at least in part with how images are used or consumed and what these images impart and how. Because these stories deal with modern structures of society and the problems seem inextricable from these structures, and because each narrative works to subvert these problems by at least shedding light on them, I will call the narratives postmodern stories.All of the characters in each of these postmodern stories exhibit the need to preserve images. Ultimately, and to simplify, this need is destructive or dehumanizing, either for these characters or implicitly for the society the characters inhabit. In Allende's story the image is used for extracting personal meaning from a catastrophe, but paradoxically this need to understand is harmful to the self and is an indictment of the way we try to understand the world in an information society. In Böll's story the image is preserved ad infinitum and its mediator is reduced to an object of consumer society. And in Jicai the image is promulgated for public consumption though no one believes in it any longer (or maybe never did).