I thought I’d post in regard to some of the short stories while they’re still fresh in my mind.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Safran Foer’s short story, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” intertwines visual media with text in an attempt to simplify conversations he has had with his family. The symbols ultimately stand in for dialogue and therefore complicate rather than simplify these conversations, at least for the reader who, if he\/she has as short-term of a memory as I do, must flip between pages in order to decode the symbols. Thematically, this story works in that it reveals the complex dynamics of communication (and the futility, I suppose, in attempting to simplify it). And, of course, post-modernly, the story makes good use of mixed media and substitution.<\/p>\n
I read somewhere that Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Weekend<\/em>, which I had seen once a couple of years ago (yay for Netflix). I don’t remember the film well enough to have made this connection on my own. If anything, the absurd fast-paced plot made me think of Voltaire’s Candide. In researching “The Uniforms,” I came across a passage in Marc Osteen’s American Magic and Dread <\/em>that I thought the class might find interesting:<\/p>\n “The story dramatizes DeLillo’s recognition that, as Steven Connor argues, in postmodern culture \u2018images, styles, and representations are not the promotional accessories to economic products; they are the products themselves’…DeLillo’s prescient vision of terrorist manipulation of the media anticipates the themes of Mao II <\/em>as well as the media savvy of real-life terrorists. But the relationship between the media and violence works both ways: the bombardment of consciousness by images is itself a form of violence.”<\/p>\n Like Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms,” Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” makes use of lists in the text. It took me about ten pages into Link’s story for me to realize that I’ve read her before. Another of her short stories, “Stone Animals,” appeared in Best American Short Stories 2005<\/em>. The thing is, it wasn’t the author’s name that made me recall this other work; it was something in the style of the writing. I disliked “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” for the same reasons I disliked “Stone Animals.” I’m having a hard time trying to express exactly what those reasons are; maybe they’re based in my aversion to fantasy, or, on a related note, maybe it’s the nonfiction writer in me talking. Or maybe those reasons are the same inexplicable reasons I have for being unable to sit through many of David Lynch’s films (most notably, Inland Empire<\/em>). I think it’s just that, while I enjoy the absurd, the bizarre, I need it to make sense in the end (or at least some weeks thereafter, when I’ve thought about it enough). I had originally been excited to read “Some Zombie Contingency Plan,” solely because of the title, having been a fan of zombie films for a long time (I even own The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks), but the use of zombies (as metaphor?) in this story threw me off. I’m interested in what the rest of the class thinks. Oh, and check out this blogger’s post about Link’s use of zombies as metaphors:<\/p>\n http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/006628.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I thought I’d post in regard to some of the short stories while they’re still fresh in my mind. Jonathan Safran Foer’s short story, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” intertwines visual media with text in an attempt to simplify conversations he has had with his family. The symbols ultimately stand in for … Continue reading On Foer, DeLillo, and Link<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,10],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-2-short-stories","tag-delillo","tag-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}