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  • Being a time being : who is who in Ozeki's A tale for the time being
    Krevel, Mojca
    The post-World War II transition from the modern to the postmodern paradigm, coinciding with the rise of the postindustrial phase of capitalism, has radically altered the ways in which we perceive ... our surroundings and ourselves. In literature, these changes first became evident in 1980s American genre fiction and in the experimental fiction of the 1990s. Mainstream fiction, too, has been reacting to the reality of the media-governed societies and consumer cultures. Its response, however, has been mainly that of a detached observer, commenting upon the new circumstances from a still decidedly Cartesian position. This chapter examines the status of the literary subject in Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being in terms of the governing principles of the postmodern epoch. The chapter argues that the pronounced fluidity, instability and interchangeability of identities in the novel not only comply with Zen-Buddhist principles, which Ozeki has admitted to employing, but also reflect the status of contemporary individuals within the social, historical and economic realities of the postmodern epoch. Examination of the participants in the story-telling act - that is, the concepts of author, narrator, character, and reader - reveals the reliance upon the conceptual framework which Jean Baudrillard developed for the description of the postmodern condition, specifically his concepts of postmodern reality as hyperreality which conditions the fractal nature of postmodern subjects. The adherence of the status and the structure of subjects in the novel to the structural principles of the postmodern paradigm allow us to consider A Tale for the Time Being as an example of a way in which the contemporary American mainstream accommodates the social and historical circumstances of the new historical epoch.
    Vir: Becoming world : probing hybridity in postmodern American fiction (Str. 19-39)
    Vrsta gradiva - članek, sestavni del
    Leto - 2017
    Jezik - angleški
    COBISS.SI-ID - 64109666

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