Category
Creative and Artistic
Description
My novel, I Liked Your Book ... Now Tell Me What It Means, takes inspiration from postmodern works like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. My novel, written in second person, features an unnamed female protagonist who wants to determine the true meaning of a short story because her thesis chair asks her how she can definitively assert the author’s intentions, but the subjective nature of the story and the inaccessibility of the author makes interpretation difficult, putting her entire thesis project at risk. My novel mirrors the postmodern quest narrative as the protagonist struggles to locate the author and uncover the story’s true meaning. The novel also integrates common postmodern themes of absurdism, metafiction, and intertextuality. My research for the piece stems from the prominent postmodern theories of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, which consider meaning multiplicity and instability as well as the roles of the reader, author, and text. By integrating the concepts of these theorists and the techniques of Pynchon and Calvino into my original narrative structure, my novel offers a fresh perspective on textual play, enjoyment, and meaning complexity. In this way, my novel, grounded in research, advocates for the playful nature of serious text and invites readers to engage first-hand in this experience by blending academia with absurdity and metafiction with philosophy.
I Liked Your Book ... Now Tell Me What It Means: Intertextual and Postmodern Influences in an Original Narrative
Creative and Artistic
My novel, I Liked Your Book ... Now Tell Me What It Means, takes inspiration from postmodern works like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. My novel, written in second person, features an unnamed female protagonist who wants to determine the true meaning of a short story because her thesis chair asks her how she can definitively assert the author’s intentions, but the subjective nature of the story and the inaccessibility of the author makes interpretation difficult, putting her entire thesis project at risk. My novel mirrors the postmodern quest narrative as the protagonist struggles to locate the author and uncover the story’s true meaning. The novel also integrates common postmodern themes of absurdism, metafiction, and intertextuality. My research for the piece stems from the prominent postmodern theories of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, which consider meaning multiplicity and instability as well as the roles of the reader, author, and text. By integrating the concepts of these theorists and the techniques of Pynchon and Calvino into my original narrative structure, my novel offers a fresh perspective on textual play, enjoyment, and meaning complexity. In this way, my novel, grounded in research, advocates for the playful nature of serious text and invites readers to engage first-hand in this experience by blending academia with absurdity and metafiction with philosophy.
