Struggling With the Postmodern Crisis of History in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984)

Struggling With the Postmodern Crisis of History in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) PDF Author: Tessa Tumbrägel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656114455
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 69

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Passau, language: English, abstract: Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes's most acclaimed novel worldwide, poses and playfully elaborates on questions about traditional(ist) understandings of history and conventional concepts of truth, which are also frequently asked by postmodern theorists and philosophers. How can we know the past? Can we ever do so on objective grounds? Are we not bound to (socio-culturally determined) modes of representation that prevent us from thinking or writing about anything but representation? Does the past even exist outside of our systems of signification or is it merely the product of these systems? In postmodern thought these kinds of questions are raised in the context of an increasing scepticism towards realist or modernist ontology and epistemology. Philosophers and writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and later Hayden White and Keith Jenkins testify to the assumption that "history now appears to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of foundationless, positioned expressions" (Jenkins 1997: 6), stressing that there is an inescapable relativity in every representation (or rather re-interpretation) of historical entities (cf. White 1997: 392). However, in this paper I will hope to show that, despite it being "a very hard [and indeterminate] act to follow" (Barth 1980: 66), history is not dead in Barnes's novel and neither is the pursuit of (its) meaning. In fact, both remain subjects of a longing for truth and authenticity that is repeatedly re-invented, played with, undermined and reinstalled, rather than deconstructed, in the course of FP's narrative. I intend to divide my paper into two sections, each of them further divided into several sub-parts. In section one I will at first provide a short compendium of postmodern philosophical-theoretical assumptions on histo

Struggling With the Postmodern Crisis of History in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984)

Struggling With the Postmodern Crisis of History in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) PDF Author: Tessa Tumbrägel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656114455
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 69

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Passau, language: English, abstract: Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes's most acclaimed novel worldwide, poses and playfully elaborates on questions about traditional(ist) understandings of history and conventional concepts of truth, which are also frequently asked by postmodern theorists and philosophers. How can we know the past? Can we ever do so on objective grounds? Are we not bound to (socio-culturally determined) modes of representation that prevent us from thinking or writing about anything but representation? Does the past even exist outside of our systems of signification or is it merely the product of these systems? In postmodern thought these kinds of questions are raised in the context of an increasing scepticism towards realist or modernist ontology and epistemology. Philosophers and writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and later Hayden White and Keith Jenkins testify to the assumption that "history now appears to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of foundationless, positioned expressions" (Jenkins 1997: 6), stressing that there is an inescapable relativity in every representation (or rather re-interpretation) of historical entities (cf. White 1997: 392). However, in this paper I will hope to show that, despite it being "a very hard [and indeterminate] act to follow" (Barth 1980: 66), history is not dead in Barnes's novel and neither is the pursuit of (its) meaning. In fact, both remain subjects of a longing for truth and authenticity that is repeatedly re-invented, played with, undermined and reinstalled, rather than deconstructed, in the course of FP's narrative. I intend to divide my paper into two sections, each of them further divided into several sub-parts. In section one I will at first provide a short compendium of postmodern philosophical-theoretical assumptions on histo

Struggling With the Postmodern Crisis of History in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984)

