Posts

Sorted by New

Wiki Contributions

Comments

The film Stranger Than Fiction and the novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books are good examples of Man Vs Author.

I think the Man Vs Man, Self, and Reality thing is just about where the cause of conflict in fiction came from: first it was other characters , then it was inner struggles (with the rise of ideas like Freud's subconscious) and the protagonist's own limitations, then it was the meaninglessness or irrationality of the external world itself (in the manner of Albert Camus, Thomas Pynchon, and later Philip K. Dick, i'm guessing).

The Baudrillard bit is probably a reference to his concepts of "simulacrum" and "hyperreality", which i don't understand. Wikipedia says:

The postmodern semiotic concept of "hyperreality" was contentiously coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard defined "hyperreality" as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality;"[2] hyperreality is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. Baudrillard believes hyperreality goes further than confusing or blending the 'real' with the symbol which represents it; it involves creating a symbol or set of signifiers which represent something that does not actually exist, like Santa Claus. Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.