Play It As It Lays.ppt

1、Play It As It Lays,-Joan Didion,Author Characters her 4-year-old daughter, Kate, is institutionalized with some sort of brain damage; her casual affairs are many but mechanical and lifeless.,When Maria discovers she is pregnant, probably not by her husband, she has an abortion. Her closest friend BZ

2、, a homosexual who produces her husbands movies, commits suicide by taking an overdose of pills while cradled in her arms. Finally, Maria herself is hospitalized for what is usually loosely described as a “nervous breakdown.”,Literary Background,Play It As It Lays is written in 1970 of America. The

3、1960s,being an experimental decade, yields what has come to be called Postmodernism.,Postmodernism V.S Modernism: response reaction Characteristics: experiment with form an embrace of “low” and pop culture a tendency to deal with utterly contemporary subjects: (environmental havoc, consumerism, nucl

4、ear fears, the language and phenomena of contemporary life) let go of all “core” values and belief systems such as “the self”, “truth, representation” We can almost find all these features in this novel!,Theme,“The Waste Land outlook The Hollywood Novel Didions Women,“The Waste Land outlook,It is a

5、view of life that takes its name from T.S. Eliots poem. It is characterized by a sense of the futility of modern life and of necessity to fully engage despair in order to come to some new terms with the contemporary world.,This outlook is expressed in Play It As It Lays through the subject as “void”

6、, “nothingness”, and “vacuity”. In this novel, Didion focuses on a highly personal and private version of the broken center. Things are falling apart in Marias world, the breaking up of her marriage, the brain damage of her daughter, the sudden violence of her mothers death in a car accident. Maria

7、can find no cause and effect in these events, can find no meaning in her life, and finally desperately come to realize the irrationality and absurdity of life. Nihilism ?虚无主义 Existentialism ?存在主义,The Hollywood Novel,Hollywood as metaphor for everything that is tawdry, artificial, and superficial abo

8、ut America has become a clich in contemporary fiction. Those who can succeed must have some transcending subject matter.,Didions Play It As It Lays is one of those successful Hollywood novel, which enlarges upon the limited nature of its material. It presents a picture of personal dread and anxiety

9、, of alienation and absurdity lurking within and without. Although Hollywood is her setting, nothingness is the theme.,But the uniqueness of Didions combination of Hollywood and the theme can be seen in the use of “cinematic technique” (that frames the despair and emptiness that fills Marias world )

10、 and “flashback” which derives from film production and technically responds to the specific culture of Hollywood movie industry. It can also be regarded as an embrace of the “low” and pop culture by Didion.,Joan Didion, by utilizing the popular culture namely movie industry, as the setting of the n

11、ovel, gives the whole setting a metaphoric meaning: life itself is a play. All human beings are, without exception, actors and actresses who play a role in it. And in the postmodern society, many people, like Maria, are not successful confronted with the sophisticated and chaotic circumstances.,Didi

12、ons Women,Didions novels are dominated by a womans point of view and all portray in detail womens feeling about their exclusively feminine experiences: childbirth, motherhood, abortion, menstruation, sexual submission to male demands,And there is no exception to Play It As It Lays. In this novel, th

13、e reader is presented with the victimized woman, Maria Wyeth, her experience of encounter with nothingness and her self-regaining process. Like other female protagonists in Didions works, she is also doomed by her female gender. She is obsessed with female experience and female anxieties and the obs

14、ession is the kernel of her suffering. And these sufferings are always related to men.,Style,Joan Didion, who has laid great stress on the art and craft of composition, is called “the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today”.,Didion is heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, someone who

15、taught Didion the importance of the way sentences worked within a piece of writing as “curt, direct, paratactic and no bullshit”. Other influences include Naturalist writer Henry James, one who wrote perfect, indirect, complicated sentences, and George Eliot. Didion has been inspired predominately b

16、y male authors, and she looks to women as role models for life lessons, as opposed to their particular writing styles. Specifically, Didion mentions Brontes, because of her encouragement of delusional theatricality.,“ To generalize about Didions style is difficult because it is so various in its use

17、 of rhetorical and stylistic devices. It ranges widely in diction, using both simple and esoteric words; in sentence structure, using long and short sentences, loosely and tightly coordinated ones; in tone, from mocking irony to straightforward praise or blame; in manner, from the most intimate to t

18、he rather formal. Two generalizations can safely be made, however : first, Didions style is invariably graceful, for she has a practiced ear for the rhythms of languages; second, her style is never inflatedevery word counts.” -by Henderson,Lexical exhibition Catalogue structure Syntactic features :

19、parallelism, antithesis Figures of Speech: metaphor, simile, symbolism Repetition Heteroglossia （复调，杂声） Fragments Minimalism （式微化）,Heteroglossia,Polyphony of voices 多角度叙述 For example, in Play It As It Lays, the novel begins from three sections narrated separately by Maria, Helene, Marias ex-husband

