Much has been made over the potentially dark and dangerous side of postmodernism - its antihumanism, its attack on basic assumptions about language and experience, its denial of selfhood. For Lance Olsen, however, there are points of convergence between postmodernism and the comic vision.
Both the comic and the postmodern attempt to subvert all centers of authority - including their own. Both ultimately deride univocal visions. Through radical incongruity of form and vision, both seek to short-circuit the dominant culture's repressive impulses.
After a lively introductory chapter that maps the confluence of postmodernism and the comic vision, Olsen focuses on seven British and American fiction writers, using their works to examine various aspects of the rise and fall of postmodern humor in our culture.

Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision (Humor in Life and Letters)

Humor & Entertainment

Lance Olsen

Humor

Wayne State Univ Pr

Sharky Marky and the Big Race'is a children's picture book story about a group of sea creatures having an underwater car race. The story encourages children to participate in the adventure by counting numbers to help Sharky Marky come back to win the race. "Now Marky has fallen to last in line. He'll need your help to catch up in time." Get ready for a rip-roaring fun-filled adventure story about an underdog that goes from flat tire to trophy!

Sharky Marky and the Big Race

Olsen Images

Sewing Shut My Eyes is a tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle—nine darkly satiric out-takes of America tubing. Visions of mid-air synchronicities, robotic cockroaches, cyborg poets and one monstrous HDTV, all rendered in a hypo-manic style of electrified clauses and full-throttle patter. Here's Mona Sausalito, self-proclaimed "fricking gorgeous" bad-little-girl for Escort a la Mode and, on the side, Neogoth lyricist in the band of her boyfriend Mosh ("His real name is Marvin Goldstein"). Mona wants to be a poet. "I write about human sacrifices, cannibalism, vampires, and stuff. Mosh loves my work. He says we're all going to be famous some day. Only right now we're not, which bites, cuz I've been writing for like almost ten months. These things take time, I guess."Olsen hallucinates a turned-on, channel-surfing nation where pain has become home theater and given enough channels, watching would beat sex. A nameless agent of the ultimate phantom bureaucracy holds his Yeltsin-70 at the ready and recalls O.J. on trial, supermodels and styrofoam landscapes, America screening fast and addictive. In the title story, Kerwin Penumbro wakes on his birthday to the ultimate tv, the renowned Mitsubishi Stealth, and at a point thirty-three thousand feet above the triangulation of Iron Lightning, Faith, and Thunder Butte, SD, Itty Snibb, supremely confident dwarf and prosperous entrepreneur, prepares to meet God.These are fictions for minds lit with cathode-ray tubes, hands pixilated with static, for bodies that have become switching stations for the Society of the Spectacle.The only thing left to do is start sewing shut our eyes.

Sewing Shut My Eyes (Black Ice Books.)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Fiction Collective 2

Girl Imagined by Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple who find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and the culture of reproduction. Structured around twelve photographs from a single roll of film, the book explores the nature of photography and the questions that nature raises about the notions of the simulated and the real, the media-ization of consciouness, originality, self construction, and the way we all continually fashion our faces into masks for the next shot. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. The prevailing metaphor and structural device of photograpy examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The seemigly stable and fixed individual past turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future. The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces.

Girl Imagined by Chance

Nietzsche's Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Salome, his stormy association with Richard Wagner, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his radibly anti-Semitic sister. Here is an authoritative portrait of the Nietzsche we know and the Nietzsche we don't. His titantic ego, suppressed, squelched, and sealed up within him, all but unknown to his acquaintances, creates a maniacal and raging giant inside his own skull that is mysterious and unnerving. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in Nietzsche's Kisses is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex experience of Nietzsche's final hours.

Nietzsche's Kisses: A Novel

Calendar of Regrets is a wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel—through time, space, narrative, and death.The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rather’s mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s point of view—these and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks. View a trailer for the book here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZvaLi91Blk

Calendar of Regrets

Literary

Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age--right from its use of two back covers (one "upside down" and one "right-side up") that allow the reader to choose which of the novel's two narratives to privilege. Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost, whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia. The second involves Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both to remember and to forget Alana’s death. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided “dialogue” with her brother, Lance. Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’s and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the bottom of the page, from front to back. How a reader initially happens to pick up Theories of Forgetting determines which narrative is read first, and thereby establishing the reader’s meaning-making of the novel.

Theories of Forgetting

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Books by Lance Olsen