The Collision of High and Popular Culture in Robert Coover's Collection
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VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY ELINGA ŠIMK ŪNAIT Ė THE COLLISION OF HIGH AND POPULAR CULTURE IN ROBERT COOVER’S COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES “PRICKSONGS AND DESCANTS” MA Paper Academic Advisor: Dr. Daina Miniotait ė Vilnius, 2007 CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………...3 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..4 I. Postmodern Context.....................................................................................6 II. High and Popular Culture in Literature........................................................9 III. Intertextuality.............................................................................................12 IV. Metafiction.................................................................................................16 V. Postmodern Elements in “Pricksongs and Descants”.................................19 1. High and Popular Culture.....................................................................20 a) High Culture..........................................................................20 b) Popular Culture.....................................................................21 c) High-Pop Culture Collision...................................................24 d) The Theme of Sexuality........................................................29 e) The Theme of Violence.........................................................33 VI. The Role of Intertextuality in Coover’s Stories.........................................35 VII. Metafiction in Coover’s Stories.................................................................45 CONCLUSIONS.....................................................................................................….51 SUMMARY….............................................................................................................53 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................54 2 ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the collision of high and popular culture in Robert Coover’s collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. The methods chosen for the study are close reading and textual analysis by interpreting every short story, defining its genre, noticing the features of high and popular culture and ways of presenting them, grasping the hot point where high and popular cultures collide, analyzing the aim and message of the collision. The paper emphasizes the blend of high-popular culture collision and discloses it with the help of postmodernism, high and popular culture instances, intertextuality, metafiction and genres transformation techniques through the themes of sexuality, violence and television. The research has revealed the message of the author hidden in the collision of high and low culture to satirize the image of 1960s America society and help the readers better understand the present reality. 3 INTRODUCTION The aim of this paper is to determine the line between high and low culture in an American postmodern writer’s Robert Lowell Coover’s (b. 1932) collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. While modern literature includes only high culture, in postmodernism the line between these two kinds of culture becomes obscure. Such a collision helps to disclose some invisible parts of the text; it denudes the human psyche, the force of human subconsciousness, and the dark corridors of human behavior. The objectives of this paper are to determine the role of postmodernism, intertextuality, metafiction, and define the bridge of the two above-mentioned cultures. Postmodernism in Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants” is well presented through the collision of high and popular culture. We may say that the author wanted to convey a strong message to satirize the society of 1960s America by intertwining these two cultures and colliding them in the sense of very well known patterns. In my work I analyze high and popular culture as literary terms, posmodernism, intertextuality and metafiction because Coover used them very widely in his writing. The body of the work is based on the collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. I use the methods of close reading and textual analysis by interpreting the short stories, defining their genre, grasping the aspects of high and popular culture, finding the hot point where high and popular cultures collide, analyzing the aim and message of the collision. The scope of my work is determined by the theme. The research deals with theoretical and practical data needed to support and solve the research problem. The scope ranges from literary knowledge of postmodernism, high and popular culture, intertextuality, metafiction, genres transformation, and Coover’s writing style to practical understanding of high and popular culture collision and the author’s message to such extent that is needed to determine the line between high and low culture in Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants”. Coover is a postmodern writer as he employs intertextuality, metafiction and high-popular culture collision techniques in his works. He is an experimentalist whose work offers insight into the nature of literary creation, narrative forms, and cultural myths. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Convinced early in his career that traditional fictional modes were exhausted, Coover has pioneered a variety of inventive narrative techniques, complex metafictional structures 4 and lucid pastiches of various genres to satirize contemporary American society and the role of the author. In this way, he has attempted to subvert and revitalize older, cliché- ridden literary forms. Coover regards himself a realist though not a traditional one. He is a writer whose works elude easy categorization. His writing includes the genres of fairy tales, historiographic metafiction, the fantastic, magic realism, and postmodernism. While most of his writings belong to all these genres, they, nevertheless, fall subject to none. Where he experiments with formal archetypes, like fairy tales and biblical parables, he also exposes the metafictional fissures in terms of narration, sexuality, and structure. He mimics the postmodern quest for some sort of placement in this world by layering fairy tales, nursery rhymes, allegories, parables, and mythology upon his own outspoken and incredibly human heroes. This humanist edge also aids Coover in his treatment of sexuality and violence within his texts. 5 I. Postmodern Context In order to understand Coover’s writing better, it is necessary to define literary postmodernism itself, review its political, historical and social context, and determine the role of high and popular culture collision in postmodern literature. Postmodernism as a literary trend was formed in the 6 th decade of the 20th century in the United States of America because of people’s disappointment with the changed life caused by Civil Rights movement, president Kennedy’s assassination, feminism, Vietnam and Cold Wars. Postmodernism was a reaction against the western humanist tradition of the 18th century. It rejected the concept of man’s omnipotence, his ability to understand the outer reality. An American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work, John Barth in his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1997, 62-76) claimed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been “used up”, their possibilities consumed through over use. By exhaustion he does not mean “anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities…” Barth holds up the figure of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as an exemplar of an artist who “doesn’t merely exemplify an ultimacy; he employs it…” in his story entitled, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ” in which a turn-of-the-century French Symbolist produces, not copies or imitates, but actually composes several chapters of Cervantes’ novel (1997, 66). What impresses Barth is that Borges thus (re)uses Cervantes’ novel in order to produce a “remarkable and original work of literature, the theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (1997, 69) . So, changing the medium may help writers find new messages, or at least new ways of re-using the old ones. In his other essay called “The Literature of Replenishment”, Barth tries to define literary postmodernism. There is no clear definition for the term “postmodernism” and for the characteristics of “postmodernist fiction” in this era, and some scholars claim that postmodernism is the extension or the opposition of modernism in a way. In this essay, Barth shows his disagreement with this notion, and at the same time he also points out his liking of some qualities of the literature of the last century. According to Barth, it is not literature 6 that is exhausted, but its forms, genres, styles. He states that authors have to combine these old forms in new ways and methods and that in such a way literature becomes replenished. Postmodern fiction is marked by parody, irony, metafiction, grotesquery, black humor and absurd fantasy. By using these means, postmodern authors try to convey their disapproval, dissatisfaction with, and rebellion against the seeming ugly world of those