(Photo Credit: theopie)
It's significant to note that I approach this Capstone project under the thrall of David Foster Wallace. Last summer I read Wallace's most notable work "Infinite Jest", a 1,079 page postmodernist masterpiece featured in the Time's 100 Best Novels. It might be trite to say that this book changed my life and unnecessary in an academic blog such as this. But it's true. Wallace changed my entire outlook on living, on what it is to be human, on how I plan to navigate my life in a way that means something. It's with these changes that I approach this Capstone, not to model after Wallace, not to use his body of work as a template for my own, but rather to emulate his tenacious dedication to postmodernists themes.
In order to do that, naturally, it's necessary for me to get a handle on postmodernism as a theory, a disciple. This blog seeks to begin that process.
Postmodernism (which I apply here strictly to literature), like an concept or movement, encompasses a vast arrary of qualitlies which are neither deifinitive or operate in congruence with one another. The postmodernist period begins sometime after the second world war and has not yet reached it's endpoint. Several traits of the postmodernist work include (but are not limited to):
- Irony, Black Humor
- Temporal Distortion (definited as fragmentation, or a nonlinear narrative. For example Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" employs this tactic.)
- and magical realism
(list gathered from http://postmodernblog.tumblr.com/)
In my graphic novel I will be using paranoia, magical realism, and meta fiction.
In my next post I will delve further into this "postmodernist template" and the techniques that I will use to create my capstone.
No comments:
Post a Comment