Ok, above is the poster I had to create as part of my postgraduate course, which was supposed to demonstrate what my thesis was about. Yes, it borrows quite heavily from the piece of art ‘The Great Bear’, but I thought it was an interesting way of trying to show how Brautigan uses signifiers from across the range of cultural awareness in his work. And how all these things are nominally connected by the culturally aware consciousness. He talks in his work about the ‘calender map’ and creates a sort of geography of time. To me it seems he does the same thing with a geography of cultural allusion.
My thesis is now finished (as far as these things are ever really finished as opposed to abandoned) and it has finally been passed by the examiners. Below I have put in links to the introduction and four of the eight chapters. I won’t be putting the other four or the conclusion up and I’ll probably even take these ones down again at some point. I will be working on trying to get the whole thesis published as a minor critical work so I’ll update the blog on progress of that as, when and if it happens…
Chapter 1 : The John Lennon of the Hippie Novel
Chapter 3 : Pastiche and Postmodernism
Chapter 4 : A Postmodernist Model of Time
Chapter 5 : Zen and the Art of Richard Brautigan
Twenty-Two B 