postmodernism

[atena_63]

would you please give me some information about the definition of postmodernism and also introduce some post modern authors ?

[Veva]

Hi, postmodernism has the following characteristics:
1. it is joined with pop-art but refuses consumer society
2. you can look at the text from both scientific and artistic side
3. the text has many genres and styles
4. the text usually looks like a letter or diary
5. can sometimes look like a parody and has signs of irony
6. the story denies the rational, reveals a secret or crime
7. often does not explain situations
8. this is not common, but sometimes the authors try to talk about a taboo in society (like sexuality or mental diseases)

I was told by my teacher that the novels are following - Lolita (Nabokov), Sophi's choice (Styron), The name of the rose (Eco)

[atena_63]

Thank you Veva, very helpful info.
I wonder whether the works of Beckett and salinger are categorized as postmodern?

[JBI]

Hi, postmodernism has the following characteristics:
1. it is joined with pop-art but refuses consumer society
2. you can look at the text from both scientific and artistic side
3. the text has many genres and styles
4. the text usually looks like a letter or diary
5. can sometimes look like a parody and has signs of irony
6. the story denies the rational, reveals a secret or crime
7. often does not explain situations
8. this is not common, but sometimes the authors try to talk about a taboo in society (like sexuality or mental diseases)

I was told by my teacher that the novels are following - Lolita (Nabokov), Sophi's choice (Styron), The name of the rose (Eco)

I would have to disagree with those notions, simply because they generally miss the point, and only really apply to one or two works.


Generally, I see it as literature that questions what is literature - mind you, not expands what literature is by means of the tradition, - but really questions what exactly literature is, how it functions, what it does, what it represents.

Really though, post-modernism varies heavily between country. The above definition seems a typically American one, but really I personally would argue America hasn't embraced what is really being embraced by other countries, in terms of post-modernism. The term in America simply seems to apply to the clash between popular, counter, and traditional culture that occurred after the 50s, and seems to miss a global perspective entirely.

P.S., Epistolary fiction, or diary fiction are two of the oldest forms of writing. In truth, novels started out for the most part epistolary in style.

[NickAdams]

Thank you Veva, very helpful info.
I wonder whether the works of Beckett and salinger are categorized as postmodern?

There is some confusion as to Beckett's position, either the last modernist or the first postmodernist, but think he shifted to postmodernism fully when he found his voice. The transition can be seen between the Belaqua novel and Molloy. I agree with JBI, but Don Quijote and Tristan Shandy are very curious cases. I think postmodernism is an arbitrary category and has more social than literary. Authors: Pynchon, Calvino, Borges, Beckett. You can say meta-fiction is a postmodern genre, but never forget Quijote and Shandy.

[atena_63]

thank you all .pls let me know :
- how can we distinguish a modern work from a postmodern one? is postmodernism following modernism or it is a movement againt modernism ?
im told that incoherence and uncertainty are the characteristics of a postmodern literary work . but as you know these features are seen in modernist novels as well.
- what is the idea of postmodernism about religion ?

- how does it consider life in general ?

[Virgil]

I don't know if there are any hard and fixed rules as to what postmodern is. I just take it as post WWII literature, modernism as ending just prior to WWII and so a follow on. Just looking at American post modern literature, I really fail to see the connections between Nabakov's Lolita, Ralph Elison's Invisible Man, Capote's In Cold Blood, and Saul Bellow's Herzog. These terms are relatively meaningless, other than to consolodate an era.

[DisPater]

would you please give me some information about the definition of postmodernism and also introduce some post modern authors ?

