the life and the opinions of tristram shandy

David Foster Wallace or any other postmodern writer would be darn tootin' proud. The book is self-reflexive (it thinks about itself), narrator-Tristram produces multiple versions of himself, there's no climax and no resolution, and the characters are caricatures rather than complex, rounded people. Plenty of people will claim that Tristram Shandy was postmodern before there was any modernism to be post about. If you've read a piece of contemporary literary fiction-the kind of book that wins prizes-and closed it thinking, 'What the heck?' then you've probably read a postmodern book. They used techniques like pastiche (collage), stream-of-consciousness, and self-reflexivity to question not just 'real life' but the whole idea of writing.

Technologies like TV, radio, and movies made 'real life' start to seem a lot less real. Voilà, you have modernism.Ī few decades later, other writers started to question the ideal of modernism. They started writing novels that played with the idea that a book could have anything to do with real life. At the end of the century, some writers started to get bored with realism, the idea that novels were supposed to represent 'real life' accurately. The 19th century is famous for producing big door-stopper novels full of complex plots and characters. (1) Tristram Shandy is a postmodern classic. There are two ways to make sense of this: Nope, Tristram Shandy self-consciously makes fun of all these conventions while being pretty entertaining in its own right. And this duckling doesn't look like any of the others: not Samuel Richardson, who wrote long, detailed novels about girls being raped not Daniel Defoe, who wrote biographical novels about sailors and prostitutes not Henry Fielding, who wrote funny parodies of Richardson. Shmoopers, you're checking out one of the Top 40 Hits of the 18th century. Tristram Shandy might be soapy, but it's also got substance. Basically, it covers everything but Tristram's life: his father's philosophical opinions, his mother's obsession with giving birth in London, his parson's ability to make everyone mad, his uncle's mania for toy forts, and, more than anything else, how stinkin' hard it is to write this book. Where does the soap opera come in, you might ask? Tristram Shandy's got all the drama of Days of Our Lives -think marriage, misunderstandings, mistakes and misnamings. Tristram Shandy is a soap opera about penises-big penises, small penises, working penises, broken penises, wounded penises, real penises, symbolic penises, and… you get the point. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Introduction

The life and the opinions of tristram shandy