20、Carter. And the three sections are all about Maria. So Maria is introduced to the reader from different points of view.,The main part of the story is narrated in third-person narration. But towards the end of the novel, Didion inserts some chapters which are in the first-person narration. However, m

21、ost of the narration is from the point of view of Maria. Marias mind, moods, and emotions dominate every page. Everything-events, other characters, objects, even the weatheris seen from her point of view, measured by her response. Even her abortion is presented not in the objective details of the op

22、eration, but rather in her subjective reactions:,the color of the wallpaper, the noise of the air-conditioner, the sound of the television set in the next room are the things that count; her mind records them as she desperately tries to ignore the reality of the abortion. The reader can share her em

23、otions because we see them from within her experience.,Minimalism,Minimalism presents what is often a bare, simplified snapshot of some events, insisting that the reader imagine the rest of circumstances and guess about their impact. It can be characterized by ordinary subject matter, straightforwar

24、d narratives, slightness of story, and characters who dont think out loud.,It reflects a number of contemporary thoughts about the society. It also reflects the postmodern idea that the story does not exist without the reader. Among Didions novels, Play It As It Lays is the most typical minimalist n

25、ovel. It is a striking bare novel. Out of the total of two hundred and thirteen pages, one hundred and forty-two have significantly more than the usual inch of bare margin, and sixty-two of those are one-third or more blank.,Symbols,Name Maria Wyeth: “ Wyeth” has the same sound as “why is”. It sugge

26、sts the activity of questioning, her questioning of existence. BZ: can be “ be zero”, which suggests that he has gone all the way to zero, to the end where there is nothing more. And in the novel, BZ finally commits suicide.,The crap game it suggests Marias predicament of living in a world where the

27、 past fails to connect rationally to the future, where dreams of new beginning are played out. She inhabits a world which seems “not to apply”( her home in Silver Wells, Nevada has literally vanished, replaced by a missile range). In such a world where “nothing adds up”, Maria finally adopts her phi

28、losophy of life “ play it as it lays” which just like our title goes.,The rattlesnake Marias knowledge of evil is symbolized by the frequent appearance of the rattlesnake in her dreams. As a girl, her father had warned her against turning over rocks for fear she might reveal a snake. She was unable

29、to follow the advice, for the rattlesnake is revealed all too clearly in the harsh light of her reason. Once released, it never crawls back under the rock. Maria can have no turning back, no retreat to the comforts of innocence or ignorance; the rattlesnake pursues her everywhere, in her dreams, on

30、the highways, even in the coiled shape of her food.,Driving on the freeway Marias daily driving on the freeway is logical extension of the idea of refuge in the present implicit in “ play it as it lays”. Like the game of craps it implies randomness and directionlessness. Each trip is without aim or

31、goal: no one has any relation to another.,The abortion It becomes the primary symbol of amputating present from past, of severing, through “radical surgery”, the continuum of personal history. The abortion is the chief source of Marias problem with “as it was”, the source of her accumulated guilt, t

32、he cause of her nightmares of hacked pieces of flesh in the plumbing. The abortion is the primary reason Marias past no longer “adds up”; it is the root of her despair, the most immediate and personal reason for her sense of the collapse of cause and effect. With the abortion, she cuts herself adrif

33、t from any sense of purpose.,Marias hospitalization It is regarded as “the second abortion” for her in the novel. Maria falls into this second abortion in her attempt to shield herself from the past and its accumulated guilt. It renders Maria the possibility of exiling from both the past and future,

34、 but it also lets her dissociate herself from the present.,意义失却的仿真时代：论狄第恩顺其自然中的虚空主题,【英文篇名】The Meaningless Simulation Age: The Void in Didions Play It As It Lays 【作者中文名】王海萌 【文献出处】外国文学研究, 2006年 03期 【摘要】虚空是当代美国女作家狄第恩一贯关注的焦点,其小说顺其自然揭示了处于后现代仿真语境中个人被黑洞吞没的空无状态。本文借用鲍德里亚关于内爆以及历史终结的相关理论,提出顺其自然利用好莱坞和拉斯维加斯作为故事发生的背景强调了后现代社会的仿真性,而小说在时空方面的挤压回应了鲍德里亚关于历史终结的推论。小说最终揭示的是,在后现代社会,主体的存在只是一种幻像,永恒的虚空才是宿命的策略。 【关键词】琼狄第恩; 仿真; 历史; 主体; 虚空;,琼狄第恩作品中新新闻主义、女权主义和后现代主义的多角度展现,【英文篇名】The Multi-angle Representations of New Journalism Feminism and Postmodernism in Joan Didions Works 【作者】李美华 【学位授予单位】厦门大学;