Arnason, David. A Girl’s Story. From Bowering, Hutcheon, editors. Likely Stories. Coach House Press, 1992. Originally published in The Circus Performers’ Bar. Vancouver: Talon Books Limited, 1984.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/83487488/A-Girls-Story-227

Michael Ondaajte. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Anansi, 1993.
http://books.google.ca/books/reader?id=cJ9su54FA3UC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb_hover

Understanding history for a post modernist point of view

What is history?

• How so we know the past?
• How do we make sense of it?
• Traditional response is to make stories about it
• E.g. historical fiction, history textbooks
• Yes, the past once existed
• We learn about it through documents and other artifacts that have been left behind
• Traces of the past
• Based on those
• We construct or reconstruct the past

History vs. Truth

• What is fact?
• What is truth?
• Who decides?
• Not easy to decide from post-modern
• Novel, 1984
• Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth
• Rewrites history to reflect current view
• Now have technology to manipulate pictures as well
• Is there a single meaning to the past?
• Who is telling the story?
• Different people see things in different ways
• E.g. Five blind men and an elephant

Billy the Kid

• Book is not about the real Billy the Kid
• MO exposed to American popular culture after WWWII
• Movies with Roy Rodgers and Gene Autry
• Read American comic books
• Became fascinated with Billy by the age of eight
• Legend and truth woven together
• In late 1960’s, discovered a series of paintings about Ned Kelly
• Read books, newspaper articles, Royal Commission Report
• Listened to recorded ballads about Kelly’s exploits
• Showed author how he might create his own picture
• Had already written some poems using Billy’s voice
• Legend of Billy emerged
• With his memories of playing Cowboys and Indians as a child
• Wrote the book over two years
• Took another year to edit and rearrange the manuscript
• Never interested in the real Billy
• Instead, saw him as an alter ego
• Author looked for links between
• Mythology
• History
• Biography
• Created a collage of photographs, lyrics, ballads, short prose pieces, interviews, tall tales and found poems

Putting the book together

• The photographs and layout of the book
• Two important elements
• Many of the photographs staged
• Used family and friends
• Worked with an editor
• Dennis Lee

The Real Billy the Kid

• Born New York City
• November 23, 1859
• Real name: Henry McCarthy
• Mother remarried William H. Antrim
• 1873
• Source of alias?
• Moved to New Mexico
• Used William H. Bonney as an alias
• Committed first murder
• At the age of 12
• Knifed a man who insulted his mother
• By 18 years of age
• Charged with 12 murders
• Captured and sentenced to death
• After his gang killed a sheriff and deputy
• Escaped by killing two guards
• Eventually trapped and shot to death
• By former friend, Pat Garrett

How the author plays with traditional conventions

• Who was Billy the Kid?
• Facts? Myth or fiction?
• MO used some post modern techniques

Post modern literature: some characteristics

As readers we think historical fiction authors have done their research

• Questions role of author
• One single, authorial voice
• Who decides that work has one single meaning
• Meaning of work is not fixed
• Shifting point of view
• Other voices include
• Pat Garrett
• Paulita Maxwell
• Sally Chishum
• Mostly Billy’s voice but
• He is killed on page 6
• His list of dead includes himself
• So is the book written after he is dead?

Discontinuous narrative

• Storyline does not proceed in a linear fashion
• “television” writing
• In fragments
• In present tense
• Has a cinematic feeling to it

Other techniques

• Paradox
• Billy
• “gentleman”
• Pat Garnett
• “sane assassin”
• “sociopath”
• Layering
• How many times is Billy’s death mentioned throughout the story?
• Building on death, may feel like travelling in circles
• Makes writing feel dense
• Used a variety of sources
• To recombine elements of the past
• To create a new work of art

Postmodernism

There are no eternal facts, as there are no eternal truths.
There are no facts, only interpretations.

-Friedrich Nietzche 1844-1900
German philosopher

Postmodernism: a definition

• There is no fixed definition
• Reaction against modernism?
• Evolution on a path to?
• Some characteristics
• General agreement

Postmodernist

• Post WWII
• Later in North America (1960-1970)
• Reaction to war and its aftermath
• Reaction to devastation
• Modernists
• Words no longer adequate
• Continued experiments with form
• Questioned everything
• What is going on?

Postmodernism and capitalism

• Market capitalism
• 18th-19th centuries
• Technology
• Stream driven motor
• Literature
• Realism
• Jane Austen

Second stage...

• Late 19th century to mid 20th century
• Monopoly – capitalism
• Technology
• Electric and internal combustion engine (car)
• Literature
• Modernism

Third stage...

