Ella Fitzgerald Essay examples - 614 Words

Ella Fitzgerald To some, Ella Fitzgerald had a hard life from the moment she was born. To others, Ella had it made. Ella Fitzgerald was born April 25th 1917 in Virginia. Soon afterwards, her parents separated and Ella followed her mother to Yonkers, New York. Ella was barely a teenager when her mother died. While still coping with this tragedy, Ella found herself failing school and having frequent run-ins with the police. She was also abused by her caretakers while in the custody of a reform school. At age 15 Ella ran away from school along with the horrible memories of that time. Somehow she managed to support herself through the Great Depression, a feat that is most commendable. Ella found her†¦show more content†¦Ellas voice had a sweetness to it that was rarely accompanied by such a wide range as hers. Her style has been described as effortless, natural, flexible, ageless and accessible. Many call her The First Lady of Song. She started as a swing singer, moved to bebop, perfected scat and jazz and could sing modern or classic songs. Artists whose songs she stylized included Louis Armstrong, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and the Gershwins. Throughout her life she collaborated on more than 250 albums, sold more than 40 million of those albums and won 13 Grammy awards. Her influence soon spread throughout the musical circuit and her singing style was much imitated in the 1950s and 1960s. Ellas trademark of scat singing (a technique in which the singer improvises as an instrument would and uses nonsense syllables) was taken up by many male and female jazz vocalists. Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday and the modern day Joss Stone all show signs of Ellas influence. Ella is also credited with inspiring the great Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet and Mel Torme to some extent. Although Ellas influence through style is great, perhaps her greatest achievement can be noticed in her career as a whole. Ella Fitzgerald was an influential woman with many followers around the world, of all races, religions and nationalities. In many ways she opened theShow MoreRelatedElla Fitzgerald Essay656 Words   |  3 PagesElla Fitzgerald Singer. Born April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. (Though many biographical sources give her birth date as 1918, her birth certificate and school records show her to have been born a year earlier.) Often referred to as the first lady of song, Fitzgerald enjoyed a career that stretched over six decades. With her lucid intonation and a range of three octaves, she became the preeminent jazz singer of her generation, recording over 2,000 songs, selling over 40 million albumsRead MoreElla Fitzgerald Biography Essay1454 Words   |  6 PagesBiography Dubbed The First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums. Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie andRead More Ella Fitzgerald - The Gold Collection Essay example513 Words   |  3 PagesElla Fitzgerald - The Gold Collection The overall illusion of Ella Fitzgerald’s The Gold Collection album is a reflection of the trials and tribulations of love. The collection consists of many tracks that have passionate lyrical value, that the words instantly relate to those moments in life when you are struggling with devotion for a significant other. The album is arranged in a precise manner, where those melancholy and heartrending songs are preceded by upbeat, catchy tunes, that even withRead MoreThe Roaring 20 s `` Changed Ella Fitzgerald s Lifestyle And Her Music1003 Words   |  5 PagesThe â€Å"Roaring 20’s† changed Ella Fitzgerald’s lifestyle and her music by providing outstanding musicians, financial struggles, and popular music leading her to become one of the most prominent singers of all time. Though life provided numerous struggles she still managed to push through and complete her childhood dreams of becoming an entertainer. Fitzgerald’s voice developed through the sty le of music in the 20’s, eminent artists vocal structure and the emotion she channeled into her music due toRead MoreElla Fitzgeralds Influences1541 Words   |  7 PagesElla Fitzgerald is known as the â€Å"First Lady of Song,† and for good reason. Throughout her career, Fitzgerald took jazz singing to new heights of fame and popularity, influencing the style of jazz and future generations of musicians. Today, her music remains well-known and loved, and her long and prolific career reflects her impeccable skill and style. Her influence is still strong today, with singers such as Adele, Mica Paris, Lady Gaga, and Lana Del Rey (BBC) citing Fitzgerald as a major influenceRead MoreElla Scatted Her Way to the Top of teh World1210 Words   |  5 Pages Ella Scatted Her Way to the Top of the World The early 1900s was a violent and horrible time to look back at. Americans have came a long way since then. America couldnt have gone through a more rough time. From racism and discrimination to the Great Depression. At the time African Americans were looked down upon by some people of different races. Hate crimes were common as well as discrimination in restaurants and other public places. A common quote from the time was â€Å"Separate but equal†Read MoreEssay about The Ultimate Collection by George Gershwin635 Words   |  3 PagesCollection by George Gershwin George Gershwins The ultimate collection, is a compilation of Gershwins greatest hits. The compilation is made out of two CDs; the first cd is Gershwins pieces sung by different jazz singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and more#8230; The second cd, is Gerswhins famous pieces taken from musical shows such as Porgy and Bess, Rhapsody in Blue, Cuban overture, Funny face and more. FirstRead MoreBiography of Janis Siegel620 Words   |  3 PagesHollywood Bowl Tribute for Ella Fitzgerald† to which she was very eager to participant in. In March of 2008, she was asked again to pay a tribute to one of her idols in an event called, â€Å"LA Phil Presents A Tribute to Ella† in Los Angeles at