Parables of Semiurgic Era

The rise of the second phase of capitalism after World War II and its relation with the increase in information production and the ubiquity of mass media, the incessant play of signs and images in the groundless 'cyberspace' leading to the erosion of referentiality and 'reality' with the consequent absence of 'reality' masked through the simulation of reality and generation of 'hyperreality' are issues famously theorized by Jean Baudrillard. The writers try to show that these notions are arguably nowhere better illustrated than in the fiction of Brian Moore, a novelist whose career coincided with Baudrillard. For, in Moore's work a consumerist society is delineated in which the infinitely reproduced objects and commodities threaten the subjectivity and identity of modern man. Besides, the 'auratic' value of art, history, human relations and religion, in such a universe, is replaced by 'hyperreal' counterparts. The writers suggest that Brian Moore has written uncanny parables of what Baudrillard calls 'the seimurgic era.'