Towards New Grand Narratives in Postmodern Fiction

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

10 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

08/07/2007

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction
DeLillo's White Noise and its resemblance to Lyotard's emancipation narrative
1. Jack and Murray's style of speech
The hyperreferential style of life
1. DeLillo's structuring of the narrative
2. The naming of the time for which intimacy is reserved
The DeLillo critic Bruce Bawer
Jack: A character and a function
Subversions
Cantor
1. The main character Kat struggling to free herself from repetitious life
2. Changing for the better
3. A reinvention of the George Herriman comic strip
The nature of the information Kilgore imparts and its resemblance to the discourse of postmodern theory
Stephenson
1. Snow Crash: Protagonist, a samurai-wielding pizza delivery boy
2. The irony with which Snow Crash is written
Conclusion
Works cited

Abstract

In Niel Brügger's essay "What about the postmodern?" Brügger relates Lyotard's idea of the narrative of emancipation, writing that "[in such narratives] it is not only important to legitimate denotative statements, which fall into the sphere of truth, but also to legitimate prescriptive statements, which fall into the sphere of justice," and that such grand narratives are "no longer trustworthy" (80). In this paper I will first examine the function of the grand narrative in Don DeLillo's White Noise and will then examine grand narratives in a range of short fiction. DeLillo's characters, although espousing doctrines that would seem to subvert existing grand narratives, are building for themselves sets of new grand narratives, which are often precariously founded upon the old. There is a mediation at work in the text evident not just in the way Jack lives his life in the consumer world, bombarded by information, but also in the way Jack narrates this world. I will focus on how that narration is working.