15th November, 2011

NOTES

Briefing: qualcosa che viene detto a qualcuno in sintesi di qualcosa che è stato già detto, non ammette repliche.

POSTMODERNISM

The book “Oranges are not the only fruit” is a typical postmodern novel.

Postmodernism developed during the sixties and its main tenets are:

• it does no longer believe in the concept of truth, it puts therefore the question of authority into doubt

• it does no longer believe in the concept of a centre as it generally happened in all the previous generations.

If modernism (it covers the first three decades of the XX Century) was still looking for a centre, for a point of reference and put the question and the research on art in the centre, postmodernism questioned all that and came to the conclusion that there is no longer a single centre because saying that there is no absolute truth ALSO IMPLIES THAT THERE IS NO MEANING, there is no longer a centre, but many centers and therefore MEANING IS ALWAYS DIFFERED : THERE IS A CONTINUOUS SLIPPING OF MEANING BECAUSE MEANING IS NEVER STABLE.

The concept is connected to the relationship between: signifier and signified (from ‘to signify’).

The position of the reader is the best one because it is the reader that gives sense of the possible meaning.

A perfectly example of the postmodernism is “Oranges are not the only fruit” that relies on a reconstruction of the Bible structure in a new context (con+text) and there is a lot of intertextuality. Another example is David Lodge’s “Nice work” (ottimo lavoro). There are two characters: a male (Vic, recalls victory), and a female (Robyn Penrose, recalls Robin Hood, an idealist. The surname suggests she is a writer).