Siri Hustvedt’s latest work The Blazing World (2014) is a complex and multi-layered novel that deals with the notion of authorship in the art world. The novel shows an intricate play with the concept of authorship and highlights in particular a form of authorship that is rather restrictive. The fictional author/creator constructs an aesthetic experience …
In Rethinking Postmodernism(s) Katrin Amian declares that “Postmodernism, it seems, is history”[1] for the simple reason that “the term appears to have exhausted its potential as a means of describing and understanding the shifting alliances of literary and cultural production in the new millennium.”[2] I, too, believe contemporary literature can not be understood as …
Last October thirteen international young artists were showing their work in an old hotel in Munich, called Mariandl. Two of them – Stephanie Müller and Klaus Erich Dietl – transformed one of the hotel rooms into a therapy room. The room itself as well as their therapeutic concept was a combination of surrealism and humorous …
In literary reviews ‘Everything is illuminated’ by Jonathan Safran Foer is often praised for its richness in tone and genre. It is both ironic and serious and it shows multiple elements from different genres: it is a Bildungsroman, a magical realistic story, the story of a road trip, the story between friends, a letter …
Foer’s novel ‘Everything is illuminated’ can easily be seen as your typical postmodern novel. It consists of three text forms: the narrative itself, a one-sided letter correspondence, and a kind of magical realistic narrative that is the product of a character called Jonathan Safran Foer. Also, the main narrative is constantly altered by information you …
In Ian McEwan`s Atonement fiction is as ambiguously portrayed as in Kennedy`s “Original Bliss”. But McEwan goes further. He not only portrays the two-faced nature of fiction, he also strongly accentuates its aesthetic potential as well as showing how fiction functions as an instrument of inadequacy. Briony – a thirteen-year-old girl – is the protagonist …
