CLASS TEST: EXPECTED RESULTS

1. The word postmodernism well displays the movement’s cultural features and contradiction: first of all it implies a relationship with modernism since at the same time it comes diachronically after, but also goes beyond some of its tenets. As it always happened with something new, at the beginning it is considered with suspect.

2. Modernism and postmodernism while constantly having a mutual silent dialogue, are totally different as far as the way they consider truth, because while modernists still believe in the possibility to find a meaning which could give relevance to their existence and they followed personal quest in this direction, postmodernists do not even think to look for truth as a single unique point of reference because they don’t believe there is one.

3. Intertextuality is a cultural and narrative technique which openly displays references to other texts in different ways ranging from inner influence structural frameworks and/or quotations.

4. The connection between the rise of the novel and the birth of industrialization is clearly explained by Robyn’s lesson, where she finds a justification in the protestant ethic as the string board for the investment of once no how. If on the one hand capitalists invested their money in industrial projects, the novelist invests his/her imagination to create a product that customer only knows he wants when reading the novel. Robyn is one of the protagonists of Lodge Nice Work, a typical example of the semiotic materialism underlining postmodernism.

5. Postmodernism cannot distinguish between high and low art because it rejects the idea of meaning as a reference point, and, as a result, if there is no reference meaning, there cannot be any definite truth or authority which can establish what is high and low art all the same discourse formation that can coexist.

6. Postmodernism does not believe in the concept of authority because it poses the idea that since there is no single identity conceived of as a unique finite soul in total control of his/her production, communication and relationships, it follows that there cannot be a single author from which a text can totally originate and therefore there is only production as a tissue of intertextual references.

7. Readers in postmodernism come to the forefront for the same reason that explains the lack of a single author. If there is no author meaning, comprehension and interpretation, there is a shift from the author to they who create possible meaning and interpretation for their process of meaning, that is from trying to find personal meanings out of the discourse formation they can across in the text they read.

8. Using the Bible as a structuring principle of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a revolutionary attitude rationally conceived of to put into question the text of the Bible seen as a dogmatic point of reference. The Bible, the very essence of western culture is used in a gain like narrative framework to create a form of entertainment like the novel. In addition it provides the intelligent reader a sense of direction to follow the project displaying one of the most traditional format of the western novel: the bildouns roman. Indeed, the name of the chapters are symbolic and metaphorical representation of different steps and stages of growth in the protagonist life. In short religion, the untouchable references and truth excellence of all western culture is continually and continuously questioned, thus demonstrating that postmodernism does not believe in history, meaning, dogmas, author or whatever when they come to be considered untouchable rules that are expected to tell people what to do and what to not.

9. Inserted parallel stories are meant to provide the reader a parallel layer where symbolically and thus metaphorically the narrator creates a silent dialogue between storyline, plot and the inserted stories of the novel. It follows that the structural choice wants to underline the apparent difference between realism, apparently telling about facts, history and events, and fiction. Fiction actually means something invented. Storyline and inserted stories are just a way for the narrator to provide the reader with occasion for reflecting and researching about once life.

10. The adoption of a first person narrator for most part of the novel is an other gain like choice with which the writer Jeanette Winterson herself plays with the reader in that he doesn’t easily distinguish between Jeanette the concrete living writer and Jeanette the protagonist of the novel, thus making fun of all those (critics included)that still are unable to understand fiction is not concrete reality: it is an artcraft, something made up and despite of this most of the time conceived of as more real than reality itself. In a few words, hyperreal.