    
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 400
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - 06:13 pm: | |
Hi, I have read Erasure by Percival Everett, which I interpret as mostly a satire of social realist fiction, or at least a certain type of social realism. I take it that the term erasure was coined by the poststructuralist thinker Jacques Derrida. I'm not a writer and I have no background in literary theory to speak of, but I suppose that what I've been attempting in my own inimitable style, is a kind of deconstruction of the novel I'm reading. In one sense I think it is a work of social realism, although in my opinion, so many aspects of it would contradict describing it as realism.
For example, we're told a horrible story involving the housing project. Then on the other hand, we're told that No Face is such a bad dude that he put out his own eye with acid in order to win a bet, and that the young Lucifer was so scientifically-minded that he brought callipers onto the basketball court in order to measure the cranial volume of the players - an allusion to Zora Neale Hurston's fieldwork as an anthropology student at Columbia University. Maybe that's supposed to be a tall tale, however, I doubt that Spokesman is the kind of person who could have read a biography of Zora Neale Hurston. |