Post Modern Era

1. Emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on how seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on what can be perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness form of writing.

2. A movement away from apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's stories are an exalmple of this as they have multiple view points for the narrarator.

3. A blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary and prose seems more poetic.

4. An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of differing materials and content.

5. A tendency toward reflexivity about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production.

6. A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimal designs and a rejection of formal aesthetic theories in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.

7. A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.

Magic Realism

New type of realism created by Gabirel Garcia Marquez that blends realism with playful imagination

Timeline of Events in Literature

1954- Wallace Stevens publishes Collected Poems
1961- Joseph Heller publishes his satirizing book on military logic in Catch-22
1966- Bernard Malamud publishes The Fixer, a book abut the Jewish life in Czarist Russia
1973- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publishes the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago; documents oppression in the Soviet Union
1976- Alex Haley publishes a book about his family and its origins in Africa in the novel Roots
1982- Alice Walker publishes the book The Color Purple
1989- Amy Tan publishes the Joy Luck Club
1995- Garrett Hongo publishes Volcano: A memoir of Hawaii
1996- D. Tashjian publishes WWII art and the home front book
1997- BC. Taylor publishes Nuclear pictures portraying the horrors of nuclear weapons
2002- Large line of books are published showing and describing the events leading up to 9/11

Major Events in the Post Modern Era

Postmodern - ism

Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel) Dr. Seuss' first book, "And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street," (1937), was rejected by 28 publishers until finally Random House Publishing published the book. Among his most famous books is The Cat and the Hat (1957), a story about two children who find themselves home alone with a roguish, hat-wearing feline who is a study in bad behavior. With only 223 words and a lot of repetition, it was ideally suited for beginning readers and became the alternative to the dullness of "See Spot run" primers. In addition to becoming one of the world's most loved children's writers, Ted Geisel worked as a political cartoonist, an advertising illustrator, and a documentary filmmaker. Geisel also wrote books under the names Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone.
Stephen King Stephen King was born in Portland Maine in 1947. As a young man he was unable to find work so he lived off of his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry. Occasionally King would sell one of his short stories, which brought in some money, but this began to happen after many, many rejection letters. His first published story was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber" in Comics Review in 1967. Hard work and long hours writing paid off eventually. King published stories more often, in men's magazines mainly, and many of these stories were later compiled into the Night Shift collection. King began teaching high school in 1971at Hamden Public High School in Maine. He wrote on weekends and evenings, still managing to produce short stories and novels. None of the novels were accepted for publication until the spring of 1973 when Carrie was published, after King's wife fished it out of the garbage where he had thrown it during an exceptionally disheartened mood. Carrie brought financial relief, and freedom in that it enabled King to leave teaching and concentrate solely on his writing.
John Steinbeck John Steinbeck (1902-1968), who was born in Salinas, California, came from a family of moderate means. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. In the post modern era he wrote the mentional books, East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American states. He died in New York City in 1968.