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Post-ModernismPost-modernism has many interpretations and no single

definition is adequate. Postmodernism is a term that encompasses a wide-range of

developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art, literature, and culture.

Different disciplines have participated in the post-modernist movement in varying ways.

In literature, writers adopt a self-conscious intersexuality sometimes verging on pastiche, which denies the formal propriety of authorship and genre.

Historicity, historicization, socio-cultural locatedness of moments in history

Critical study of class, race, and gender; uses other perspectives

Intersexuality, self-reflexivity, montage, pastiche

Signs, image, reproductive social order

Local accounts Description

Generative, Genealogical, Archaeological

Postmodernist Literature contains a broad range of concepts and ideas that include:

Greater diversity of cultures that leads to cultural pluralism. (small groups within a larger society maintain their culture identity). Reconceptualizations of society and history

Responses to modernism and its ideasResponses to technological advances

Common ThemesIrony : A literary device that uses contradictory statements to reveal a

reality different from what appears to be true.

Playfulness : Consider not very seriously.

Black Humor : The juxtaposition of morbid and farcical elements (in writing or drama) to give a disturbing effect.

Pastiche : Authors often combine multiple elements in the postmodern genre.

Metafiction : Writing about writing, often used to undermine the authority of the author and to advance stories in unique ways.

Paranoia : The belief that there is something out of the ordinary, while everything remains the same.

TRIST

RAM

SHANDY

by

LAUREN

CE

STER

NE

Characters Tristram Shandy : Tristram is both the fictionalized author of The Life and

Opinions of Tristram Shandy and the child whose conception, birth, christening, and circumcision form one major sequence of the narrative. The adult Tristram Shandy relates certain aspects of his family history, including many that took place before his own birth, drawing from stories and hearsay as much as from his own memories. His opinions we get in abundance; of the actual details of his life the author furnishes only traces, and the child Tristram turns out to be a minor character.

Walter Shandy : Tristram’s philosophically-minded father. Walter Shandy's love for complicated and convoluted intellectual argumentation and his readiness to embrace any tantalizing hypothesis lead him to propound a great number of absurd artificial-scientific theories.

Elizabeth Shandy (Mrs. Shandy) : Tristram's mother. Mrs. Shandy insists on having the midwife attend her labor rather than Dr. Slop, out of resentment at not being allowed to bear the child in London.

   

Captain Toby Shandy (Uncle Toby) : Tristram's uncle, and brother to Walter Shandy. After sustaining a groin-wound in battle, he retires to a life of obsessive attention to the history and science of military fortifications. His temperament is gentle and sentimental: Tristram tells us he wouldn't harm a fly.

Corporal Trim : Manservant and sidekick to Uncle Toby. His real name is James Butler; he received the nickname "Trim" while in the military. Trim colludes with Captain Toby in his military, but his own favorite hobby is advising people, especially if it allows him to make eloquent speeches.

Dr. Slop : The local male midwife, who, at Walter's insistence, acts as a back-up at Tristram's birth. A "scientific operator," Dr. Slop has written a book expressing his disdain for the practice of midwifery. He is interested in surgical instrument and medical advances, and prides himself on having invented a new pair of delivery forceps.

Parson Yorick : The village parson and a close friend of the Shandy family. Yorick is lighthearted and straight-talking; he detests gravity and pretension. As a witty and misunderstood clergyman.

In fact, the narrator of the novel is Tristram Shandy and it is the autobiography of Tristram Shandy. But it is the reality that Tristram is seen sometimes in novel and we only know some inf. about him.

Sterne aims to bewilder the readers and to gets live in a world that some undreamed situations happen.

He thinks that no reader knows what is the next situation or action and when he supposes it, he tears the pages of writings.

The original name of the novel is The Life and The Opinions of Tristram Shandy, but this name is a trick.Because in Tristram Shandy, there is neither Shandy’s life nor Shandy’s opinions. The life telling is Tobby’s life who is Shandy’s uncle and opinions telling are Walter Shandy who is Shandy’s father.

And he said :“ If I thought you was able to form the least

judgment or probable conjecture to yourself of what was to come in the next page, I would tear it out of my book.”

Post-Modernist Elements in Tristram Shandy

It is true that generally preface is at the beginning of the books, but Sterne puts it in Volume III, Chapter XX.

“To conceive this right, _____ call for pen and ink _____ here’s paper ready to your hand. _____ Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind _____ as like your mistress as you can _____ as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you _____’tis all one to me _____ please but your own fancy in it …” (330).

In Volume 6, Chapter 40, Sterne draws confused marks on the page.

He says that he tells the situations in a complicated and confused way up to now, but from now on he says that he tries to tell the situations in a logical way.

“To one who took pleasure in the happy state of others, ______ there could not have been a greater sight in the world, than, on a post- morning, ______ in which a practicable breach had been made by the duke of Marlborough, ______ in the main body of the place, _____ to have stood behind the horn-beam hedge, and observed the spirit with which my uncle Toby, ______ with Trim behind him, sallied forth; _____ the one with the Gazette in his hand, _____ the other with a spade on his shoulder to execute the contents. ______ What an honest triumph in my uncle Toby’s looks as he marched up to the ramparts! _____ What intense pleasure swimming in his eye as he stood over the corporal, ______ reading the paragraph ten times over to him, as he was at work, lest, peradventure, ______ he should make the breach on inch too wide, ______ or leave it an inch too narrow ______” (313).

“ _____ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ______ .

_____ You shall see the very place, Madam; said my uncle Toby. Mrs. Wadman blush’d_____look’d towards the door_____turn’d pale_____blush’d slightly again______recovered her natural colour____blush’d worse than ever; which for the sake of the unlearned reader” (440).

Chapter XXXIII “ I told the Christian reader____ I say Christian____hoping he is one____ and if he is not, I am sorry for it____ and only beg he will consider the matter with himself, and not lay the blame entirely upon this book,____ ….” (325).

Chapter XXXIV“ I told the Christian reader in the beginning of the chapter which proceeded my uncle Toby’s apologetical oration,____ though in a different trope from what I shall make use of now, That the peace of Utrecht was with in an ace of creating the same shyness betwixt my uncle Toby and his hobby-horse, as it did betwixt the queen and the rest of the confederating powers” (326).

Chapter V“My mother was going to very gingerly in the dark along the passage which led to the parlor, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife. ____’Tis a shrill penetrating sound of itself, and Obadiah had helped it by leaving the door a little a-jar, so that my mother heard enough of it, to imagine herself the subject of the conversation ………” (250).

Chapter XII“ ____But to return to my mother.My uncle Toby’s opinion, Madam, ‘that there could be no harm in Cornelius Gallus, the Roman praetor's lying with his wife;’ _____ ………” (258).

“ __How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter? I told you in it that my mother was not a papist. __ Papist! You told me no such a thing, Sir.

__ Madam, I beg leave to repeat again that ….. __ Then Sir, I must have missed a page. __ No, Madam –you have not missed a word. __ Then I was asleep, Sir.” (40-41).

Works Cited Urgan,Mina. “İngiliz Edebiyatı Tarihi”. Yapı Kredi Yayınları.

İstanbul. 2004. Swearingen, J. “Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy: An Essay in

Phenomenological Criticism New Haven”: Yale University Press. (1977).

Sterne, L. “Tristram Shandy”. W.W.Norton&Company: New York&London. 1980.

Williams, J.“Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy)”. MLN. Vol.105, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1990). The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism”. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Thanks Fr Yur Participatin

by Hüseyin ÜNAL