the Disney Hall. In 2008, she produced and sang a tribute to Johnny Mercer which featured one of her sideline girl trio’s called JaLaLa. Then in 2010, she became a member of another group at the Kennedy Center that celebrated Ella Fitzgerald again. In today’s timeRead MoreLouis Armstrong And Duke Ellington804 Words   |  4 Pagestechnique to master because singers must be able to use their voices as instruments. So Louis Armstrong started it and after came Bing Crosby, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald. Due to Louis Armstrong creation of scat we have the amazing Ella Fitzgerald who s is known as the First Lady of Song. The album that Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald created has joined The Grammys Hall Of Fame as of November 22, 2015. So, the influences that Louis Armstrong had are still here to this day. Next traitRead MoreNat King Cole s Vocal Style1434 Words   |  6 Pageswere segregated, vowed to not return to the south after being attacked during a performance, and sued hotels which denied him. Cole became the first Black man to host a television show, The Nat King Cole Show, where he hosted many guests such as Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett. Ultimately the show was only on air for two years due to lack of sponsorship. Cole believed it was due to his race. Despite the fact Cole made a difference in how the public viewed African-Americans, there were times when he

ABC system Free Essays

string(30) " costs such as machine power\." A. ) Critically discuss the way (ABC) operates, referring to pools, drivers and activity hierarchy. Definition Activity based costing (ABC) is a cost accounting approach concerned with matching costs with activities (called cost drivers) that cause those costs. We will write a custom essay sample on ABC system or any similar topic only for you Order Now It is more sophisticated kind of absorption- costing and replaces labour based costing system. ABC states that (1) products consume activities, (2) it is the activities (and not the products), that consume resources, (3) activities are the costs drivers, and (4) that activities are not necessarily based on the volume of production. Instead of allocating costs to cost centres ( such as manufacturing, marketing, finance), ABC allocates direct and indirect costs to activities such as processing an order, attending to a customer complaint, or setting up a machine. A subset of activity based management (ABM), it enables management to better understand (A) how and where the firm makes a profit, (B) indicates where money is being spent and (C) which areas have the greatest potential for cost reduction. The motivation to choose the ABC system is because it is too difficult to assign some cost like, indirect cost, management salaries and office staff salaries through Absorption costing. And this method (ABC) has found its niche in the manufacturing sector. It can be applied to derive realistic costs in a complex business environment. It can be applied to all overhead costs, not just production overhead and also it can be used just as easily in service costing as in product costing. Although it is apparent that ABC alleviates considerably many of the worst effects if the arbitrary product line cost allocations inherent in many conventional systems, it does not eliminate the mall. Cost pool: some measure of cost apportionment may still be required at the stage of cost pooling. Overheads common to more than one cost pool (especially in the absence of specific resource metering) could include rent rates, insurance, building deprecation, power, heat, and light. They may require to be attached to cost pools although no definition means of doing this is available. Indeed the proliferation of cost pools under an ABC system could increase the amount of such apportionment which is necessary. Cost drivers: once pooled an appropriate cost driver must be used to attach cost to individual products. It is doubtful whether even a very detailed segmentation of cost into a large number of cost pools will ever achieve a perfect homogeneity within each pool. Thus the ability of a single cost driver to fully explain the cost behaviour of a cost pool is questionable. In order to have a usable cost driver a cost must be caused by an activity that is measurable in quantitative terms and which in turn can be related through this measure to production output. Not all costs will be readily susceptible to this process. For example, it will be difficult to identify meaningful cost drivers for corporate as opposed to based advertising, top managerial activity relating to the business as a whole and other general costs such as external audit, finance costs and goodwill amortisation. It is doubtful that ABC system can completely avoid the problem of cost commonality at the stage of applying cost driver rates to achieve product line costs. This will occur where the chosen cost driver relates t more than one product. For example where a maintenance hour is spent in repairing a facility used by several products or a purchases order contains items used on many different products. The cost of that hour or invoice is not specific to one product but will have to be spread over all products affected on the basis of the cost driver weightings given to each of the relevant products. The selection of cost driver is not automatically provided mangers with an easy-to-step cost control ‘handle’. (ABC book, p. 109). Also this ABC system is not good for making decision because this is not true cost this is based on average cost. Disadvantages ABC will be of limited benefit if the overhead costs are primarily volume related or if the overhead is a small proportion of the overall cost. The choice of both activities and cost drivers might be inappropriate. It is impossible to allocate all overhead costs to specific activities. And it can be more complex to explain to the shareholders of the costing excise. Although the benefits obtained from ABC might not justify the costs. ABC operating way ABC has two stage