GRENDEL

POST MODERNISM  A reaction to Modernism, which was a reaction to Realism, which was a reaction to Romanticism, etc.  Modernism expressed a sadness that life was subjective and meaning fragmented, but believed Art could transcend this fragmentation and show truth by looking at the aggregate of the whole.

POST MODERN LIT  Post Modernism embraces the fragmentation and subjectivity and rejects the notion that there is a truth or a meaning. Grendel plays with this assumption that life is meaningless—a Nihilistic Theme.  There is a celebration of the lack of meaning—of nonsense. There is a kind of PLAYFULNESS—dark humor and irony are very common.  Pushes the ideas of Modernism to extremes—discards the need for a traditional narrative, of sticking to a single genre or form, of pretending to be real and not fictive.

INTERTEXTUALITY  One of the realizations of the post-modern artist is the impossibility of originality. Everything that is created relies on exposure to and influence by previous creative works. So the post-modernist embraces this intertextuality and makes it central to the work.  Grendel takes the villain and monster from Beowulf and almost all of the elements of the story are borrowed from the original.  It also borrows overtly from other cultural narratives and schools of thought.

PASTICHE  The post modern writer also rejects traditional notions of form and the limitations of genre. A work can be a cobbling together of all sorts of text types.  Grendel is a combination of novel, script and epic poem with illustrations like a children’s book. This is sometimes referred to as “genre bending”.  This also serves to highlight the focus on FRAGMENTATION

METAFICTION  Post modern works will draw attention to the fact that they are works of fiction and create stories about stories (think about the Things They Carried ).  Grendel is overtly fictive and the monster and characters seem to be aware of being part of mythology and cultural narratives.  This creates an unusual relationship between reader and text—a much different feeling than in the works of realism and their verisimilitude.

REJECTION OF GRAND NARRATIVES  Postmodernists not only reject grand narratives, but they also embody an “anti-authoritarian” position when approaching and analyzing the world and its cultural productions. In other words, postmodernists distrust any entity or agency that tries to control or regulate what people can or cannot do, and they also distrust any agent or element that tries to fixate the meaning that something possesses (or can ultimately possess). --Sims, Stuart (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism  The Hero Archetype—who’s to say what is heroic? Can a monster be the hero? Are we bound to the patterns and narratives of our culture, our mythology or is life meaningless and random? Is it all “accident”?  In some sense this becomes a Free Will vs. Determinism theme

JOHN GARDNER  Accidently killed his brother in a farm accident as a youth—haunted him his entire life—what is accidental? What does it all mean?  "I was conscious that what I was about to do (or dramatize, or seek to get clear) was an annoying sometimes painful disharmony in my own mental experience, a conflict between a wish for certainty, a sort of timid and legalistic rationality, on the one hand, and, on the other, an inclination toward childish optimism, what I might now describe as an occasional flickering affirmation of all that was best in my early experience of Christianity." Here we recognize the basis for Grendel's predicament: his stubborn clinging to skepticism and cold, hard reason, while constantly tempted by belief.- -The Twelve Traps in John Gardner's Grendel by Barry Fawcett—read the first 2 pages now