Ray Bradbury: The Post-Modern Writer

My name is Michael Dandy and I was born in Indonesia. I moved to Georgia in October 2006 and enrolled the Northview High School. I like reading novels with suspended stories and thriller plots. Usually, I spend my leisure time by listening to the music or playing computer. Actually, this is my first blog so I fell excited when create this blog. I hope you enjoy the blog.

This blog is created to fulfill the American Literature assignment. Primarily the blog will discuss about the literary movement that began in 1968, Post-Modern. There are lots of post-modern writer today and I choose Ray Bradbury among them because Bradbury is well-known for his science fiction writings. I do the research about this writer’s writing life. The research question was “why does Ray Bradbury choose science fiction as his writing genre?”. The research paper will explain about every aspect that gives influence in Bradbury’s writing career. In addition, there is a short story that I make based on the post-modern characteristic. I hope you will have more understanding about post-modern literature after you read this blog.

Ray Bradbury

I write a short story with post-modern genre. The story is about the competition in the nuclear weapon development between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One of the scientists from the Soviet Union has been killed almost a week after he got honor to hold the second key. His apprentice suspects that there is a conspiracy behind this murder. A letter from mentor’s wife will explain everything.

A Letter from Mentor’s Wife

Postmodern literature arose after World War II as a series of reactions against the perceived norms of modernist literature. Just like postmodernism itself, it is hard to define; Wagner offers this approach: “Postmodernism, then, can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the “Chemical (Scottish) Generation” of the fin-de-siècle.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature

Here are the characteristic of Postmodern literature:

• Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader
• No heroes
• Concern with individual in isolation
• Social issues as writers align with feminist & ethnic groups
• Usually humorless
• Narratives
• Metafiction
• Present tense
• Magic realism

Source: http://www.teachnlearn.org/LITERARY%20PERIODS%20AND%20THEIR%20CHARACTERISTICS.htm

• responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between ‘high’ culture and commonly lived life,
• responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism,
• acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle,
• resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather than as a weave,
• reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence as rhetorical constructs.

Source: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/post-mod-attrib.html 

• Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms.
• Postmodernism is suspicious of being “profound” because such ideas are based on one particular Western value systems.
• Postmodernism prefers to dwell on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events.
• Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, “jagged,” with no one specific reality possible.  Therefore, it focuses on a vision of a contradictory, fragmented, ambiguous, indeterminate, unfinished, “jagged” world.
• Postmodern writer creates an “open” work in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own (unguided) interpretation.

Source: http://vc.ws.edu/engl2265/unit4/Modernism/all.htm

Here is the research paper.

Ray Bradbury: Father of Science Fiction

Novels

• (1950) The Martian Chronicles
• (1953) Fahrenheit 451
• (1957) Dandelion Wine
• (1962) Something Wicked This Way Comes
• (1972) The Halloween Tree
• (1985) Death Is a Lonely Business
• (1990) A Graveyard for Lunatics
• (1992) Green Shadows, White Whale
• (2001) From the Dust Returned
• (2003) Let’s All Kill Constance
• (2006) Farewell Summer

Short Stories

• (1947) Dark Carnival
• (1951) The Illustrated Man
• (1953) The Golden Apples of the Sun
• (1955) The October Country
• (1959) A Medicine for Melancholy
• (1962) R is for Rocket
• (1962) The Small Assassin
• (1964) The Machineries of Joy
• (1965) The Vintage Bradbury
• (1966) S is for Space
• (1966) Twice 22
• (1969) I Sing The Body Electric
• (1976) Long After Midnight
• (1980) The Stories of Ray Bradbury
• (1984) A Memory of Murder
• (1988) The Toynbee Convector
• (1996) Quicker Than The Eye
• (1997) Driving Blind
• (2002) One More for the Road
• (2003) Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
• (2004) The Cat’s Pajamas: Stories
• (2005) A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

Plays

• (1948) The Meadow
• (1963) The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics
• (1966) The Day It Rained Forever
• (1966) The Pedestrian
• (1972) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays
• (1975) Pillar of Fire and Other Plays
• (1986) Fahrenheit 451
• (1986) The Martian Chronicles
• (1988) Dandelion Wine
• (1988) Falling Upward
• (1988) Bradbury on Stage: A Chrestomathy of His Plays

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury#Short_story_collections

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury and George Bush

EPCOT, Bradbury’s work for Disney

Fahrenheit 451

The Martian Chronicles

Here is the Outline.

Here is the list of Works Cited.