61 essential postmodern reads

[dfw]

Kathy Acker's "In Memorium to Identity"
Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers"
Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine"





http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/07/the-mostly-complete-annotated-and-essential-postmodern-reading-list.html

[Desolation]

Very hit or miss...They've got most of the core group (Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Wallace, Murakami, Calvino, Bolano, etc), sure, and a few interesting original choices (Foer, Eco, Phillip K. Dick, Burton, Hawthorne). But it still feels a little off.

Faulkner and Sterne? Sure. Kafka and Shakespeare? Not so much.

How can you bring up the great cusp-modernists, O'Brien, Nabokov, and Borges...but not Beckett? And no Finnegans Wake?

[islandclimber]

Certainly some interesting choices here, yet quite inconsistent. And some rather mediocre books placed there... Scarlett Thomas' PopCo? Percival Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier? Really...

And then the choice of Shakespeare, Kafka, Foer, Dick, Hawthorne... How does one equate these authors with postmodernism?

Where are the great Hungarians? Krasznahorkai (The Melancholy of Resistance), Nádas (A Book of Memories), Esterhazy (Celestial Harmonies), Karinthy (Metropole)?

[ashulman]

Harold Bloom talks about how Hamlet is the first postmodern work well before the postmodern era. You have to consider how radical the structure is, with the play within the play, within the play, etc. And then there's the strange playing with time where Hamlet starts a student and soon after he returns from England about 10 years older. It's completely bizarre and disjointed. Definitely has the elements of what later became postmodernism.

And if you read stories by Kafka like The Country Doctor, as well as the Metamorphisis, I think you can make a strong case for him as well. Now that I think of it, most of Kafka's work subverts the existing modes of storytelling and introduces the modern angst as we still know it.

[YesNo]

I guess this has been discussed before, but if everything from Hamlet on could be postmodern, what does it mean to be postmodern?

Perhaps it would also be helpful to know what isn't postmodern?

[PeterL]

I guess this has been discussed before, but if everything from Hamlet on could be postmodern, what does it mean to be postmodern?

Perhaps it would also be helpful to know what isn't postmodern?

Postmodernism is what came after modernism. Therefore, modernism must predate Shakespeare.


Someone, but I can't find who right now, said that he had stopped using the word "postmodern", because it had come to mean "things that I like" to some people and "things that I hate" to other people. I think that this list partially illustrates that idea.

[Desolation]

Postmodernism is what came after modernism. Therefore, modernism must predate Shakespeare.


Someone, but I can't find who right now) said that he had stopped using the word "postmodern", because it had come to mean "things that I like" to some people and "things that I hate" to other people. I think that this list partially illustrates that idea.

I'm not a fan of the term myself, even though it is perhaps my favorite genre/movement based on the core group of writers that the term usually describes. I much prefer the more inclusive "Experimental Fiction." It doesn't have a time stamp. Modernism and Post-Modernism are too vague, especially as they relate to each other.

[PeterL]

I'm not a fan of the term myself, even though it is perhaps my favorite genre/movement based on the core group of writers that the term usually describes. I much prefer the more inclusive "Experimental Fiction." It doesn't have a time stamp. Modernism and Post-Modernism are too vague, especially as they relate to each other.

"Experimental fiction" isn't a bad term, but it doesn't describe much of what has been called post-modern. I think that the attempt to find a term for things as disparate as The New York Trilogy and Tristam Shandy is a waste of time. It's the battle between the splitters and the lumpers being played in the field of literature. I'm a lumper, and I'm not even sure what the difference between fiction and non-fiction is; maybe we should just call it literature.

[Eiseabhal]

Postmodernism is a daft term for fictive fiction. Fiction that Sterne and Lewis C and frankly most sci-fi and fantasy authors and wee kids kids see as STORY telling but which most grown ups see only as a bit of fun .

[islandclimber]

Postmodernism is a daft term for fictive fiction. Fiction that Sterne and Lewis C and frankly most sci-fi and fantasy authors and wee kids kids see as STORY telling but which most grown ups see only as a bit of fun .

How on earth do you equate postmodernism with the pure escapism of "fictive fiction"? Most sci-fi and fantasy authors and wee kids couldn't make heads or tails of pretty much anything in the postmodern canon. I don't particularly like the overarching net people cast with the term these days (especially, as PeterL mentioned, this idea of postmodern being anything contemporary one likes) but equating the fractured and unstable narratives of postmodern literature with fictive fiction is just silly... It often contains episodes or vignettes of the fictive, of storytelling but it certainly goes beyond that with the way it drops into and then out of the ubiquitous...


I guess this has been discussed before, but if everything from Hamlet on could be postmodern, what does it mean to be postmodern?

Perhaps it would also be helpful to know what isn't postmodern?