to produce the first one is the Cost pool and the second one is the Cost drivers which are linked to the activity hierarchy. And the activity hierarchy is based on five different activity, such a Unit-level activities, Batch-level activities, Product-level activities and Facility activities. Cost pool A cost pool is an activity that consumes resources and for which overhead costs are identified and allocated. Cost pools are the grouping expenses, which is a locatable of accounts serving to express the cost of goods and service, within a business or manufacturing organization. The Principe behind the pool is the direct and indirect cost to be correlated with specific cost drivers, so to find out, the total of expense associated with the production of a product. Cost driver A cost driver is the units of an activity cost an activity cost driver is something that drivers the cost of a particular activity. A factory can run such machine as an activity. The activity cost driver with the execution of the two machines are connected, could be machine hours, what is the cost of Labour, maintenance and energy consumption drive the machinery activity. An activity can have more than one cost driver attached to it. For example, a production activity may have the following associated cost drivers a machine, machine operates, floor space occupied, power consumed, and the quantity of waste and or rejected output. The ABC activity hierarchy has five levels: Level one: Unit basis- costs are primarily dependent on the volume of production. This category will therefore include costs such as machine power. You read "ABC system" in category "Essay examples" Level two: Batch basis- costs primarily dependent on the number of batches. This category will include the costs of set-up and batch monitoring. Level three: Process level- costs are primarily dependent on the existence of process. This category will include such costs as quantity control and supervision. Level four: Product level- costs are primarily dependent on the existence of the product group or line. This is management and parts administration. Level five: Facility level- costs are primarily dependent on the existence of a production facility or plan. Costs as rent, rates and general management. Example of Cost pools and Cost drivers Direct labor hors Supervising cost pool Number of parts Painting cost pool Number of test Inspection and testing cost pool Number of parts Assembling cost pool Machine hours Machine cost pool Number of set ups Setting up Machines cost pool Number of purchases orders Ordering and Receiving Material cost pool Classify in Activity Based Costing method to cost driver is very necessary for unit costs and total costs. We know that. Costing on the concept that products consume activities and activities consume resources based Pools of activity, we find cost drivers. Assume a company wants to produce several products. At this time, what with companies to calculate the unit cost? Only by the raw material and labour costs and production overheads to absorb direct labour hours or machine hours is not good way. There will be many activities in which we are spending money, such a number of purchases order, number of setups, machine hours, number of parts, number of test and direct labour hours. B. ) What kinds of firms/products would you advise to use ABC? It would be advisable for big or/large companies with multiple products to use ABC, because for these companies it makes a lot of logic with multiple products or services who are distress from inaccurate costing information and need to know which products are really winners and which are losers. For these companies the effort required to successfully implement ABC is worth the time and resources. ABC can identify high overhead costs per unit and find ways to reduce the costs, avoid decreases in head counts due to inaccurate allocation of costs, and measure profitability with higher accuracy than traditional costing that uses direct-labor hours as the only cost driver. ABC is most useful when you have lots of overhead and a bunch of different products. In any environment that doesn’t have a lot of overhead; ABC isn’t worth the work and won’t deliver insights. Also, ABC doesn’t make sense in any business that sells a single product or that provides a single service, hich is usually the case in a small firm. The reasons for implementing ABC is many Companies they will have better Management, good budgeting, performance measurement, calculating costs more accurately, ensuring product/customer profitability, evaluating and justifying investments in new technologies, improving product quality via better product and process design, increasing competitiven ess or coping with more competition Similarly, when assessing the costs of products and services, ABC can illustrate the costs of them and help in establishing the profitability of the individual products and services. This can be particularly useful in modern economies where companies are increasingly trying to differentiate and personalise both products and services and tailor them to individual needs and requirements ABC can be used on wide ranges of products, and also in modern manufacturing. This system is also good for a lot of non-factoring-floor activities such as product design, quality control, production planning and customer services. Here are some examples of ABC users in the UK: British Aerospace (defence) Hewlett Packard (electronics) IBM (electronics) Black and Decker (tools) Royal Bank of Scotland (banking) Cummins Engines (engineering) Guinness (drinks) DHL (couriers) Norwich union (insurance) Lucas industries (engineering) Nissan Yamato (cars) Seven Trent Water (water) C. ) Evaluate the extra commercial value of using ABC in comparison with standard absorption costing. ABC has been developed to solve the problems that traditional costing methods create in these modern environments. The Activity based costing (ABC) assigns manufacturing overhead costs to products in a more reasonable manner than the traditional approach