Postcolonial and postmodern literature?

[Albus Dumbledore]

What are the characteristics of postcolonial writing as well as postmodern writing?

[CognitiveArtist]

I'm very curious about postmodern literature, with it's aura of playfulness and irony.

I read a little chapter on it which helped me, it's in the Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dfpJqgYC7x8C&printsec=frontcover&sig=XnQco589v0axDtMLH1_0WhsdJEI#PPA62,M1). It articulated well the differences between postmodern literature and modernist literature, explaining how postmodern literature largely goes beyond or builds on top of modernist literature.
I remember the article said modernism tried to explain or present the whole world and the sense of it's worldliness, whereas postmodern literature tries to go beyond or "out do" the world. Yet despite this type of extravagance context is important, things aren't simply exaggerated as time and space are important. Modernist Literature I understand emphasised dispositions, so people would be rather stable over place and time.
Another dimension is modernist literature emphasises structure and identity, which made a story able to give you a clear "still picture", where things can clearly be identified with having specific characteristics and identity. Postmodern literature, like postmodern philosophy, disbelieves that there are clear pictures and identities of things in the world so postmodern literature tells a story where things are blurry and changing. An interesting distinction in the chapter is that postmodern literature favours "the voice" whereas modernist literature favours "the eye". This reminds me of a distinction about postmodern things in general which enables me to remember the gist of the postmodern's style, which is the postmodern is a condition whereas modernism ("modern philosophy" and modernist literature I presume) is a "position". This is detailed well in the introduction to Postmodern theology (http://books.google.com.au/books?id=RR-E32WkwuEC&printsec=frontcover&sig=rsWrtbizybe8uMJ30yMs94wmn3w#PPA3,M1)
I shall resist describing postmodernity in either conceptual or cultural terms alone. I shall prefer, rather, to speak of the postmodern "condition" as something that is at once intellectual/theoretical and cultural/practical, a condition that affects modes of thought as well as modes of embodiment. Significantly, the first book to treat postmodernity as a distinct intellectual and cultural movement wasn Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979.
A condition is something altogether different from a position. A position refers to one's location in space or, alternatively, to one's opinion on a certain issue. The point is that a position, whether geographical or argumentative, can be plotted or specified more or less accurately. Positions are determinate - fixed, definite. A condition is altogether more diffuse, an environment in which one lives and moves and, in some sense, has one's being.

As for postcolonialism and literature I could only speculate.

Hope my comments are helpful or interesting. Feel free to comment if you think I stumbled over a detail or two, as knowledge about the postmodern can always be finer :)

[SirJazzHands]

That's odd because I always thought authors like Woolf, Faulkner, were modernist, and they aren't very "structured".

[CognitiveArtist]

The distinctions between postmodern literature and modernist literature I take to be rather tenuous, but that's what I learned from the chapter. Got a better definition of postmodern literature on you?

[AuntShecky]

Postmodern fiction often is dubbed "metafiction," in that it is about two things : the conventional plot plus itself or the form of fiction. It is "fiction about fiction." Some characteristics include: general and topical satire, parody,
a winking or tongue-in-cheek narrator, and surrealism.

[Taliesin]

I quite like something I read somewhere on the net: A modernist is on the way like a pilgrim, a postmodernist is on the way like a tourist

[CognitiveArtist]

I'm surprised and a little disappointed a lit. student didn't provide better definitions of postmodern literature, as I felt I wasn't that too the point.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature) actually has a good page on it. Also on metafiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction), where it stated metafiction is apart of both modernist and postmodernist literature.

Some of the main points I thought were modernist literature finds chaos and conflict in life problematic, whereas postmodern literature finds chaos in life to be intrinsic to life itself, like Heraclitus, so it may as well just be reveled in.

Also a kind of decentering theme seems to be in postmodern literature. A story or a thing is never a stable identity, but is often composed of a fluctuating identity, a lot of things put together (Pastiche). Metafiction seems on the same page with decentering, that you can have a story within a story or art within art and the boundaries between what's fictional and what's real are blurred. It's hard to tell where the fiction stops and non-fiction starts.

[NickAdams]

I would look to Salmon Rushdie for postcolonial literature.