Choose (or create) and justify a METAPHOR which you feel best Essay

Choose (or create) and justify a METAPHOR which you feel best represents the literature of the late 20th - Essay Example Eliot, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce). Through a natural artistic progression of action/reaction, then, the post-modern movement that followed the modernist movement, used the trappings of relativity to examine and express that the juxtaposition of random events to expectations of relativity creates the illusion of an epiphany. In this essay, I will cite examples from two well-respected and critically acclaimed authors, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, to illustrate how they achieve this aim in contemporary perspectives, namely sociological and technical. Before we get to our examples, however, we need to start with the idea of epiphany and its recent place in literature. Long has the term â€Å"epiphany† been part of the Christian lexicon. It wasn’t until James Joyce introduced the term in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that it gained a new connotation—one that deeply permeates literary fiction still today. An epiphany, as presented by Joyce, can be seen as the moment when a character comes to an illuminating realization wherein all that has been learned, or at least presented to the reader, makes sense as interconnected parts of a whole. For instance, in Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, that moment comes when the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who spends much of the book struggling to understand the justice of Christianity and his place in it (among other things), comes to a moment wherein he sees God and God’s love in all things, as they comes together like puzzle pieces that form a new picture of Stephen’s reality. The reaction to this, then, is that all of the elements we encounter in everyday reality are not related, however, in any objective sense, but products of randomness in which we assign relative meaning to them; thus we create our own epiphanies. While his first three books