of basically allocating costs on the basis of machine hours. Activity based costing first assigns costs to the activities that are the real cause of the overhead. It then assigns the cost of those activities only to the products that are actually demanding the activities The Traditional accounting focuses on what it cost to do something, for example, to cut a screw thread; activity based costing also records the cost of not doing, such as the cost of waiting for needed for part. ABC records the costs that traditional cost accounting does not do. Any unit cost, no matter how it is derived, can be misinterpreted. There is temptation to adopt a simplistic approach. This would say for example, that if it cost 10000 to produce ten units, it will cost 10000 to produce 100units. As we know, this in incorrect in the short term, owing to the existence of short-term fixed cost. The ABC approach does not eliminate this problem anymore than the traditional approach. The alternative to presenting full absorption costing information in a traditional costing system has been to prodive the user with a marginal costing statement which distinguishes clearly between the variable cost of production and the fixed cost of production. This carries an implication for the decision-maker that if the variable cost of production is 100 for 20 units, the additional cost of producing a further 50 units will be 50Ãâ€"5=250 The traditional method of costing relied on the arbitrary addition of a proportion of overhead costs on to direct costs to attain a total product costs. The traditional approach to cost allocation relies on three basic steps. Advantages of ABC ABC provides a more accurate cost per unit. As a result, pricing, sales, strategy, performance management and decision making should be improved. ABC also provides much better insight into what drives overhead costs. And it recognises that overhead costs are not all related to production and sales volume. In many businesses, overhead costs are a significant proportion of total costs, and management needs to understand the drivers of overhead costs in order to manage the business properly. Overhead costs can be controlled by the managing cost drivers. D. )Research and briefly trace the main developments in ABC theory from 1988 to date Activity based costing (ABC) is a cost allocation model pioneered by Harvard Cooper and Kaplan (1988) in the field of the management account. Studies have investigated the structure of ABC models that emerge from the process (e. g. Noreen Sanderson, ABC has been successfully applied manufacturing and service industries (Helmi Hindi, 1996; Kroll 1996; Reimann Kaplan 1990) for improving tactical and strategic decision making and for enhancing corporate cost control and customer profitability (Bradway Ross 2000; Mabberly 1998). In 1999 Peter F. Drucker explained in the book Management Challenges of the 21st Century, that traditional accounting focuses on what it cost to do something, for example, to cut a screw thread; activity based costing also records the cost of not doing, such as the cost of waiting for needed for part. ABC records the costs that traditional cost accounting does not do. Granof Platt Vaysmann (2000) discuss ABC implementation in the public sector, by using the example of a university department. They have demonstrate the validity of ABC method application in accordance with university process How to cite ABC system, Essay examples

Postmodernism in Literature free essay sample

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc. ) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-Francois Lyotards concept of the meta-narrative and little narrative, Jacques Derridas concept of play, and Jean Baudrillards simulacra. For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the authors univocal control (the control of only one voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. A list of postmodern authors often varies; the following are some names of authors often so classified, most of them belonging to the generation born in the interwar period: Other significant examples of 18th century parody include the works of Jonathan Swift and Shamela by Henry Fielding. There were many 19th century examples of attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature including Lord Byrons satire, especially Don Juan; Thomas Carlyles Sartor Resartus; Alfred Jarrys ribald Ubu parodies and his invention of Pataphysics; Lewis Carrols playful experiments with signification; the work of Isidore Ducasse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, etc. Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work influenced the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and attacked the central role of the artist. Tristan Tzara claimed in How to Make a Dadaist Poem that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious. Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist Rene Magrittes experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many Postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a Postmodernist though he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magical realism was not fully realized until the postmodern period. 2] Comparisons with modernist literature Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism, in which a story was told from an objective or omniscient point of view. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist exam ples in the stream of consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against ruin is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyces Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolfs Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. [3] Shift to postmodernism As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernisms popularity. 