Beauty Beast

Judgment and Superficiality in "Beauty and the Beast": Parsing a Fairytale from a Postmodern Perspective

It is the conceit of nearly every epoch to assume that certain ideas, perspectives, and frameworks are new or unique to the current time, and with postmodernism this has extended to the notion of purposefully and meaningfully fragmented texts. That is, many postmodernists view fragmentation and purposeful alienation from reality -- truly, a questioning of what constitutes reality -- as the quintessential and definitive postmodern element (Erb, 51). While it cannot be denied that the postmodern period and postmodern works frequently embrace and utilize such fragmentation, and while perhaps no era has used it to the extremes or with the prevalence as the postmodern era, it must also be acknowledged that concepts of alienation from truth and reality are not new to the period, though they were dealt with quite differently in earlier...
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