253- ] English Literature - Postmodernism

253- ] English Literature

What Is Postmodern Literature?

Postmodern literature is a literary movement that eschews absolute meaning and instead emphasizes play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality. The literary movement rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction to modernist literature’s quest for meaning in light of the significant human rights violations of World War II.

Common examples of postmodern literature include Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Literary theorists that crystalized postmodernity in literature include Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard.

What Are the Origins of Postmodern Literature?

Postmodern literature’s precursor, modernist (or modern) literature, emphasized a quest for meaning, suggesting the author as an enlightenment-style creator of order and mourning the chaotic world—examples include James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.

However, after the series of human rights violations that occurred during and after World War II (including the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Japan, and Japanese internment in the US), writers began to feel as if meaning was an impossible quest, and that the only way to move forward was to embrace meaninglessness fully.

Thus, postmodern literature rejected (or built upon) many of the tenants of modernism, including shunning meaning, intensifying and celebrating fragmentation and disorder, and initiating a major shift in literary tradition.

Characteristics of Postmodern Literature

Postmodern literature builds on the following core ideas:

1. Embrace of randomness. Postmodern works reject the idea of absolute meaning and instead embrace randomness and disorder. Postmodern novels often employ unreliable narrators to further muddy the waters with extreme subjectivity and prevent readers from finding meaning during the story.

2. Playfulness. While modernist writers mourned the loss of order, postmodern writers revel in it, often using tools like black humor, wordplay, irony, and other techniques of playfulness to dizzy readers and muddle the story.

3. Fragmentation. Postmodernist literature took modernism’s fragmentation and expanded on it, moving literary works more toward collage-style forms, temporal distortion, and significant jumps in character and place.

4. Metafiction. Postmodern literature emphasized meaninglessness and play. Postmodern writers began to experiment with more meta elements in their novels and short stories, drawing attention to their work’s artifice and reminding readers that the author isn’t an authority figure.

5. Intertextuality. As a form of collage-style writing, many postmodern authors wrote their work overtly in dialogue with other texts. The techniques they employed included pastiche (or imitating other authors’ styles) and the combination of high and low culture (writing that tackles subjects that were previously considered inappropriate for literature).