The author of this writing found both texts suggested for discussion interesting and thought-provoking. A story by Flannery O’Connor, in which the grandmother struggles to soften the heart of the escaped convict but fails, is saturated with religious symbols and may be regarded as a parable. Curiously, the story starts with words: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (O’Connor 5). It immediately puts the tension on the reader and makes them anticipate something bad coming, and the narration holds them in this mood during the entire reading. This is a disturbing story, sometimes destructive, which contains humorous episodes mixed with a sense of tension. This text combines realism and absurdity, which is quite unusual. In its turn, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem is easy to read, but it leaves an ambiguous impression on the reader. With closer reading, it becomes clear that the writer shares what happens in her inner world after the loss. Although the author writes, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”, it becomes evident that losing does not come easy neither for the author nor for the reader (Bishop).
Both works can be regarded as examples of postmodernism due to the fact that they illustrate the disjunctive method of literary narration. These are experimental literary works in which there are unusual forms of transmission and organization of figurative and aesthetic material. In particular, this type of writing organizes the space of literary representation in a fragmentary form. In both texts, sentences are not combined into a single whole, and the story and the poem are organized in the form of changing phrases. Instead of a coherent narrative, the reader can observe a series of unrelated episodes in which plots and images are arbitrarily combined.
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. “One Art.” Poets.org. Web.
O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Web.