{"id":608,"date":"2009-04-14T17:55:50","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T22:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=608"},"modified":"2009-04-14T23:31:12","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T04:31:12","slug":"family-life-in-postmodern-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=608","title":{"rendered":"Family Life in Postmodern Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think it’s interesting\u00a0how the chapters in Tropic of Orange<\/span> correspond with the characters. I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s clearly another expression of fragmentation, but it’s odd that she outlines it for us in the beginning. It almost seems like a key, in the way that some of the information in House of Leaves <\/span>seemed like a key. Yamashita is, in a way, telling us how to read the book. She organizes the information, it seems, to help us make sense of the novel. Doesn’t this sentiment seem slightly anti-postmodern? However, I’ve never seen it done in another text, so it is an innovative technique. I wonder if anyone read the chapters out of order. I’d like to go back and reread this in a year, but instead of reading straight through, I’d read the chapters the way they appear in the outline. I wonder how that would change the meaning of the text.<\/p>\n

I liked this book, in particular, because it gave me some ways to\u00a0continue thinking about my research topic. Most of the books we’ve read don’t deal closely with family life. In fact, their seems to be a lack of families, or a tearing apart of families, in most of the books we’ve read. Pynchon doesn’t\u00a0depict a family\u00a0and gives very little weight to the one marriage in the text.\u00a0In House of Leaves<\/span>, the Navidson family is figuratively (and literally in the case of Tom) torn apart.\u00a0 There is one marriage in the Lathe of Heaven<\/span>, but\u00a0it is also made to be a background issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We do see marriage and family life in The Female Man<\/span>, but it is completely different from the traditional idea of the nuclear family. In Beloved<\/span>there are families, but they are often separated by death and slavery. In this text, family members never seem to work as a cohesive unit, but instead stay isolated from one another. In Mao II, Bill, Scott,\u00a0and Karen make up a sort of untraditional family unit.\u00a0 However, this family is also torn apart by the end of the novel. In The Tropic of Orange<\/span>, Rafaela, Sol, and Bobby\u00a0are at the center of the story. Although family members, such as Rafaela and Sol, seem to operate in normal ways, their are various abnormalities surrounding them. In this case, the family life is altered, not internally, but externally as the geography around them twists and turns from its natural state.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sometimes the aspects that interest me most\u00a0in a book are not what it says, but what it doesn’t say.\u00a0There is an obvious absence of family life in the books we’ve read.\u00a0\u00a0This lead me to wonder – where do families (especially nuclear families), marriage, and love fit into postmodernism?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think it’s interesting\u00a0how the chapters in Tropic of Orange correspond with the characters. I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s clearly another expression of fragmentation, but it’s odd that she outlines it for us in the beginning. It almost seems like a key, in the way that some of the information … Continue reading Family Life in Postmodern Literature<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[56,70,59,32,28,63,57,120,51,71,72],"class_list":["post-608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-13-tropic-of-orange","tag-beloved","tag-family","tag-fragmentation","tag-house-of-leaves","tag-lathe-of-heaven","tag-mao-ii","tag-postmodernism","tag-pynchon","tag-the-female-man","tag-tropic-of-orange","tag-yamashita"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608"}],"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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=608"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":611,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions\/611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}