Subliming the Ordinary: Expression and Celebration of the Postmodern Anti-hero in Lorrie Moore's Short Stories Collection Like Life (1990)

Zanafy Gladys Toahiba ABDOUL

Numéro 3 – Décembre 2011 (2011) Page(s) 1 - 18 ISSN 2076-6130

This article aims at analyzing the contribution of the sublime in the representation and the celebration of postmodern heroes/ anti-heroes within contemporary American fiction through a collection of short stories written in the 1990s by one of America’s most influential writers. Lorrie Moore revisits in her fiction writing the notion of the sublime and culminates the loss of affect, depth and interiority that characterizes postmodern art and culture. Through the choice of her characters, she celebrates the banal, the ordinary and manages to bring some magical glow which renders the ugly, the pathetic, and the insignificant attractive and almost glamorous and touching,if not glorious.Moore’s mockery of and indifference totraditional aesthetic frames, associated with an extraordinary compassionate interest in human experience and needs,somehow engage a new sense of heroic criterion and values both in fiction-writing and in the reflected contemporary dysfunctional reality.

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Zanafy Gladys Toahiba ABDOUL. « Subliming the Ordinary: Expression and Celebration of the Postmodern Anti-hero in Lorrie Moore's Short Stories Collection Like Life (1990) ». Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères, Numéro 3, 2011, p. 1. ISSN 2076-6130.