Subversion_and_Transgression_of_Norms_in_Contemporary_Literature

ENG304 Midterm Essay topic (Home Students) ENG304 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Write an essay on the following topic: ‘One of the major functions of art in the modern world is to challenge commonly-accepted views and ideas. Discuss how precisely any TWO novels on the course subvert AND/OR transgress social, ethical or literary norms.’ Your essay should be 1500 words long and submitted via Turnitin on Blackboard before noon on Wednesday February 16th. You may choose any two novels from the Banned Books and Cult Fiction halves of the course. Bear in mind that you may not write on those texts in the exam. NOTE: YOU HAVE A FREE CHOICE OF ANY NOVEL FROM BOTH THE BANNED BOOKS AND CULT FICTION SECTIONS. YOU MAY ALSO CHOOSE TO DISCUSS TRANGRESSION OF SOCIAL NORMS OR ETHICAL NORMS OR LITERARY NORMS, OR A COMBINATION OF MORE THAN ONE.  • Causes readers to react to the story • It involves the defamiliarisation of familiar, traditional norms • Attack on traditional codes of discourse • When literature follows norms, it is essential restating that culture’s dominant values • What does one's definition of "literature" reveal about one's attitudes, beliefs, values, training, or socialization (in short, one's ideological affiliation)' • How do definitions and categories of "literature" and especially "good literature" coincide with specific political issues like "Who should govern'" "Who should have what role or function in society'" "What kinds of behaviors and belief should be excluded or included'" Osgood defines style as norm and deviation. A norm is the common practice or acceptable usage in language. It is what is permissible within the rules governing the use of language. For instance all human normal human beings have two legs each. It is the norm and anything contrary to this is a deviation. Deviation is a departure from general order. It is the deliberate violation of the norms. Every use of figure of speech could be seen as deviation. Example there is deviation in the sentence: Colourless green idea sleeps furiously. Following Chomsky’s selectional creterion, the word “sleep” is deviant and ungrammatical in the above sentence because it selects an inanimate subject. Moreover ideas have no colour. The contradiction usage – colourless – green is also a deviation. The sentence is grammatical and it violates the rule of choice. The problem with this definition is that it is difficult to decide what is the norm. Is it the ordinary or the elevated usage' Another weakness is that not all text are all literary deviant. There are some poems which cannot be said to be deviant. Norm is an established pattern within a text. The norm of language as a whole is solely concerned with linguistic levels of language, such as the grammar, phonology, lexical structure and graphology. Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sex, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime. The genre of "transgressive fiction" was defined by Los Angeles Times literary critic Michael Silverblatt.[1] Rene Chun, a journalist for The New York Times, described transgressive fiction thus:[2] A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge. The genre has been the subject of controversy, and many forerunners of transgressional fiction, including William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr., have been the subjects of obscenity trials. Transgressional fiction shares similarities with splatterpunk, noir, and erotic fiction in its willingness to portray forbidden behaviors and shock readers. But it differs in that protagonists often pursue means to better themselves and their surroundings—albeit unusual and extreme ones. Much transgressional fiction deals with searches for self-identity, inner peace, or personal freedom. Unbound by usual restrictions of taste and literary convention, its proponents claim that transgressional fiction is capable of pungent social commentary. There is also some overlap with literary minimalism, as many transgressional writers use short sentences and simplistic style. • Parody as a transgression of literary norms • Each plane functions in a distinctive language mode, or style; and each is turned in on itself, self-conscious and self-critical. The machinery of the critical evaluation is - in short - laughter, or - at more length - a sense of the absurd as quick and sure and sharp as ever one dare hope to encounter.’ • ‘The structure of hell is spoken of as an eternity and is buried within the landscape. This is reached only by a tangled path. O’Brien designs antagonistic hells, whose governing principles are opposite variations from with is normal; the everyday hell is a world of exaggerated flux, under the sway of “Atomic theory”, which insists that no physical object is stable.’ • ‘As a character who has always felt that the speculations of de Selby were important and that the world must be explicable in conceptual terms, he must accept logic and believe in the scientific method, no matter how chaotic seem to be the conclusions it produces and how much these are at variance with the other reality he recognises with the other, separates part of his brain - the reality of the external world.’ (p.168). [On Policeman Fox]): ‘[P]erhaps God, perhaps the devil, but certainly the moving principle of this world and the chief agent of the punishment of the narrator.’ (p.178). [On Myles na nGopaleen:] ‘He was a multiplicity of characters - at once a Dublin “gutty”, a famous journalist, an art critic, banker, archaeologist, inhabitant of Santry, aesthete, civil servant, social commentatory, and anything else he wanted to be according to the dictates of his mood or as a likely subject for satire or parody presented itself.’ (p.192; quoted in Conor Keilt, PG Dip., UU 2011.) • The theory is that living is an illusion and with that everything becomes possible.’ • Meta-novelist…exaggeration • ‘de-chronologised’ novel In order to demonstrate that to ignore the "imaginative accomplishment of a work" is to totally misunderstand the claims that art makes on us, Boyd further correctly observes that "For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial" and concludes from this that "attention—engagement in the activity—matters before meaning." Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention. Boyd devotes the largest part of his essay to an analysis of the play with "patterns" in Nabokov's Lolita that shows, for Boyd, that "A writer can capture our attention before, in some cases long before, we reach what academic critics would accept as the 'meaning' or 'meanings' of works. The high density of multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind." • LOOK UP Lolita: nymphet at normal school For both novels; paragraph on parody, allusions to other works, tone and language usage ('), chronology of events told, narrative/ narration, the protagonists as critics of certain things…eg Humbert as critic of modern love or the contemporary view that it is normal behaviour for sexually explorative girls(') , addresses the reader directly (just in Lolita'), Draw parallels between both books in each chapter. Both realities in the books are suspiciously superficial- “Through the abundance of coincidences, self-referencing allusions, images, dates and story lines,”(escholarship pdf). • Hell: narrator in hell in t.t.p. and life for Humbert becomes a type of hell etc.