Twitter Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

for some of the unoriginal content on Katherine Crosby’s Twitter

Basile, Jonathan. Library of Babel. Web. 15 Apr. 2016.

Basile has created a website that mirrors Jorge Luis Borge’s fictional library universe in his short story, The Library of Babel. The thought is that this library is the universe, and it contains the books of all of the possible combinations of characters (i.e. the alphabet and punctuation). The story is a postmodern thought experiment that was one of the first postmodern pieces I read.

“The Distance of the Moon.” Radiolab. WNYC, New York. 16 Apr. 2016. Radio.

“The Distance of the Moon” is a short story written by Italo Calvino. It is included in his famous collection Cosmicomics. Although this particular story is not postmodern, I thought that it was beautifully narrated. It is also easier to understand Calvino’s development into a postmodern author after listening to one of his earlier works. You can hear familiar themes, and his concern for surrealism is still apparent.

Garber, Megan. "The Author of White Noise Reviews Taylor Swift’s White Noise." The Atlantic. 22 Oct. 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.

This is a magazine article that includes a review created from quotations by postmodern author Don DeLillo. He reviews Taylor Swift’s “Track 3,” an accidently released single that only contained 8 seconds of white noise. The result is a short, reflective blurb about noise and silence. I found this piece interesting, because it uses a postmodern lens to look at pop culture. It makes the themes that DeLillo writes about in his novel more relevant, and it is a goofier take on something that could be construed as serious and thought provoking.

Kaviani, Fareed. “Understanding The Postmodern Condition through Don DeLillo’s White Noise.” The 4th Wall. 18 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

I first read White Noise when I was in high school. It was for a class, and while we analyzed its thematic concerns, we never labeled it as postmodern. The research that I have done for these last two projects has brought me back to this novel, and I was interested to read about how it fit into this genre.

Menand, Louis. “Saved From Drowning.” The New Yorker. New Yorker. 23 Feb. 2009. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

This article is about an event known as the “Postmodernists Dinner.” Menand explains that several writers, including William Gaddis and Kurt Vonnegut, got together to discuss postmodern concerns in writing, art, and culture. The article was mostly about writer Donald Barthelme’s life and works, however, the first half included some clear and profound statements about postmodernism as a genre. My favorite quotation was, “It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with “post,” it is fundamentally ambidextrous.”

Richter, Gerhard. Apple Trees. 1987. Oil on canvas.

This is a postmodern painting of blurry apple trees. I wanted to include a piece of postmodern art, and I thought that this was a good example. While most postmodern artists were looking to new mediums, Richter remained loyal to oil and canvas, and he began to explore it in a new way. This could be a typical landscape painting, but he blurs the image, forcing his audience to question the role and point of representational art (a common theme among postmodern artists).