Tuesday
Yes. It is true. Having been immersed in the world of composition pedagogy, I've learned this truth about the state of the world: language constructs the world and then becomes a construct of it. Confused? Welcome to the postness of postmodernism. Or at least my sense of it.
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Is it interesting to consider flash fiction in light of this idea, that language constructs reality? How many writers have set out to capture the experience of college, to recreate it, only to fail miserably? The problem? There was no reality to capture. That is your sentence in this life. To be born into a world without a reality, to choose the constructs by which you'll construct it. What does it mean not to choose in such a world? What does one get then? To not construct the world through word after word, constructed into sentences, flash after flash?
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Think of flash as the thing that creates the world. There is nothing until the title flashes across the top, and from that moment until the end, there's a reality that only existed because you choose those words in that order. Imagine that your flash isn't a recreation of the world but the very creation of it. Compressed like the universe before time, flash feels especially ready to accept this post postmodern responsibility: to be the defining form of our time. Wowza.
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