Moon Palace - post-modern narrative techniques

A detailed Summary of Moon Palace - post-modern narrative techniques

First of all it is necessary to partially understand the concept of post-modernity in order to apply post-modern concepts to Moon Palace. So the first question to be answered is, what is post-modernism ?

Post-modernity is an expression to describe our contempory time, much like the word Classic describes an epoch. However the post-modern concept is very divers as there is not even a common definition of post-modernism. I'll point out the most important definitions.

1. Post-Modernism is a further development from the age of modernity

2. Post-Modernism breaks with modernism

3. Post-Modernism comes before modernity

4. (Post-Modernism is only a mental construct form crazed French philosophers)

5. (Post-Modernism has never existed)

The three common definitions share many characteristics of post-modernity. Most important the post-modernity rejects the existence of one objective reality or truth. This theorem is called constructivism and forms the basis for the post-modern concept.

"Meaning is imposed on the world by us, rather than existing in the world independently of us. There are many ways to structure the world, and those are meanings or perceptions for any event or concept."

It is to been seen that Moon Palace does certainly not belong to the radical post-modern literature for Moon Palace is too realistic and straightforward in its structure thus leading to a far to unhindered creation of images in mind. Although being not as experimental as Auster's New York Trilogy and being rather reconstructive with more realistic aesthetics, Auster clearly breaks with traditional modern narrative techniques, like the traditional symbolism or imagery. The combination of a realistic setting with post-modern style elements is often called Neo-Realism.

he simplest perception like seeing and hearing does not create an image of one real existing world, but construct of one's mind only. Radical constructivism even rejects the existing of a reality without someone to perceive it, there the universe would cease to exist with the last being dying, moderate constructivists are of the opinion that an outer world exists but can never be perceived in an absolute objective way. This point of view has had great impact on the development of post-modernism. Therefore the post-modernists tend to reject all great constructs referred to as grand narratives, those grand narratives are for example history, science, education, ideology and even language. So the first steps of post-modernism were language experiments, breaking with the narrative of grammar and context, creating radical, but nearly not understandable texts.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1244
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English