Postmodernism

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Postmodernism
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Postmodernism

• Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of
  these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between
  high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre
  distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody,
  bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art
  (and thought) favors reflexivity and
  self-consciousness, fragmentation and
  discontinuity (especially in narrative
  structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an
  emphasis on the destructured, decentered,
  dehumanized subject.

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• Modernism, for example, tends to present a
  fragmented view of human subjectivity and history
  (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of
  Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that
  fragmentation as something tragic, something to
  be lamented and mourned as a loss.

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Difference

• Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that
  works of art can provide the unity, coherence,
  and meaning which has been lost in most of modern
  life art will do what other human institutions
  fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't
  lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality,
  or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The
  world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art
  can make meaning then, let's just play with
  nonsense.

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Frederic Jameson

• modernism and postmodernism are cultural
  formations which accompany particular stages of
  capitalism.
• Three primary phases of capitalism which dictate
  particular cultural practices (including what
  kind of art and literature is produced).

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3 primary phases of capitalism

• 1. market capitalism
• associated with particular technological
  developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and
  with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely,
  realism
• occurred from the eighteenth through the late
  nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England,
  and the United States (and all their spheres of
  influence)

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• 2. monopoly capitalism
• associated with electric and internal combustion
  motors, and with modernism
• occurred from the late nineteenth century until
  the mid-twentieth century (about WWII) this
  phase,

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• The third, the phase we're in now, is
  multinational or consumer capitalism (with the
  emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and
  consuming commodities, not on producing them),
  associated with nuclear and electronic
  technologies, and correlated with postmodernism.

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Postmodernity modernity

• Like Jameson's characterization of postmodernism
  in terms of modes of production and technologies,
  the second facet, or definition, of postmodernism
  comes more from history and sociology than from
  literature or art history. This approach defines
  postmodernism as the name of an entire social
  formation, or set of social/historical attitudes
  more precisely,this approach contrasts
  "postmodernity" with "modernity," rather than
  "postmodernism" with "modernism."

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The Difference

• "Modernism" generally refers to the broad
  aesthetic movements of the twentieth century
  "modernity" refers to a set of philosophical,
  political, and ethical ideas which provide the
  basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism.
• "Modernity" is older than "modernism" the label
  "modern," first articulated in nineteenth-century
  sociology, was meant to distinguish the present
  era from the previous one, which was labeled
  "antiquity."

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'Postmodernism' is a broad range of

1. responses to modernism, especially refusals of
   some of its totalizing premises and effects, and
   of its implicit or explicit distinction between
   'high' culture and commonly lived life,
2. responses to such things as a world lived under
   nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a
   world of faster communication, mass mediated
   reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores
   and a consequent pluralism,

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• 3. acknowledgments of and in some senses
  struggles against a world in which, under a
  spreading technological capitalism, all things
  are commodified and fetishized (made the object
  of desire), and in which genuine experience has
  been replaced by simulation and spectacle,

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• 4. resultant senses of fragmentation, of
  discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather
  than as a weave,
• 5. reconceptualizations of society, history and
  the self as cultural constructs, hence as
  rhetorical constructs.

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• a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the
  elements of modernist thought which are
  totalizing which suggest a master narrative or
  master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of
  experience the result may be
• a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field
  of contesting explanations none of which can
  claim any authority,
• parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and
  master-code elements, including genre and
  literary form,
• the challenging of borders and limits, including
  those of decency,
• the exploration of the marginalized aspects of
  life and marginalized elements of society.

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Breaking down grand narratives

• The 'problem' with grand narratives is that they
  bring all of experience under one explanatory and
  one implicitly or explicitly regulative order,
  and hence are potentially (some would say,
  inevitably) totalitarian and repressive
• Is living without grand narratives an act of
  courage and freedom in the face of inevitable
  doubt and instability, or merely an opening of
  oneself to the worst forces of the libido and an
  abandonment of necessary principles?

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• the writing of reflexive or meta-fiction fiction
  which is in the first instance aware of itself as
  fiction and which may dramatize the false or
  constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand,
  or the inevitable fictionality of all experience,
  on the other.

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• a reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of
  modernist form -- of the dominance in modernism
  of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which
  concept created a 'special world' for art, cut
  off from the variety and everydayness of life (a
  negative judgment on this 'refusal' is that
  postmodernism simply aestheticizes everything,
  see the next point)

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• an attempt to integrate art and life -- the
  inclusion of popular forms, popular culture,
  everyday reality Bakhtin's notion of
  'carnival', of joyous, anti-authoritarian,
  riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes
  sense in this context and adds a sense of energy
  and freedom to some post modern work

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• the notion of carnival is taken to the limit in
  the idea of transgression, the idea that to live
  and think beyond the structures of capitalist
  ideology and of totalizing concepts
• Violate what appear to be standards of sense and
  decency, the methods of social and imaginative
  control
• A more benign conception than transgression is
  the concept of the paralogical a revelation of
  the non-rational immediacy of life (considered
  thus to be implicitly revolutionary, liberating)
• as with ideas such as carnival and transgression,
  the paralogical gives access to the energy of the
  world, and allows us to experience outside of the
  strictures of the grand narratives

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• the use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical
  shifts, in order to undercut any legitimization
  of reality, subject, ontological ground
• a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between
  fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres,
  between high and low culture
• a sense that the world is a world made up of
  rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs
  and images and symbols, none of which have any
  necessary validity