941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and British novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernisms start. The prefix post, however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the atomic b ombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It ould also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction). [4][5][6] Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first performance of Waiting for Godot in 1953, the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derridas Structure, Sign, and Play lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassans usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Post-war developments and transition figures Though Postmodernist literature does not refer to everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and Magical Realism) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled postmodern; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic. The work of Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The term Theatre of the Absurd was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camuss concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco is essentially a series of cliches taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says, Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Becketts experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ] Becketts last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work [ ] He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters. [7] The Beat Generation is a name coined by Jack Kerouac for the disaffected youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Kerouac developed ideas of automatism into what he called spontaneous prose to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Prousts Remembrance of Things Past. Beat Generation is often used more broadly to refer to several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the Postmoderns (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen). Though this is now a less common usage of postmodern, references to these writers as postmodernists still appear and many writers associated with this group (John Ashbery, Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and n America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; its full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the cut-up technique, a technique (similar to Tzaras Dadaist Poem) in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Magical Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel Garcia Marquezs A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American boom, a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the Boom and practitioners of Magical Realism (Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar etc. ) are often listed as postmodernists. Many postmodernists not from Latin America (Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass, etc. ) commonly use Magical Realism in their work. [8] Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern. [9] The scope Postmodernism in literature is not an organized movement with leaders or central figures; therefore, it is more difficult to say if it has ended or when it will end (compared to, say, declaring the end of modernism with the death of Joyce or Woolf). Arguably postmodernism peaked in the 60s and 70s ith the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Slaughterhouse Five in 1969, Gravitys Rainbow in 1973, and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the 80s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. [10] With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some de clared White Noise in 1985 or The Satanic Verses in 1988 to be the last great novels of the postmodern era. However, with the continuing publication of many of the above mentioned authors, the success of younger postmodern writers (such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Noah Cicero, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathan Lethem), and with publications such as McSweeneys, The Believer, and The Onion, the declaration of the death of postmodernism is arguably premature. [11][12] Amazon. com even described the Mark Z. Danielewski novel House of Leaves, published in 2000 as post-postmodern [1] Common themes and techniques All of these themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list of features. Irony, playfulness, black humor Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humor and the general concept of play (related to Derridas concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc. Its common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon address the events of World War II. A good example of postmodern irony and black humor is found in the stories of Donald Barthelme; The School, for example, is about the ironic death of plants, animals, and people connected to the children in one class, but the inexplicable repetition of death is treated only as a joke and the narrator remains emotionally distant throughout. The central concept of Joseph Hellers Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic catch 22, and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context. The Crying of Lot 49, for example, contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. [13][14][15] Pastiche To combine, or paste together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). For example, Thomas Pynchon includes in his novels elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction; songs; pop culture references; well-known, obscure, and fictional history mixed together; real contemporary and historical figures (Mickey Rourke and Wernher Von Braun for example); a wide variety of well-known, obscure and fictional cultures and concepts. In Robert Coovers 1977 novel The Public Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can also refer to compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnsons 1969 novel The Unfortunates; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it how ever they chose. [16][17][18] Metafiction Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or foregrounding the apparatus, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for willful suspension of disbelief. It is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvinos 1979 novel If on