Struggling With the Postmodern Crisis of History in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) PDF Author: Tessa Tumbrägel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656113955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Passau, language: English, abstract: Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes’s most acclaimed novel worldwide, poses and playfully elaborates on questions about traditional(ist) understandings of history and conventional concepts of truth, which are also frequently asked by postmodern theorists and philosophers. How can we know the past? Can we ever do so on objective grounds? Are we not bound to (socio-culturally determined) modes of representation that prevent us from thinking or writing about anything but representation? Does the past even exist outside of our systems of signification or is it merely the product of these systems? In postmodern thought these kinds of questions are raised in the context of an increasing scepticism towards realist or modernist ontology and epistemology. Philosophers and writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and later Hayden White and Keith Jenkins testify to the assumption that “history now appears to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of foundationless, positioned expressions” (Jenkins 1997: 6), stressing that there is an inescapable relativity in every representation (or rather re-interpretation) of historical entities (cf. White 1997: 392). However, in this paper I will hope to show that, despite it being “a very hard [and indeterminate] act to follow” (Barth 1980: 66), history is not dead in Barnes’s novel and neither is the pursuit of (its) meaning. In fact, both remain subjects of a longing for truth and authenticity that is repeatedly re-invented, played with, undermined and reinstalled, rather than deconstructed, in the course of FP’s narrative. I intend to divide my paper into two sections, each of them further divided into several sub-parts. In section one I will at first provide a short compendium of postmodern philosophical-theoretical assumptions on history and historiography and their relation to the (de)construction of representation, truth and knowledge and thereafter show how these assumptions are critically acclaimed by traditional(ist) historians. With this theoretical background at hand, in section two I will proceed to the actual analysis of FP with regard to its appropriation of or divergence from postmodern thoughts and (literary) presuppositions. In so doing I will hope to show that, although inspired by postmodern theories, Barnes does not dwell in eternal indeterminacy or ‘historic nihilism’ but attempts to actively engage with history and the difficulties involved in the process of its pursuit.

Staring at the Sun

Staring at the Sun PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797791
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending traces the life of a seemingly ordinary woman with an extraordinary disdain for wisdom in this “marvelous literary epiphany” (The New York Times Book Review). In this wonderfully provocative novel, Barnes follows Jean Serjeant from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, confronting readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed). Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original.

British Literature in Transition, 1980–2000

British Literature in Transition, 1980–2000 PDF Author: Eileen Pollard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107121426
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends from 1980-2000.

Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch PDF Author: B. Nicol
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230288588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction traces the preoccupation in Murdoch's fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it. This argument was given an extra resonance by the death of Murdoch after Alzheimer's disease in 1999, when the book was first published - a curious blurring of life and work typical of the posthumous reassessment of Murdoch. This new edition includes detailed readings of novels not discussed in the original ( The Bell, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine , and The Philosopher's Pupil ) and includes a new preface, an updated bibliography and three new chapters covering Murdoch's most important and popular novels, considering in more depth her relationship with the dominant literary and intellectual currents of her time.

Metroland

Metroland PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797775
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of A Sense of an Ending comes a comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s that is “wonderfully fresh, crackling with nostalgic irreverence” (Vogue). Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening, and a portrait of the accommodations that some of us call "growing up" and others "selling out.

A Poetics of Postmodernism

A Poetics of Postmodernism PDF Author: Linda Hutcheon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134986262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Hawksmoor

Hawksmoor PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
ISBN: 9780241965481
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe.' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . Cover art by: Barn'whether the book addresses graffiti explicitly, evoke a city from the past, or are considered cult classics, the novels all share the quality - like street art - of speaking to their time.' Guardian Gallery

Flaubert's Parrot

Flaubert's Parrot PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797856
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book Review Julian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.

The Fiction of Julian Barnes

The Fiction of Julian Barnes PDF Author: Vanessa Guignery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350309117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Julian Barnes's work has been marked by great variety, ranging not only from conventional fiction to postmodernist experimentation in such well-known novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters (1989), but also from witty essays to deeply touching short stories. The responses of readers and critics have likewise varied, from enthusiasm to scepticism, as the substantial volume of critical analysis demonstrates. This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the essential criticism on Barnes's work, drawing from a selection of reviews, interviews, essays and books. Through the presentation and assessment of key critical interpretations, Vanessa Guignery provides the most wide-ranging examination of his fiction and non-fiction so far, considering key issues such as his use of language, his treatment of history, obsession, love, and the relationship between fact and fiction. Covering all of the novels to date, from Metroland (1981) to Arthur and George (2005), this is an invaluable introduction to the work of one of Britain's most exciting and popular contemporary writers.