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• achieved through the notion of carnival, of the
  turning upside-down of everything, and through
  the use of parody, play, black humour and wit
• this refusal and these methods of undercutting
  seriousness are associated as well with
  fragmentation, as traditional notions of
  narrative coherence are challenged
• The 'problem' with seriousness is that it has no
  room for the disruptions necessary to expose the
  oppressions and repressions of master narratives,
  in fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to
  reinforce them and hence the ideologies they
  support

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• a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between
  fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres,
  between high and low culture
• a sense that the world is a world made up of
  rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs
  and images and symbols, none of which have any
  necessary validity

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• a move away from perspectivism, from the located,
  unified 'subject' and the associated grounding of
  the authority of experience in the sovereign
  subject and its processes of perception and
  reflection
• a fragmentation of the self (the unified,
  located subject), or a disappearance or flatness
  -- the self, or subject, is no longer a
  'psychological' reality but henceforth a cultural
  construction, located rhetorically (in terms of
  the kinds of language used, the subject matter,
  the situation), differently configured in
  different situations

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A greater emphasis on the body, on the human as
incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world.

• This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of
  rationalism and of the ideology of the
  Enlightenment. This emphasis on the physicality
  of our being leads in several directions,
  including
• an emphasis on chance and contingency as
  fundamental conditions of our being and
• a positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism
  as guide to truth, hence ultimately as the ground
  for ethics.

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a rethinking of modernism's break with history.
There are (at least) two directions in which this
rethinking may go

• 1. a greater awareness of history as a narrative,
  that is, a human construct history is accessible
  to us, but only as text -- its documents are
  texts, its institutions are social texts. This
  does not mean that history did not happen it
  means that what we know as history is known to us
  only through what is configured for our
  understandings by language, by narratives with
  their own shaping forces, by figures of speech.
• 2 an insistence of the incarnate and the
  contingent, human life as located, specific,
  grounded in the body and in circumstance.

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Postmodern literature

• Postmodernism is a fact of everyday life. We live
  in a world of uncertainty, of lapses in--if not
  absence of--authority, of fragmentation, of
  visual and auditory overload, of the blurring of
  lines between mass culture and elite culture.
  Such features have found their way into
  contemporary literature and particularly into the
  literature labeled "postmodern."

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• The postmodern camp is inhabited by such writers
  as William Burroughs, Robert Coover, John Barth,
  Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut,
  Jr. and E. L. Doctorow and African American
  writer Ishmael Reed.

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Features

• a nonlinear plot, with jumps both in space and in
  time, and confuses the identity of ostensible
  author and the "I". Is the "I" the author?
  Another character? Planting the seeds of
  uncertainty in the reader regarding the identity
  of authors and their relationship to the text is
  one of the hallmarks of postmodernism. By
  extension, it prompts us to ask where "fiction"
  ends and "reality" begins.

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• postmodernism makes us question the organization
  of the text itself
• blurring of the admittedly artificial line
  between historical narrative and fictional
  narrative
• the problem of "author-ity" characterizes the
  text
• both fiction and history are reconstructions and
  that historical "objectivity" is impossible

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• Postmodern fiction is challenging, pulling the
  rug out from under readers, juggling narrators,
  obscuring authorial voice, fragmenting plot lines
  so that the old plot diagram takes on bizarre
  geometric patterns and calls attention to its own
  fictionality, the result of which is known as
  metafiction.

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Metafiction http//www.eng.fju.edu.tw/
Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm

• Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing
  which self-consciously and systematically draws
  attention to its status as an artifact in order
  to pose questions about the relationship between
  fiction and reality.  In providing a critique of
  their own methods of construction, such writings
  not only examine the fundamental structures of
  narrative fiction, they also explore the possible
  fictionality of the world outside the literary
  fictional text.  (Waugh 2)

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• Spectrum  Metafiction is thus an elastic term
  which cover a wide range of fictions.  There are
  those novels at one end of the spectrum which
  take    fictionality as a  theme to be explored .
  .. whose formal self-consciousness is limited. 
  At the center of this spectrum are those texts
  that manifest the symptoms of formal and
  ontological insecurity but allow their
  deconstructions to be finally recontextualized or
  'naturalized' and given a total  interpretation .
  . .Finally, at the furthest extreme that, in
  rejecting realism more thoroughly, posit the
  world as a fabrication of competing semiotic
  systems which never correspond to material
  conditions, ...(Waugh 18-19)

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Metafictional techniques

• Metafictional techniques include everything from
  the Dear-Reader convention to authors confessing
  to the reader that they are tired of a particular
  scene/character and want to move on. Ex.
  Virginia Woolf's Orlando
• the authorial voice interrupts the narrative to
  observe that in situation X, the biographer
  usually does Y.

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• John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman
  (1969) can be excerpted to illustrate Fowles'
  using and subverting the conventions of Victorian
  fiction and relying on a favorite postmodern
  strategy the inclusion of alternative endings.
• Plot becomes fragmentary, characters are
  eccentric, tone inconsistent, and language
  frenetic, spiced with seemingly endless allusions
  to mass culture.

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• Las Meninas Brown, Jonathan.  Velaquez Painter
  and Coutier.  New Haven Yale UP, 1986.
• "Recent studies of Las Meninas, inspired by the
  ideas of Michel Foucault, have paid considerable
  attention to the seemingly novel relationship
  between the scene on the canvas and  the
  spectator.  These ideas tacitly assume that the
  picture was meant to be seen by the
  public-at-large., as if it were hanging in an
  important museum, as it is today.  ...However.
  the original placement indicates that this is not
  the case.  In 1666, the year after the death of
  Philip IV, Las Meninas was inventoried in a room
  known as ...the office in the summer quarters,
  ...a room destined for the personal use of the
  king." (Brown 259).