Postmodernist Historical Google doc
The other night, we were asked in class to think about what a postmodernist history would look like, and even though we talked about it, I am still struggling with it. When I pondered the question initially, my first instinct was that a postmodernist history would be full of narrative and fiction. I thought about Ragtime and how Doctorow creates "pockets" in his narrative, pushing the perceived boundary between history and fiction to achieve some kind of higher truth. For example, we talked about how Morgan and Ford have a secret society in Ragtime or how Morgan thinks he is a reincarnated pharaoh. Doctorow never explicitly writes anything in his novel that violates our perception of history, or could not feasibly have happened - he makes Morgan and Ford's society a secret that they never share with anyone. He creates a pocket instead of writing, for example, that Morgan and Ford both turned themselves into bees and lived the rest of their lives as bees, because there i...