How invisible cities, Donnie Darko & the fountain are postmodern.

• Main Author: Lim, Crystal Qian Yi.
• Other Authors: Cornelius Anthony Murphy
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49732
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

"God is dead, so is Marx, and I'm not feeling too well myself." - Eugene Ionesco. When nihilism infiltrates the human condition, the search for meaning becomes futile and another road must be taken. As such, this essay will not be embroiled in the whole intellectual uproar about the point of postmodernism lest it ends up shooting itself in the foot. It already understands that this mosaic genre comes undone with the imposition of meaning. Consequently, it will focus on the "how" instead of the "why"- by zooming in on the intricacy of details (aesthetics) undertaken by postmodern writers and filmmakers in explicating the impossibility of knowledge. The key word here is "methodologies", not theories. More specifically, it will investigate the ways in which they conjure these strange, fractured, and timeless land/dreamscapes, and how these can proliferate questions about the nature of existence. Besides shattering the notion of a fixed material reality, this paper pushes the envelope further by exploring the possibilities of what will happen when these projected worlds are disrupted or placed in confrontation with each other. The text and films used are Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Richard Kelly's cult classic Donnie Darko, and Darren Aronofsky's complex sci-fi drama, The Fountain.