ENGL 324 Lecture Notes - Hubris, Snob, Castaway
3 Dec 2012
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Oscar: immorality, weak infrastructure, lack of impulse control, high tolerance of psychopathy. Himes takes lists of bad qualities and twists them and makes them humorous. Post-modernism: similarities between himes and auster = a post-modern concern with identity. Himes = 1969 (very early in post-modernism) not exactly postmodern, though. Auster makes a point of thinking about the instability of identity. The self is not a coherent whole. Makes a point thematically, where himes makes it formally (shifting of characters, shifting of the red fez) In order to make a character memorable, you"ll give them a distinct aspect. The red fez shifts from one character to another, so there"s a slipperiness of identity. What someone looks like is not an indicator of who they really are (multiple layers of artifice) Depravity and sexual deviancy and drug use and women as sex-objects > these caricatures are artifice themselves, and not representative of the self. If there /is/ a self in himes, it"s well-hidden.
