culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA
a forceful vehicle that voices concerns and anxieties about issues that are
significant to him as a critic, a playwright, and stage director. The creative
representation of the fictional-textual images that are mentally and visually
experimented engages us in a cultextual process of othering while rewriting
projections that voice and reflect back the contemporary social reality.
“(Leo) So what’s the new literary technology? To do-it-yourself
postmodernist novel? Two hundred and fifty blank pages for the reader to write
his own book in? (…)
(Simon)…Experimental fiction burns its bridges behind it, while the
realistic novel goes trudging up and down the same safe, boring old highway.”
(Lodge 1991: 93)
“(Leo) But then you don’t need much experience to fill two hundred and
fifty blank pages.
(Simon) No, only courage.
(Leo) Courage?
(Simon) Yes, courage to ditch all the obsolete machinery of traditional
realist fiction. All that laboriously contrived suspense and dutifully disguised
peripeteia.
(Maude) What’s that?
(Simon) Reversal. Usually combined with anagnorisis, or discovery, as
everyone who took the Cambridge Tragedy paper knows.” (Lodge 1991: 92)
The tremendous communicative power of Lodge’s language games and
the intended politics of the text that unfolds (simulates itself?!) before our eyes
just like a rolling film, are combined with self-reference (the text keeps referring
back to itself), irony and simulation:
“(Leo) The dreadful thinness of contemporary British writing. It’s lib,
lazy, self-satisfied prattle. (…) He (Simon) luxuriates in his own obnoxiousness.
He has orgasms of self-loathing. Don’t let the metafictional tricks fool you. The
piece is nothing but bad faith jerking itself off. (…)
(Maude) What does ‘metafictional’ mean?
(Simon) It’s a bit of American jargon, Maude. Remember, Leo works in a
university English department. He can’t open his mouth to breathe without
inhaling a lungful of words like metafiction, intertextuality, and deconstruction.
They dance like dust motes in the air of American classrooms. (…)
(Leo) It means fiction which draws attention to its own status of a text.”
(Lodge 1991: 88)
Postmodernist thought is a shift in knowledge of the culture of the
modern, an answer to the inherent globalization of culture and culture’s products
upon questions of the self, highly westernized, self-reflexive and fractured. The
Writing Game can be viewed as an essential and exhaustive text which seeks to
encapsulate the impact of postmodern culture upon creative writing.
How do we evaluate the media(ted) communication (the written
fictionalized text is seen as one such communicative instantiation) in the
postmodern world of reversed/reversing values and of a plurality of cultural
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