Learning Paths » 5C Interacting
Notes about The Hours
by - (2011-11-29)
Up to 5C - Postmodernism
MCorte - Postmodernism - Notes about The Hours
Michael Cunningham adopted intertextuality as structural principal in this fiction, in that it is a text that connects the lives of three female characters, having apparently no relation.
It is Cunningham's game-like attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes of interest for the intelligent reader, because he or she understands that in a de-centered world the only connection is provided by a text, which becomes the survival island for a series of characters. They provide a superb example of the idea of a multifaceted identity never totally grasped by the same character and the reader as well.
Postmodernism finds in The Hours its realization, differently from a modernist attitude where characters are generally leaving a quest to find balance or a form of order that might give them a reason for living according to a metaphysic principle. Cunningham's characters, male and female all the same, can only display their different aspects, where one's identity is only provide by the mirror image, returned by the interlocutor/s. There exists non unique essence or finited soul and that is way, The Hours is an appropriated title. It reminds fragmentation and dissociation of sensibility, where the different identity of one character, come it to focus, according to context and content: the content of their interaction.
The intelligent reader therefore, can identify with the essence, he or she feels closer to.
There is no protagonist, if not the text which stands in the middle of the discourses their lives, is made of. It follows that Cunningham's novel mioght be consisted of celebration of textuality: a cross section, a network of discourses where it is the reader's task to find a possible direction.
It is Cunningham's game-like attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes of interest for the intelligent reader, because he or she understands that in a de-centered world the only connection is provided by a text, which becomes the survival island for a series of characters. They provide a superb example of the idea of a multifaceted identity never totally grasped by the same character and the reader as well.
Postmodernism finds in The Hours its realization, differently from a modernist attitude where characters are generally leaving a quest to find balance or a form of order that might give them a reason for living according to a metaphysic principle. Cunningham's characters, male and female all the same, can only display their different aspects, where one's identity is only provide by the mirror image, returned by the interlocutor/s. There exists non unique essence or finited soul and that is way, The Hours is an appropriated title. It reminds fragmentation and dissociation of sensibility, where the different identity of one character, come it to focus, according to context and content: the content of their interaction.
The intelligent reader therefore, can identify with the essence, he or she feels closer to.
There is no protagonist, if not the text which stands in the middle of the discourses their lives, is made of. It follows that Cunningham's novel mioght be consisted of celebration of textuality: a cross section, a network of discourses where it is the reader's task to find a possible direction.