The term "postmodernism" is quite new and appeared in the 1970-1980’s. It is difficult to locate postmodernism temporally because it emerged in a whole variety of disciplines: art, architecture, film, music, literature, philosophy and others. If we try to define postmodernism we should do this starting from modernism, against which postmodernism defines itself.
Postmodernism follows the ideas of modernism, but attacks the "high and low" forms of art with the help of pastiche, multiple cultural elements, parody, and irony. Postmodernism rejects the boundaries between genres, including subjects and genres previously considered as not worthy of being included under the umbrella of "literature."
Postmodernism is a reaction to the modern theories in which the creator of art (the author in the case of literature) sees himself as a God. He creates for the elites, for a new enlightened society. The modernist creator in architecture, sculpture or literature does not care about the great mass of population. Their target is a small group of persons vith vast cultural knowledge. A well-known example in British modern literature is T.S. Eliot, who used in his works a lot of allusions which were not accessible to the common reader.
Having as background two World Wars, the dissolution of the great empires (the dissolution of the British Empire being the greatest proof), the new evolutions in technique, science, knowledge and thinking, the promoters and the new artists began to question the aesthetic and moral values promoted by modernism. The wish of the modernists to have stable values did not find any support with the postmodernists, who consider those modernist values sometimes necessary, but this does not mean, from their point of view, that they are not less illusory.
All these writers have not formed a unified movement, but they have characteristics in common, characteristics that can, in a way, be regarded as part of a theory. Some of postmodernist features are: temporal disorder, the erosion of the sense of time, a pervasive use of pastiche, a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs, the loose association of ideas, paranoia, vicious circles, a loss of distinction between the levels of the discourse.
On the one hand, postmodernist fiction plays with the normal chronology of time, disrupting the past, but, on the other hand, it corrupts the present, too.
If we talk about postmodernist style, some of its features that can be noticed are the hybrid style, the constitution of the arts as marginal, the practice of intertextuality, a new look and use of the ”impure” genres, a flexible, dialogical and interpretative attitude, and the fact that the postmodern writer is a bricoleur.
The postmodern writer used the narrative techniques stated by the modernist writers, but he also used new techniques such as: the multiplicity of beginnings, endings and narrative actions, and a manipulative author. The implied reader also becomes a character in the story, and one should notice the equality between reality and fiction, reality and myth, truth and lie, the original and its imitation.
In the case of the period named ”modernism” we have some stylistic characteristics such as: structure, finality, distance, centering, literary genre (delimitation), narrative (grand narrative), productivity, original creator, symbolism, elitism, coherence, essentiality, industrial society, progress, ratioanlism. In the period named ”postmodernism” we have stylistic characteristics (which can be seen as emerging from those of modernism) such as: event, game (play), participation, scattering, text (intertext), antinarrative (small/little narrative), parody, bricoleur, ambiguity, suggestion, literature for the messes, poliphony of styles, fragment, postindustrial society, consumism, irationalism.

In the cases of Eco's The Name of the Rose, Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman or Kurt Vonnegut Jr' Slaughterhouse-Five (and many more, such as Rushdie, Kundera) we have what Linda Hutcheon called historiographic metafiction: it "installs", but the goal is to critique.

[atena_63]

Many thanks dear Dispater.
If u belive that rationality, coherence, structure and finality are the characteristics of the modern novels why we consider the works of Joyce,Falkner and Wolf as modern ? as you know in the works of Joyce ( Portray of the Artist As a Young Man), Falkner ( As I Lay Dying ) and Virgina Wolf ( To The Lighthouse) we encounter with the lack of those features you've mentioned. I think we should classify these works as postmodern ones.

[DisPater]

Do you think that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, As I Lay Dying and To the Lighthouse are lacking coherence? Those books have finality, coherence and structure. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a straight-forward story; as a matter of fact all three (your examples) are that way. Not all the postmodernist books are examples of irationalism and lack of structure.

Try Donald Barthelme's The King, there is lack of coherence and structure.
Have you found intertextuality in To the Lighthouse or in The Name of the Rose and The French Lieutenant's Woman?

[atena_63]

As you know according to impressionism (as a modern approach ) the works of Joyce,Wolf and Faulkner portray the mental life of the characters . the mental life of a person is disjointed and intuitive rather than logical and there is no rational linking of objects. I think the psychological novels are lacking coherence and rationality .
I've read the works of Richard Bratigan (ex :" Revenge of the Lawn" and "In Watermelon sugar") and Barthelme's Sandman. I cant understand the differences between these works and ex Wolf's " To The Lighthouse" :confused:. ( I overlook those two works by Joyce & Falkner)
Cuz I think all of these works are lacking coherence and rationality and are the same.

[subterranean]

Can only think of Vonnegut; I might be wrong.

[JBI]

Can only think of Vonnegut; I might be wrong.

I would call him post-modern in the American sense, though I'll admit, I wouldn't call him a good writer in the aesthetic sense. But beyond that, yes, Cat's Cradle is a good example of post-modernist fiction, especially with its play against the novel forms, being that it lacks structure, direct narrative, has flat, anti-character, anti-heroic main characters, an anti-climax at the end, and a pastiche style, as well as functions with use of parody, and Bakhtinian elements.