• Multinational or consumer capitalism
• Emphasis on marketing, selling and consuming goods
• Not on producing them
• Technologies
• Nuclear and electronic
• Literature
• Postmodernism

This is where we are now. No one knows what comes next because there are no rules.

Realism

• Characters
• Recognizable
• Stress on character development
• Plot
• Structured, conventional, linear
• Point of view
• Established techniques
• Understandable
• Language
• Does not question the ability of language to communicate ideas
• “Grand narratives”
• Assumes there is meaning in world
• Interest in political extremes

Modernist

• Break with 19th century
• Key year: 1922
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
• Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
• Joyce and Woolf imploys streams of consciousness in their work
• Key event: World War I
• Writers could no longer write realistically because of how the world had changed

Modernism

• Traditional literary models
• Could not adequately represent the post war world
• The futility and anarchy that followed
• Britain
• Russia
• Often suspicious of science and technology used in war
• First technical war
• Writers viewed the world as fragmented and decayed
• World may be understood
• But only in small pieces
• Visual arts:
• Expressionism
• Abstract
• interpretive
• Surrealism
• based on dreams

Modernism & literature

• Literary characters
• Not as “real”
• Use of outsiders
• Fewer traditional heroes
• Story may not be told from omniscient point of view
• Multiple points of view in one story
• Turn from external reality of inner states of consciousness
• E.g. Stream of consciousness writing
• Character’s thoughts
• Plot
• Less structured or “planned”
• May be no “neat” conclusion
• Use of unconventional techniques to advance plot:
• E.g. Songs, newspaper articles
• Popular culture elements

Modernism & language

• Language
• Skepticism
• Language’s ability to reflect reality
• Author’s ability to reflect reality
• “Language exists to conceal thought” –T. S. Eliot

Postmodernism & literature

• Develops and extends style of modernist literature
• Both modernism and postmodernism reject 19th century realism
• Literature becomes more open-ended, fragmented
• Aristotle (350 BC)
• Beginning, middle and end
• May be no clear cut ending, or,
• May return to beginning
• Consciously disorient the reader
• Not what we expect
• Not chronological, straightforward storytelling

High versus Low Culture

• Blurs the line between
• “high” and “low” culture
• E.g. Billy The Kid
• Fiction and non-fiction
• E.g. film and books
• Who decides?
• E.g. postmodern artist: Andy Warhol
• E.g. photos of Marilyn Monroe

Postmodernism & the interpretation of literature

• Who decides what a poem/story/novel means?
• Ask the author?
• May not be totally aware
• Ask the reader?
• Everyone brings their own set of assumptions
• The text itself?
• Does reader require knowledge of an external source or event?

Modern thinking vs. Postmodern thinking

Structure	Anarchy
Theory	Anti-theory
Authoritative interpretation	No final interpretation
Search for underlying meaning	No underlying meaning
Encyclopaedic knowledge (contained)	Web of understanding

Postmodernism

• Distrust towards universal claims about
• Truth
• Ethics
• beauty
• Instead
• Based on individual perception
• Provisional
• No fixed knowledge
• The way you view the world

Modernism & grand narratives

• Stories on how we see the world define ourselves
• Every belief system based on “grand narratives”
• Canada
• What do we believe about our country?
• United States

The Grand narrative of Marxism

• Basic belief
• Capitalism will collapse on itself
• A utopian socialist will happen
• What really happened?
• Feudal systems collapsed
• Replaced by totalitarian regimes
• Narrative fell apart, there was nothing at the core

Post modernism and grand narratives

• Critiques these stories
• beliefs
• Points out that they serve to hide the contradictions
• Occur in any social organization
• Every attempt to create “order”
• Also demands the creation of a equal amount of “disorder”

Grand narratives

• Rejected by post modernism
• Replaced with “mini-narratives”
• About local events
• Not large scale or global
• Provisional, based on situation
• Make not claim to universally true

Modernism & education

• Why are we educated?
• What is the purpose of gaining knowledge?
• To become an “educated” person
• Ideal:
• Liberal arts education

Postmodernism & education

• Knowledge is functional
• You learn things
• Not to know them
• But to use that knowledge
• Emphasis on skills and training
• Much more accepting of modern world
• May use technology to produce art
• May sample other works of art to produce new work
• What is an original?
• E.g. music recordings

Postmodernism & philosophy

• Desire to return to pre-post modern era
• Associated with conservative political and religious groups
• Postmodernism
• Attracts liberals, radicals, feminists

Postmodernism

• Focus thinking about action/social reforms as local/limited
• E.g. improved day care centres in your own community
• Focus on specific local goals
• “think globally, act locally”
• Offers an alternative
• To global culture of consumption
• Celebrates a variety of voices
• Interested in differences and diversity