po-mo story assignment

Postmodern Story assignment

Rough draft: June 4

Final: June 8

Length: 3 pages

Assignment:

Write a story that acknowledges fiction’s limitations and playfully pushes against them.  Your story should be one or more of the following:

Self-conscious                                       Self-referential                         Absurd                                   

Transparently artificial                      Intertextual                     Metafictional/metatextual

Genre-bending                                      Playful                                     artifactual

Some examples, in addition to the ones we’ve already considered: 

Borges’s story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” poses as an academic essay about a modern writer who rewrites Don Quixote.  The essayist insists that the modern writer’s version is much better than that of Cervantes, even though they are word for word the same.

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a short novel about a guy who has gone out on his lunch break to get a new pair of shoelaces.  The novel takes place in the man’s head while he rides  down the escalator in his office building.

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations takes large chunks of Dickens’s novel but tells a very different story, one of sex and violence; bordering on the unreadable, this novel critiques the male-dominated world.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried calls into question how we know what “really” happened, etc.

Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, whose chapters can be read in various orders.

You might:

rewrite a book we’ve already read, and interpose authorial commentary;

write about trying to write a story;

write a story with different endings;

write a story about a character in search of a story, or a setting in search of a character, or a plot in search of a setting, or…