251- ] English Literature - Postmodernism

 251- ] English Literature 

Postmodern Literature.

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe works of literature that were produced after World War II (after 1945). The main objective of postmodern literature is to break away from conventional traditions through experimentation with new literary devices, forms, genres, styles etc.

Postmodernism in literature is not an organized movement with leaders or central figures; therefore, it is more difficult to say if it has ended or when it will end (compared to, say, declaring the end of modernism with the death of Joyce or Woolf).

Postmodernism springs from a number of variables:

A reaction against modernism: especially against the distinction between “high art” and everyday life. That is why postmodernists appealed to popular culture. Cartoons, music, pop art, and television have thus become acceptable for postmodernist artistic expression.

A reaction against a totally new world after WWII:

It implies a reaction to significant post-war events: the nuclear bombing and the massacre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonialism, and globalization. Also a reaction against capitalism, technology and information.

A reaction against realists:

Realists believed that reality was objective and could be differentiated from the subjective status of each subject’s vision. Realism believed that language could represent reality, while postmodernists believed in the randomness of human experience. Postmodernist literature holds the view that literary language is its own reality, not a means of representing reality.

A reaction against modernism:

Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. For instance, whereas modernists such as T.S. Eliot perceived the world as fragmented and represented that fragmentation through poetic language, many also viewed art as a potentially integrating restorative force against the chaos that postmodernist works often imitate (or even celebrate) but do not attempt to counter or correct.

Postmodernist themes:

q  Memory

q  Loss & death

q  The sense of paranoia

q  Meaninglessness of human existence

q  Alienation of individuals

q  Lack of communication

q  Feelings of anxiety

q  Attachment to illusions of security to conceal the void of our lives

q  Fragmentation & discontinuity

q  Uncertitude

Postmodernist literary developments defy the conventions of literary cohesion and even coherence. Postmodernist literature involves a deconstruction of certain already existing literary forms and genres, and also the invention of new ones.

ü  Point of view:

The postmodern point of view becomes more limited. They shift from the omniscient narrator of Realism to limited point of view, more incoherent and mysterious. The omniscient narrator is eliminated in order to incorporate other perspectives.

ü  Fragmentation:

No linear narration. There is no relation between narration & time, so the narrative is fragmented, with loops in time. They abandon lineal narration, lineal plots.

ü  Intertextuality:

The idea that every text is the result of pre-existing texts whose meanings it re-works and transforms.

Since postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. For example, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Borges.

(See Murfin & Ray, 1998)

ü  Pastiche:

Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction. Other writers combine elements songs; pop culture references; well-known, obscure, and fictional history mixed together; real contemporary and historical figures.

(See also Murfin & Ray, 1998)

ü  Re-writes:

They are a re-interpretation of canonical texts. They imply an appropriation of the text and the deconstruction of it, in order to produce a new version that may consist of a prequel, a sequel or a parody

ü  The absurd:

Absurd literature rejects the traditional idea that narratives should tell stories in a logical way. It is based on the idea that life is absurd –without meaning, point or purpose- and it is the duty of the writer to present the futility of life in the most striking ways.

Example: Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”.(See Murfin & Ray, 1998)

ü  Magical realism

It is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered  a genre in itself) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American "boom", a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magical Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. Some characteristics of this genre are: the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, expressionistic and even surrealistic description,

ü  Political protest literature  (postcolonial literature)

Literature produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history.

ü  Irony, black humor & sarcasm.

Sarcasm: intentional derision generally directed at another person and intended to hurt. Sarcasm involves obvious, even exaggerated verbal irony, achieving its effect by stating the opposite of what is meant (for instance false praise) so as to heighten the insult.

Irony:  a contradiction or incongruity between appearance or expectation and reality. It is commonly employed as a “wink” that the reader is expected to notice so that he or she may be “in on the secret”. It has been called the Subtlest rethorical form, for the success of an ironic statement depends upon the audience’s recognition of the discrepancy at issue. It should not be confused with sarcasm, since sarcasm is more obvious, blunt and nastier and its intent is to wound or ridicule, while irony generally lacks a hurtful aim.

Black humor: a dark, disturbing, and often morbid or grotesque mode of comedy found in certain modern and postmodern texts. Such humor often concerns death, suffering, or other anxiety-inducing subjects. Black humor usually goes hand in hand with a pessimistic world-view or tone; it manages to express a sense of hopelessness in a wry, sardonic way that is grimly humorous.

Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek (characterized by insincerity, irony, or whimsical exaggeration). This irony, along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. It's common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon address the events of World War II.

ü  The antinovel:

Postmodern novels are called antinovels because they attempt to present the reader with experience itself, unfiltered by metaphor or other vehicles of unfiltered interpretation. Antinovels violate and flout establishes novelistic conventions and norms. Confusion is an intended result of this type of narrative, also characterized by fragmentation and dislocation and requiring the reader to assemble and make sense of disparate pieces of information.

