Good fiction unites us as humans, because it gives us empathy
A friend once joked that when I am drunk, I slip headlong into literary theory. Perhaps she is right? I certainly theorise enough, even when I have only had water for days. I do not believe that postmodernism existed before the internet. Postmodernism is what goes on in hypertexts, what happens on twitter as people write together. Digital reading, where I can see how many others liked a certain passage, and publicise my notes. Postmodernism is not simply what happened after modernism; modernism never ended. We are still frightened of our technology, still wonder what it will alter, and when.
Postmodernism is creating something that draws on new technology, not the fear of it. Postmodernism is Shelley Jackson's Skin project ('Ineradicable Stain: Skin Project', go look). Neil Gaiman's Calendar of Tales. Amanda Palmer's twitter feed.
And this is all so raw. It continues without guidance, writing a path into the unknown. It turns reading into a collaboration. What about reader response? Does the texts here exist? Can I analyse a twitter feed as narrative?
Gaiman speaks of it in a video. (He speaks a beautifully blunted British. Worn down, I suspect, by America.)
This should of course be my master's thesis. But I can't, because I must make myself palatable to employers, who have no idea what postmodernism entails. Instead I shall apply myself and narrative theory to the law.
Postmodernism is creating something that draws on new technology, not the fear of it. Postmodernism is Shelley Jackson's Skin project ('Ineradicable Stain: Skin Project', go look). Neil Gaiman's Calendar of Tales. Amanda Palmer's twitter feed.
And this is all so raw. It continues without guidance, writing a path into the unknown. It turns reading into a collaboration. What about reader response? Does the texts here exist? Can I analyse a twitter feed as narrative?
Gaiman speaks of it in a video. (He speaks a beautifully blunted British. Worn down, I suspect, by America.)
Click to viewThis should of course be my master's thesis. But I can't, because I must make myself palatable to employers, who have no idea what postmodernism entails. Instead I shall apply myself and narrative theory to the law.