Similarities/Différances (In the quest to be new, I've just repeated history)

Bressler writes that post-modernism substitutes a collage for a worldview rather than a map. It highlights "how 'seeing' or 'reading' actually occurs rather than investigating the actual object being seen or read" (96). I think that this actually leads to gimmicks in writing style. I don't quite understand why seeing life as a collage couldn't be the object or subject of the novel or the book without tinkering with the writing structure. Don DiLillo's White Noise  is written in the first person and Underworld is third-person omniscient (he called it a rolling God's eye view or something else that made it sound new). He's also considered a great member of the postmodern community. However, he isn't doing too much that is radical in terms of presentation.

            Lauren Slater wrote a book that was fairly conventional as well, except she put the idea of lying in a nonfiction book at the forefront. One of the chapters was presented as a letter to her editor on the merits of the book being published as nonfiction rather than fiction. She claimed she was discussing important ideas and that was the merit of the book. The idea of an emotional narrative of truth that should considered as truthful as actual events(I would start quoting from the book but I ditched it). One of the lines was a quote from a writer that told her she would break literary ranks. It's easy to play with the subversion of truth in the nonfiction genre. The entire book felt like a gimmick. Brahm Stoker did this with Dracula. Even Chuck Palahniuk's work becomes dull; Rant was told using oral history which has been done before. Even when older writers incorporated letters into their novels, allowed multiple characters to express their views.

            The ideas of post-modernism seem exciting, but that energy is hard to maintain. It seems that everything has been peeled apart to the smallest elements. How does one start putting something back together and where do they find the conviction to do so?

            I'm unsure how much of this chapter is stating the obvious and breaking it down into terms. After talking to Ryan and Josh about this feeling, they mentioned that these were the first people to bring academic focus to these concerns. I think of Black Mass as subverting binary dichotomies and those started a while ago. Paradise Lost brought Lucifer to the numerator position of the God/Satan dichotomy even though it wasn't Milton's intention.

            Perhaps this shows how much these ideas have permeated our culture. The ideas seem somewhat self-explanatory once they are reduced (I guess that's treasonous). Not that I'm an expert. The intertextuality seems to be demonstrated by "The Wasteland" and the poets working in the epic tradition; Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

            What's interesting is that the Structuralist approach is a standard practice in the classroom in the undergraduate classes. At least that is what I remember in my own classes when we'd do close readings in class. However, I've been hearing complaints about this approach from professors that have used it. It does allow every student to get on the same page quickly in class and provides lead into new techniques. The desire to be done with that school of thought is interesting and so is the fact that it is still being used.

         I do like the idea of not treating texts in isolation. Part of it has to do with the Bible, a collection of multiple books jammed together to create a seemingly cohesive whole if you don't deconstruct it. We should have a Construction theory where we work on putting things together, not necessarily using them to take things apart. If you constantly disassemble components there will be nothing left. Even post-modernism seem to be unable to build anything.

        Heyne pointed out that I've just suggested structualism.