a winters night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the first chapter his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonneguts own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim OBriens 1990 novel/story collection The Things They Carried, about one platoons experiences during the Vietnam War, features a character named Tim OBrien; though OBrien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and OBrien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents through out the book. One story in the book, How to Tell a True War Story, questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable and heroic, moral war stories dont capture the truth. Historiographic metafiction Linda Hutcheon coined the term historiographic metafiction to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (about Simon Bolivar), Flauberts Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), and Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung). John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenants Woman. In regards to critical theory, this technique can be related to The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. [19] Temporal distortion This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonneguts non-linear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five becoming unstuck in time. In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coovers The Babysitter from Pricksongs Descants, the author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. [20] Technoculture and hyperreality Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the cultural logic of late capitalism. Late capitalism implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillos White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a â€Å"white noise† of television, product brand names, and cliches. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. [21][22][23] Paranoia Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Joseph Hellers Catch-22 and the work of Thomas Pynchon, the sense of paranoia, the belief that theres an ordering system behind the chaos of the world. For the postmodernist, no ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pychon has many possible interpretations. If one reads the book with a particular bias, then he or she is going to be frustrated. [24] This often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when hes convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. [25] Maximalism Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers has generated controversy on the purpose of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by Francois Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson-Rubin hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. Many modernist critics, notably B. R. Myers in his polemic A Readers Manifesto, attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchons Mason Dixon, or James Chapmans Stet, where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment. [26][27] Different perspectives John Barth, the postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label postmodern, wrote an influential essay in 1968 called Literature of Exhaustion and in 1979 wrote Literature of Replenishment in order to clarify the earlier essay. Literature of Exhaustion was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In Literature of Replenishment Barth says, My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century Modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naivete, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Becketts Texts for Nothing The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and contentism, pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction [28] Many of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II, one of the most famous of which being Joseph Hellers Catch-22. Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war: The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the Fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V. , and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cats Cradle. I dont think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didnt know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Pynchon and in Cats Cradle. [29] Novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding: I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. [30] Novelist David Foster Wallace in his essay 1990 essay E Unibus Pluram makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of whats seen and whats said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature: It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U. S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists, the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by postmodern. The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR, the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 Heres Robert Coovers 1966 A Public Burning, in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president. [31] Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism an be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the Chemical (Scottish) Generation of the fin-de-siecle. In what follows, the term postmodernist is used for experimental authors (especially Durell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while post- modern is applied to authors who have been less innovative. [32] Postmodernism (literature), term used to denote a multitude of styles and attitudes which exist partly as a response to high Modernism, and partly as a result of post-industrial mass production and late capitalism. Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define; indeed, a central tenet is that certain experiences and concepts resist any sort of representation in writing or art. However, one of its most recognizable attributes is a certain self-consciousness with regard to the methods of production and to the social contexts of any work, together with a playful incorporation of, or gesture towards, previous styles and modes of thought.