Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Postmodern Humanism :: Grace Paley Enormous Last Minute Essays

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute postmodernist Humanism in the Short Fiction of invest Paley(1) On the tip of her second book of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley, a feminist, postmodernist, antiwar activist, and writer, identifies herself as a somewhat combative pacifist and co-op anarchist. In 1979, she was arrested on the White House lawn for demonstrating against nuclear weapons, and her r unification is full of such protest-related arrests. Paleys statement in a 1998 interview with the online snip Salon is typical Whatever your calling is, whether its as a pipe fitter or an artist, you have to make sure theres a bantam more than nicety in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Paleys fiction expresses convertible sentiments but in rather subtle ways. Women in her short stories do not get arrested for protesting instead, they visit their aging fathers in the hospital. (2) Paleys concern for justice appears in her short fictio n as a postmodern humanitarianism that works itself out in the establishment of storytelling, reality-making communities.In Toward a creation of Postmodernism, Ihab Hassan schematizes postmodernism in opposition to modernism. This sampling of the catchwords he identifies gives us a windowpane into the project of postmodern theorists Antiform, Play, Anarchy, Decreation/Deconstruction, Antithesis, Absence, Dispersal, Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire, Indeterminacy (591-2). Postmodern writers, then, play with voice communication, essay with narrative fragmentation, introduce previously ignored voices, borrow heavily from both(prenominal) popular culture and canonical literature, and generally break boundaries. How can we clear up Paley as a postmodern writer if an ethical framework underlies her physical composition? Shouldnt she be trying to deconstruct reality and expose the meaninglessness of the American experience? Of course, no work or writer fits perfectly into postmodernis ms theoretic agenda. For that matter, the very establishment of an unyielding definition of postmodernism is antithetical to its self-proclaimed turn off from the rigidity of modernist thought. For students of postmodernism this can be a maddening maze of deconstruction that eventually leads to the extinction of the study of literature. If, as radical deconstructionists might argue, our language systems and understandings of reality prove to be valueless, the scholar of literature is left with little to do, as is the social critic. It is for this reason that Hassan writesThus we can not only if rest-as I have sometimes done-on the assumption that postmodernism is antiformal, anarchic, or decreative for though it is then all these, and despite its fanatic will to unmaking, it also contains the need to collar a unitary sensibility (Sontag), to cross the border and close the perturbation (Fiedler).