The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

to the status of fact, and suppresses events which might perturb the status quo. The novel Libra (DeLillo 1989) is a rewriting o ...

Rewriting a historical event To create a postmodern fiction which rewrites a historical incident (Exercise 3), you need to decid ...

hand down historical accounts. For example, imagine a museum or library in which all the alternative histories and memories of t ...

has a special relation to postmodernism, it is what he calls postmodernism’s ‘low art’ double, its ‘sister-genre in the same sen ...

creating and the one we live in. Writers, in order to create new worlds, often draw on elements of traditional or past societies ...

Will there be a religion, or an activity, or a set of beliefs, approximating to a religion? Almost every society originally had ...

understand it. But you can invent some new words, and it may be necessary to do this anyway to allude to concepts which only exi ...

In fact, this is happening all the time in language use: the rise of comput- erisation, for example, has produced considerable l ...

Narration and focalisation An important aspect of how this new world is projected will be deter- mined by narration and focalisa ...

CONCLUSION Postmodernist fictional strategies question our comfortable assumptions about the past and contemporary society. They ...

Postmodern f(r)ictions 155 LeGuin, U. 1981, The Left Hand of Darkness , Futura, London. First published in 1969 in Great Britain ...

156 chapter eight Postmodern poetry , avant-garde poetics In this chapter we broaden some of the possibilities for writing poetr ...

exercises Write a series of postmodern lyrics which engage with each of the following: a) the split self b) the subversion of v ...

unified, expressive self. According to psychoanalytic theory, for example, the human subject who emerges from the Oedipal proces ...

requires, in other words you kept your sense of humour honest, even when you said that poems are less important than a mortgage ...

haven’t been invented yet the body makes it up as it goes along it can happen to anyone it is 1965 my father steps out into a su ...

I am manic, I am sad, I am aggressive, I am violent, I am straight, I am dirty, I am thirty-seven, I am a loner, I am a walker, ...

The subversion of voice One of the challenges of writing a postmodern lyric is to avoid it becom- ing overly confessional, self- ...

running off with the money and faking our own deaths. Will technology make me remote? I don’t know where I am, I never know what ...

and despairing raise their heads and stop believing in the strength of their oppressors.’’ To be slayed by such sighs: a noble f ...