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(I composed this in Word and then couldn’t find the “import from Word” function; so, hopefully, the formatting isn’t crazy.)<\/p>\n
<\/span>Reading Don DeLillo\u2019s story \u201cComing Sun. Mon. Tues.,\u201d I found a parallel between modernist and postmodern fiction. <\/span> <\/span>There is a scene in Mrs. Dalloway<\/em> where the narration fluidly shifts between the protagonist and other Londoners. <\/span>Although the experiences of these figures are disparate, they are united by common spectacle \u2013 in this case a plane overhead advertising a product spelled by its contrails. <\/span>A sense of community is formed. <\/span>The postmodernist text, on the other hand, uses stream of consciousness in a different way, to affect the divorce of the individual from community. <\/span> <\/span>In the \u201cinformation age,\u201d we have more and more ways to interact with, and ostensibly become part of, communities via technology. <\/span>It seems as though the act of representing oneself online should reinforce a sense of individuality and the sense of being part of a greater community. <\/span>But the sheer amount of content available has the effect of trivializing both the individual and community. <\/span>In the postmodernist reader introduction, the author mentions Umberto Eco\u2019s assertion that, \u201cwe want to say things but our simultaneously aware \u2026 that they have been said before\u201d<\/em> (Nicol 4). <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It seems to me that this sense of redundancy is a large factor in the alteration of our perception of authenticity, and subsequently the feeling that meaningful human interaction and community <\/span>has been declining in recent years. <\/span>Whereas in Woolf\u2019s narrative the airplane unites the various figures, technology in DeLillo\u2019s White Noise<\/em> is a facet of the dehumanizing forces apparent to citizens of the \u201cpostmodern era.\u201d The elitism and sense of progress (as producers of literature) espoused by many modernist authors is noticeably absent in DeLillo\u2019s postmodernist screeds against the banality of consumerist culture. <\/span>At one point, Murray, a character in White Noise<\/em>, <\/em>encapsulates the author\u2019s postmodern angst, describing \u201cthe vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity\u201d (DeLillo 50). <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (I composed this in Word and then couldn’t find the “import from Word” function; so, hopefully, the formatting isn’t crazy.) Reading Don DeLillo\u2019s story \u201cComing Sun. Mon. Tues.,\u201d I found a parallel between modernist and postmodern fiction. There is a scene in Mrs. Dalloway where the narration fluidly shifts between the protagonist and other Londoners. … Continue reading Postmodern Angst<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17,19,20,18],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1","tag-delillo","tag-modernism","tag-white-noise","tag-woolf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}