Baudrillardian post-structuralism is certainly interchangeable with the ideas of postmodernism... Meaning/value only exists through contrast, through interrelations of objects, words, signs. He follows Sassurean semiotics in insisting upon the arbitrariness of the sign. No word can be inherently meaningful unless connected with others (co-dependence of signifier-signified relationship in creating meaning). But he goes beyond this into a historically understood version of structural semiology, where we must look beyond and beneath the surface to discover the underlying reality. This allows us to understand that there are no universal meanings. That the more obvious and coherent the organization of the surface level, the more difficult it is to see beyond and beneath this where one finds only the incoherent and chaotic. And societies are constantly searching for meaning, or a total knowledge and this predictably fruitless search leads to delusion, subject (human) being seduced by object. The delusion that we can come to a complete understanding of being or humanity or society or any other such self-referential thing. This leads to a hyperreality. In the attempt to create a coherent view of reality, society instead makes it less coherent, more unstable, more fractured, often paranoid, schizophrenic, insecure (but only beneath the outwardly calm surface). Not to say the world is unreal, but that reality has perished to an extent, that there is no such thing as the real, it has been replaced by a simulacrum, a copy without an original, "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality." The model works by substituting the signs of the real for the real, a perfect construct on the surface without the misfortunes of the real. Never again will the real be able to produce itself, the simulacrum has more vitality and integrity than the real which rots away beneath the surface. Reality is lost to a world where the historical, the societal, the personal all collapse in upon us, not all at once, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, in a "war" of attrition, that leads to –as Krasznahorkai writes in War and War- "the version that has triumphed by stealth."

And this being explained further by Krasznahorkai with: “It wasn’t a case of some mysterious divine decree driving an innocent human agency… but precisely the opposite, a disgraceful decision taken by humanity at large, a decision far exceeding normal human authority but drawing on a divine context and relying on divine assistance.” And: “…the details would all support, strengthen, ensure and so maintain this momentous historical turn of events, this treacherous insurrection of false scales, false content, false proportions and false extents… they understood that the victory would be unconditional only if they… exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled.”

The “ideological genesis of needs” precedes production of goods to meet those needs according to Baudrillard, purchase has a fetishistic side, the global society has lost the ability to connect with the symbolic element, there is no real, all is made up of references with no referents, the hyperreality mentioned above… The simulacram of postmodern/poststructural thought is the model itself, endlessly reproduced. Historical progress has ended, but not as in a culmination but as in the very idea of it has collapsed. There is no longer room for the “metanarrative” as Lyotard stated. We reject universal values but use them to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices… We must now reinvent the real as fiction, for it has disappeared from our lives...

Postmodern Literature may be a term that is tossed about far too widely. Yet… Baudrillardian thought (as well as the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, amongst others) is hugely prevalent thematically in the works of Pynchon, DFW, Krasznahorkai, Nadás, McElroy, Ackers, Burroughs, Gass, Ballard, DeLillo, Ducornet, Gaddis, Esterhazy, etc etc. To reduce these writers to mere “fictive fiction”/ simple storytelling is rather absurd. Maybe they should be slid into areas such as post-structuralism, post-colonialism, post-cognitivism, post-humanism, post-rationalism, etc. Yet. One of the more salient aspects of fiction is that it does not have to stick to one field, it sweeps up so many things at once, or in sequence. I think one of the problems is people confuse the idea of postmodernism and its not so cynical rejection of universality with the ideas of post-structualism especially, yet also post-cognitivism, post-humanism, post-rationalism, post-anarchism, post-colonialism. Postmodernism is the artistic side of Post-structuralism and encompasses all these things in my opinion and therefore does not need a clear definition. In fact the theory itself belies having a fundamental meaning behind it. ANd therefore postmodern literature is referencing this world where we have moved beyond or away from a modernist literature built from ideas of structuralism, cognitivism, rationalism, humanism, colonialism, etc. It is just the great dialectic taking its next step (backwards, forwards, to the side, a mixture of the three, who know?). Not each piece of contemporary literature resides in this realm, most does not; yet the shattered skeptical narrative of postmodern literature certainly exists, and the term is certainly useful in the discussion of works that can be placed in this postmodernist philosophical discourse.

I suppose my perfect description of Post-modernism would be another quote of Krasznahorkai's:

"Reality examined to the point of madness."

[Scheherazade]

I am not sure what the point of discussing this so-called topic would be as dfw habitually comes and starts threads, offering little opinion himself but rather ordering others: "Discuss... List 'em."

Unless he makes *a little* effort himself to share some of his own wisdom with us, I am not sure why we should indulge his fancy.

[dfw]

hahahaha
I'm just a young'un so not very widely read yet

[Eiseabhal]

There is a silly tendency that some people have , and it is encouraged by some writers, to think we have to decode novels , poems and so on to come to some profound understanding of life , art, ourselves, the universe... But what we have to do with some (maybe all texts) is immerse ourselves in them.

Or to take it from another angle, immersing oneself in a story ( I'll persist in using that word - for inaccuracy's sake) is something a child's untutored (uncorrupted) imagination can do spontaneously but we adults need to be reminded about.