ü  Metalepsis

(See: “El lector como detective”, de Isaías Gonzalez)

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, modernist literature was the central literary movement. However, after World War II, a new school of literary theory, deemed postmodernism, began to rise. 

250- ] English Literature , Postmodernism

 250- ] English Literature

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a term used to refer to a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the world. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts.

The term began to acquire its current range of meanings in literary criticism and architectural theory during the 1950s–1960s. In opposition to modernism's alleged self-seriousness, postmodernism is characterized by its playful use of eclectic styles and performative irony, among other features. Critics claim it supplants moral, political, and aesthetic ideals with mere style and spectacle.

In the 1990s, "postmodernism" came to denote a general – and, in general, celebratory – response to cultural pluralism. Proponents align themselves with feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism. Building upon poststructural theory, postmodern thought defined itself by the rejection of any single, foundational historical narrative. This called into question the legitimacy of the Enlightenment account of progress and rationality. Critics allege that its premises lead to a nihilistic form of relativism. In this sense, it has become a term of abuse in popular culture.

Definitions

"Postmodernism" is "a highly contested term", referring to "a particularly unstable concept", that "names many different kinds of cultural objects and phenomena in many different ways". It may be described simply as a general mood or Zeitgeist.

Although postmodernisms are generally united in their effort to transcend the perceived limits of modernism, "modernism" also means different things to different critics in various arts. Further, there are outliers on even this basic stance; for instance, literary critic William Spanos conceives postmodernism not in period terms but in terms of a certain kind of literary imagination so that pre-modern texts such as Euripides' Orestes or Cervantes' Don Quixote count as postmodern.

According to scholar Louis Menand, "Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It's definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done." From an opposing perspective, media theorist Dick Hebdige criticized the vagueness of the term, enumerating a long list of otherwise unrelated concepts that people have designated as postmodernism, from "the décor of a room" or "a 'scratch' video", to fear of nuclear armageddon and the "implosion of meaning", and stated that anything that could signify all of those things was "a buzzword".

All this notwithstanding, scholar Hans Bertens offers the following:

If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic, epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.

In practical terms, postmodernisms share an attitudeof skepticism towards grand explanations and established ways of doing things. In art, literature, and architecture, this attitude blurs boundaries between styles and genres, and encourages freely mixing elements, challenging traditional distinctions like high art versus popular art. In science, it emphasizes multiple ways of seeing things, and how our cultural and personal backgrounds shape how we see the world, making it impossible to be completely objective. In philosophy, education, history, politics, and many other fields, it encourages critical re-examination of established institutions and social norms, embracing diversity, and breaking down disciplinary boundaries. Though these ideas weren't strictly new, postmodernism amplified them, using an often playful, at times deeply critical, attitude of pervasive skepticism to turn them into defining features.

Historical overview

Two broad cultural movements, modernism and postmodernism, emerged in response to profound changes in the Western world. The Industrial Revolution, urbanization, secularization, technological advances, two world wars, and globalization deeply disrupted the social order. Modernism emerged in the late 1800s, seeking to redefine fundamental truths and values through a radical rethinking of traditional ideas and forms across many fields. Postmodernism emerged in the mid-20th century with a skeptical perspective that questioned the notion of universal truths and reshaped modernist approaches by embracing the complexity and contradictions of modern life.

The term "postmodernism" first appeared in print in 1870, but it only began to enter circulation with its current range of meanings in the 1950s—60s.

Early appearances

The term "postmodern" was first used in 1870 by the artist John Watkins Chapman, who described "a Postmodern style of painting" as a departure from French Impressionism. Similarly, the first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to 1916, describing Gus Mager as "one of the few 'post' modern painters whose style is convincing".

Episcopal priest and cultural commentator J. M. Thompson, in a 1914 article, uses the term to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing, "the raison d'être of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition". In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Stephen's College and also an Episcopal priest, published Postmodernism and Other Essays, which marks the first use of the term to describe an historical period following modernity. The essay criticizes lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of the Enlightenment. It is also critical of a purported cultural shift away from traditional Christian beliefs.

The term "postmodernity" was first used in an academic historical context as a general concept for a movement by Arnold J. Toynbee in a 1939 essay, which states that "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914–1918".

In 1942, the literary critic and author H. R. Hays describes postmodernism as a new literary form. Also in the arts, the term was first used in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.

