Postmodernism

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Postmodernism Postmodernist Literature

• English 11

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What is Postmodernism?
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Postmodernism Definition

• Coined in 1949
• To describe a dissatisfaction with modern
  architecture, founding the postmodern
  architecture
• Any of several movements (as in art,
  architecture, or literature) reacting against the
  philosophy and practices of modern movements

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Postmodernist Literature Overview

• After World War II
• A series of reactions against the perceived
  failure
• Reaction against modernism

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Postmodernist Literature Overview

• Important Works
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth (1968)
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

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First, what is modern? Depends on Discipline.

• The break away from 19th-century values is often
  classified as modernism, and carries the
  connotations of transgression and rebellion.
  However, the last twenty years has seen a change
  in this attitude towards focusing upon a series
  of unresolvable philosophical and social debates,
  such as race, gender and class.
• Rather than challenging and destroying cultural
  definitions, as does modernism, post-modernism
  resists the very idea of boundaries. It regards
  distinctions as undesirable and even impossible,
  so that an almost Utopian world, free from all
  constraints, becomes possible.

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Modernism Vs Postmodernism

• A break from 19th century realism
• A story was told from an objective or omniscient
  point of view
• Character development
• Both literature explore subjectivism
• Turning from external reality to examine inner
  states of consciousness
• Drawing on modernist examples in the stream of
  consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf and James
  Joyce

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Modernism Vs Postmodernism Poems (Not limited
to poems)

• The Waste Land by T S Eliot
• Fragmentary
• Employing pastiche like much postmodern
  literature
• Speaker in The Waste Land "these fragments I
  have shored against my ruins"
• Modernist literature fragmentation and extreme
  subjectivity as an existential crisis, or
  Freudian internal conflict

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Modernism Vs Postmodernism

• A problem that must be solved, and the artist
  often cited as the one to solve it
• Postmodernists this chaos is insurmountable the
  artist is impotent, and the only recourse against
  "ruin" is to play within the chaos.
• Playfulness becomes central and the actual
  achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely
  

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Modernism Vs Postmodernism

• Explore fragmentariness in narrative- and
  character-construction
• Characterized by allusive difficulty, paradox,
  and indifference or outright hostility to the
  democratic ethos
• More and more in jeopardy since the rise of
  fascism and dictatorial communism.

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• Modern
• Linear progress in history
• Boundaries, social class, race and gender
• Formality, emphasis on authoritarian perspectives
• Scientific rationality, unified theory of
  progress
• Essentialism, seeking real essences
• Prescription
• Normative

• Postmodern
• Historicity, historicization, socio-cultural
  locatedness of moments in history
• Critical study of class, race, and gender uses
  other perspectives
• Intertextuality, self-reflexivity, montage,
  pastiche
• Signs, image, reproductive social order
• Local accounts
• Description

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• Post-modernism has many interpretations and no
  single definition is adequate. Different
  disciplines have participated in the
  post-modernist movement in varying ways in
  architecture, traditional limits have become
  indistinguishable, so that what is commonly on
  the outside of a building is placed within, and
  vice versa.
• In literature, writers adopt a self-conscious
  intertextuality sometimes verging on pastiche,
  which denies the formal propriety of authorship
  and genre. In commercial terms post-modernism
  may be seen as part of the growth of consumer
  capitalism into multinational and technological
  identity.

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• postmodernity (involves) the end of an
  overarching belief in scientific rationality and
  a unitary theory of progress, the replacement of
  empiricist theories of representation and truth,
  and increased emphasis on the importance of the
  unconscious, on free-floating signs and images,
  and a plurality of viewpoints a shift from a
  productive' to a reproductive social order, in
  which simulations and models -- and more
  generally, signs -- increasingly constitute the
  world, so that any distinction between the
  appearance and the real is lost.

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• Another feature of postmodernism seen by some
  theorists is that the boundaries between high'
  and low' culture tend to be broken down.
  According to many theorists, postmodernist
  cultural movements, which often overlap with new
  political tendencies and social movements in
  contemporary society, are particularly associated
  with the increasing importance of new class
  fractions.

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Common Themes Techniques

• Irony, playfulness, black humor, hyperreality,
  temporal distortion, metacognition/metafiction,
  paranoia
• Postmodern fiction characterized by the ironic
  quote marks,
• Postmodern novelists labeled black humorists
  John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt
  Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman
• Common to treat serious subjects in a playful and
  humorous way

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Common Themes Techniques

• Pastiche
• To combine, or "paste" together, multiple
  elements.
• An homage to or a parody of past styles
• A representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or
  information-drenched aspects of postmodern
  society
• A combination of multiple genres to create a
  unique narrative or to comment on situations in
  postmodernity
• William S. Burroughs science fiction, detective
  fiction, westerns
• Margaret Atwood science fiction and fairy tales

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Common Themes Techniques

• Metafiction (metacognition)
• Writing about writing or "foregrounding the
  apparatus"
• Making the artificiality of art or the
  fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader
• Generally disregards the necessity for willful
  suspension of disbelief
• To undermine the authority of the author, for
  unexpected narrative shifts
• To advance a story in a unique way, for emotional
  distance
• To comment on the act of storytelling

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Common Themes Techniques

• Historiographic metafiction
• Fictionalize actual historical events or figures
• The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia
  Marquez (about Simón Bolívar)
• Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (featuring such
  historical figures as Archduke Franz Ferdinand of
  Austria and Sigmund Freud)

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Common Themes Techniques

• Temporal distortion
• Central features Fragmentation and non-linear
  narratives
• Temporal distortion for the sake of irony
• Example Historiographic metafiction
• Distortions in time in Kurt Vonnegut's non-linear
  novels Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five
  coming "unstuck in time

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Common Themes Techniques

• Anachronisms Abraham Lincoln using a telephone
  In his flight to Canada (Ishmael Reed)
• Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into
  multiple possibilities.
• "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs Descants by
  Robert Coover multiple possible events occurring
  simultaneously -- in one section the babysitter
  is murdered while in another section nothing
  happens and so on

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Common Themes Techniques

• Technoculture and hyperreality
• Fredric Jameson society has moved past the
  industrial age and into the information age.
• Jean Baudrillard postmodernity was defined by a
  shift into hyperreality in which simulations have
  replaced the real.
• People are inundated with information
• Technology as a central focus in many lives

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Common Themes Techniques

• Paranoia
• The belief that there is an ordering system
  behind the chaos of the world
• Postmodernist no ordering system exists, so a
  search for order is fruitless and absurd.
• Often coincides with the theme of technoculture
  and hyperreality.
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut the
  character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he
  is convinced that everyone else in the world is a
  robot and he is the only human

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Time to go

• Thank you!