Post-postmodernismo attraverso l'opera di George Saunders e il racconto Puppy

Post-postmodernismo e George Saunders

Cosa viene prima

• La postmodernità: l'organizzazione dell'esperienza e del sentire culturale e sociale del tardo capitalismo
• La fiction postmodernista si sposta dalla premessa mimetica: il linguaggio fa la realtà e non può che parlare di se stesso.

. The fiction writer is "ceasing to pretend that his business is to render the world; he knows, more often now, that his business is to make one, and to make one from the only medium of which he is master -- language." William Gass

Deconstruction to Reconstruction

From deconstruction (high post-modernistm) to reconstruction (post- postmodernism)

• DA: Sfiducia e abbandono delle cosiddette master narratives Globalizzazione e consumismo - dal senso del possesso al senso del comprare per essere; Scomparsa del referente storico (mimetico) in favore della primarietà del linguaggio Il disinteresse per il cosiddetto affect (in nome della sperimentazione e dell'ironia) Una preferenza nella fluidità divertente delle superfici rispetto alla complicazione della profondità. SCETTICISMO, APATIA

A: Affect, autenticià, neoromanticismo: literary New Sincerity

New Sincerity

• «Literary New Sincerity does not mark a rejection of post- structuralist ideas about language so much as attempt to work through their implications in the service of something ethically traditional but aesthetically novel.» (Adam Kelly)

an aesthetic sea change in literature, particularly fiction. Put simply, many of the fiction writers who have come on the scene since the late 1980s seem to be responding to the perceived dead end of postmodernism, a dead end that has been reached because of postmodernism's detachment from the social world and immersion in a world of nonreferential language, its tendency, as one writer once put it to me, to disappear up its own asshole. We can think of this aesthetic sea change, then, as being inspired by a desire to reconnect language to the social sphere or, to put it another way, to reenergize literature's social mission, its ability to intervene in the social world, to have an impact on actual people and the actual social institutions in which they live their lives. In the

Biobiblio di George Saunders

• He was born in Amarillo (1958), Texas and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois. He has a degree in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. (from his website)
• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 1996
• Pastoralia, 2000
• In Persuasion Nation, 2006

. The Braindead Megaphone, 2007 . Tenth of December, 2013

• Lincoln in the Bardo, 2017
• Liberation Day, 2022

Tecnica di scrittura: Third-person Ventriloquist

«I do this thing that I call third-person ventriloquist »

• «I do this thing that I call third-person ventriloquist. It's kind of a standard third-person voice at first, and then, as quickly as I can, I try to get into the person's thoughts, but then with the extra kicker of trying to use [or] restrict myself to his or her diction. When you're thinking in somebody else's voice, you sort of do become them. [ ... ] What I've found is this technique really makes me love these characters a lot, even when they're kind of messed up or they're doing things that are evil or questionable. Because you're entering the imaginative process through their doorway, it shifts the world a little bit on its axis.» (NPR, «George Saunders on Absurdism and Ventriloquism in Tenth of December»)

Hearing Voices & Editing

. «what really happens is that as I'm writing, I'm "hearing" these voices-or, actually, much more nuanced versions of them. "Hearing" isn't quite right, but it's some kind of in-the-head improv going on, that is helped along by a quasi-sonic component. The purpose of "doing" the voice is to get some prose down-the internalized speaking-of- the-voice is generative. Then I edit it really hard, which creates a new (on the page) "voice." Then, when I go to do a reading, or prep a piece for a reading, I'm trying to recall what that voice sounded like and (this is the tricky part) recreate it aloud. There is a big gap, however, between what I heard and what I can do. (I can only do about five different voices, so.) Also, this whole "hearing" thing is a little ... approximate. Prose can be extremely communicative; moreso, even, than the human voice. So although I'm starting with some idea of a voice, through the editing, I feel like I push that even further-the reader can discern an incredible amount of nuance, via diction and syntax and punctuation. >> (From «Conversation with G. Saunders> by Steve Gronert Ellerhoff)