254- ] English Literature - Postmodern Writers

 254- ] English Literature

Notable Postmodern Authors

Here are some notable authors who contributed to the postmodern movement:

1. John Barth: Barth wrote an essay of literary criticism titled The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), detailing all writing as imitation and considered by many to be the manifesto of postmodern literature. Barth’s fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a prime example of the metafiction characteristic of postmodernism, featuring several fictional disclaimers in the beginning and end, arguing that the book was not written by the author and was instead given to the author on a tape or written by a computer.

2. Samuel Beckett: Beckett’s “theatre of the absurd” emphasized the disintegration of narrative. In the play Waiting for Godot (1953), Beckett creates an entire existential narrative featuring two characters who contemplate their day as they wait for the ambiguous Godot to appear. However, he never arrives, and his identity is not revealed.

3. Italo Calvino: Calvino’s novel If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) is an excellent example of a metanarrative—the book is about a reader attempting to read a novel titled If on a winter's night a traveler.

4. Don DeLillo: Following an advertising executive in New York during the Nixon era, DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) is an exceptionally fragmented narrative, exploring the rise of global capitalism, the decline of American manufacturing, the CIA, and civil rights, and other themes. White Noise (1985) reframes postmodernism through consumerism, bombarding characters with meaninglessness.

5. John Fowles: Fowles’s The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is a historical novel with a major emphasis on metafiction. The book features a narrator who becomes part of the story and offers several different ways to end the story.

6. Joseph Heller: Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) tells many storylines out of chronological order, slowly building the story as new information is introduced. Heller also employs paradox (a literary device that contradicts itself but contains a plausible kernel of truth) and farce (a type of comedy in which absurd situations are stacked precariously atop one another) to complicate the narrative further.

7. Gabriel García Márquez: Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is an exceptionally playful novel that follows several characters sprawled out over an extended length of time, emphasizing the smallness of human life.

8. Thomas Pynchon: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is the poster child of postmodern literature, using a complex, fragmented structure to cover various subjects such as culture, science, social science, profanity, and literary propriety. The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) employs a significant amount of silly wordplay, often within contexts of seriousness.

9. Kurt Vonnegut: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969) is a non-linear narrative in which the main character has been “unstuck in time,” oscillating between the present and the past with no control over his movement and emphasizing the senseless nature of war.

10. David Foster Wallace: Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) embodies postmodernism through its eclectic, encyclopedic structure, characters trapped within the postmodern condition, obsessive endnotes and footnotes, and meandering consciousness. The Pale King (2011) is also highly metafictional, employing a character named David Foster Wallace.