Excerpts from the Winnie- the-Pooh film adaptation as well as short stories by Bundy and Shearman are used to establish a core understanding of postmodern fiction. The majority of the module is shaped on the model of Literature Circles, but with an obvious departure in terms of set text. In addition, the novel is placed in context with other postmodern works of fiction, the historical/political realities of the 1960’s counterculture and is discussed in relation to right wing nationalists’ use of the Dresden firebombing in an effort of historical revisionism and holocaust denial.
Somewhere in there, students discuss such philosophical concepts as time, cause and effect, free will, good and evil, relativism, intertextuality, war, historical revisionism, parody, existentialism, frame narratives, fiction and reality, optical illusions, hybrid genres, paradox, fragmentation, Chinese-box-worlds, ontological uncertainty, flying saucers, PTSD, historicity, little green men shaped like plungers and the insignificance of death. Through close reading of Slaughterhouse Five, this module examines key elements of postmodernism and historiographic metafiction. A condition which sends him fluttering between laughter and forgetting in a universe with ill-defined ethics, illusive moral absolutes and rampant relativism.
Part eye-witness account of the WWII Dresden bombing part sci-fi novel part black comedy part absurdist play, Kurt Vonnegut’s postmodern masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five (1969) chronicles the adventures of haphazard hero and anesthetized optometrist Billy Pilgrim who has come unstuck in time. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech-born author Milan Kundera says in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And what do birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ ” Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Pedersen and Jesper Engsted, Aarhus Katedralskole