A Postmodern Study of Doris Lessing‘s The Golden Notebook in the Light of Jean-Francois Lyotard ‘s Ideas

A Postmodern Study of Doris Lessing‘s The Golden Notebook in the Light of Jean-Francois Lyotard ‘s Ideas

Kiaei, Shahram
Azizi, Ensiyehsadat
Azizmohammadi, Fatemeh

It has become a virtual commonplace of contemporary criticism that postmodern thought challenges the Enlightenment view of human reason, especially its assumption of a stable, autonomous subject capable of directing the forces of history. For this reason some theorists see postmodernism as pivoting on a reformulation of anti-Enlightenment thought that surfaced during the nineteenth-century and which remained active throughout the modernist period. From this perspective, literary modernism's ambivalent stance toward the integrity of the subject is in part the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud-- precisely those nineteenth-century thinkers who situate much of the postmodern project. Regarding all the previous criticisms, this study clearly assumes that postmodernism employs quite different critical methodologies from those of modernism. Nevertheless, as Jean-Francois Lyotard suggests, evidence of this postmodern emphasis is latent in modernism itself, most particularly in those highly experimental or transgressive works that challenge traditional notions of referential language, rational order, or the autonomous subject. This study, particularly, examines Doris Lessing‘s major work for which she was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, The Golden Notebook (1962), in which postmodern elements especially Lyotard‘s exists. Ultimately, the paper hails this most influential novel as a postmodern masterpiece.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

692