Postmodern Writing Features In The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is both the climax of Muriel Spark's work creation and the turning point. Her previous works all manage to express the counter balance between human beings'free will and supernatural manipulative power, thus full of Gothic styles. However, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie does not have those strong Gothic styles, but postmodern characteristics instead.According to the theory of postmodernism, postmodern novels have the features of complexity and openness. That is, all the contradictory reasons and explanations co-exist in the same text, thus putting readers in a situation full of different meanings. The indeterminacy of meaning lies in the fact that postmodern novels provide readers many possible and even paradoxical explanations. At the same time, there are no sufficient reasons that can prove one explanation is better than other ones. Readers can neither logically own all the explanations nor choose a so-called better explanation.In fact, Spark's novel is just in this situation. Postmodernism means that the deep structure is lost. The content of the text is uncertain, broken and open. For this novel, the story itself does not have the up-and-down plots, but what is interesting is that how the readers make judgment of Miss Jean Brodie. Is she a good person or a bad person? Is her influence on pupils positive or negative? All these questions just indicate the openness of postmodern novels.The paper includes seven parts.The first part briefly introduces the life and writing experiences of Muriel Spark as well as the plot of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.The second part makes introduction to the basic theory of postmodernism, the development of postmodern novels and its main features.The third part mainly analyzes how the theory of indeterminacy is embodied in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.The fourth part mainly analyzes how the theory of pluralism is embodied in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.The fifth part mainly analyzes how the theory of language games is embodied in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The sixth part points out the significances of this novel based on the above analysis.The last part is the conclusion.