Although these early uses anticipate some of the concerns of the debate in the second part of the 20th century, there is little direct continuity in the discussion. Just when the new discussion begins, however, is also a matter of dispute. Various authors place its beginnings in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Theoretical development

In the mid-1970s, the American sociologist Daniel Bell provided a general account of the postmodern as an effectively nihilistic response to modernism's alleged assault on the Protestant work ethic and its rejection of what he upheld as traditional values. The ideals of modernity, per his diagnosis, were degraded to the level of consumer choice. This research project, however, was not taken up in a significant way by others until the mid-1980s when the work of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, building upon art and literary criticism, reintroduced the term to sociology.

Discussion about the postmodern in the second part of the 20th century was most articulate in areas with a large body of critical discourse around the modernist movement. Even here, however, there continued to be disagreement about such basic issues as whether postmodernism is a break with modernism, a renewal and intensification of modernism, or even, both at once, a rejection and a radicalization of its historical predecessor.

While discussions in the 1970s were dominated by literary criticism, these were supplanted by architectural theory in the 1980s. Some of these conversations made use of French poststructuralist thought, but only after these innovations and critical discourse in the arts did postmodernism emerge as a philosophical term in its own right.

In literary and architectural theory

According to Hans Bertens and Perry Anderson, the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley first introduced the term "postmodern" in its current sense during the 1950s. Their stance against modernist poetry – and Olson's Heideggerian orientation – were influential in the identification of postmodernism as a polemical position opposed to the rationalist values championed by the Enlightenment project.

During the 1960s, this affirmative use gave way to a pejorative use by the New Left, who used it to describe a waning commitment among youth to the political ideals socialism and communism. The literary critic Irving Howe, for instance, denounced postmodern literature for being content to merely reflect, rather than actively attempt to refashion, what he saw as the "increasingly shapeless" character of contemporary society.

In the 1970s, this changed again, largely under the influence of the literary critic Ihab Hassan's large-scale survey of works that he said could no longer be called modern. Taking the Black Mountain poets an exemplary instance of the new postmodern type, Hassan celebrates its Nietzschean playfulness and cheerfully anarchic spirit, which he sets off against the high seriousness of modernism.

(Yet, from another perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche's attack on Western philosophy and Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics posed deep theoretical problems not necessarily a cause for aesthetic celebration. Their further influence on the conversation about postmodernism, however, would be largely mediated by French poststructuralism.

If literature were at the center of the discussion in the 1970s, architecture was at the center in the 1980s. The architectural theorist Charles Jencks, in particular, connected the artistic avant-garde to social change in a way that captured attention outside of academia. Jenckes, much influenced by the American architect Robert Venturi, celebrated a plurality of forms and encourages participation and active engagement with the local context of the built environment. He presented this as in opposition to the "authoritarian style" of International Modernism.

The influence of poststructuralism

In the 1970s, postmodern criticism increasingly came to incorporate poststructuralist theory, particularly the deconstructive approach to texts most strongly associated with Jacques Derrida, who attempted to demonstrate that the whole foundationalist approach to language and knowledge was untenable and misguided. It is during this period that postmodernism came to be particularly equated with a kind of anti-representational self-reflexivity.

In the 1980s, some critics began to take an interest in the work of Michel Foucault. This introduced a political concern about social power-relations into discussions about postmodernism. This was also the beginning of the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism. The art critic Craig Owens, in particular, not only made the connection to feminism explicit, but went so far as to claim feminism for postmodernism wholesale, a broad claim resisted by even many sympathetic feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson.

Generalization

Although postmodern criticism and thought drew on philosophical ideas from early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. This work served as a catalyst for many of the subsequent intellectual debates around the term.

By the 1990s, postmodernism had become increasingly identified with critical and philosophical discourse directly about postmodernity or the postmodern idiom itself. No longer centered on any particular art or even the arts in general, it instead turned to address the more general problems posed to society in general by a new proliferation of cultures and forms. It is during this period that it also came to be associated with postcolonialism and identity politics.

Around this time, postmodernism also began to be conceived in popular culture as a general "philosophical disposition" associated with a loose sort of relativism. In this sense, the term also started to appear as a "casual term of abuse" in non-academic contexts. Others identified it as an aesthetic "lifestyle" of eclecticism and playful self-irony.

The "Science Wars"

The basis for what became known later as the Science Wars was the 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by the physicist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn presented the direction of scientific inquiry — the kind of questions that can be asked, and what counts as a correct answer — as governed by a "paradigm" defining what counts as "normal science" during any given period. While not based on postmodern ideas or Continental philosophy, Kuhn's intervention set the agenda for much of The Postmodern Condition and has subsequently been presented as the beginning of "postmodern epistemology" in the philosophy of science.

In Kuhn's 1962 framework, the assumptions introduced by new paradigms make them "mutually incommensurable" with previous ones, although they may provide improved explanations of the material world. A more radical version of incommensurablity, introduced by the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, made stronger claims that connected the largely Anglo-American debate about science to the development of poststructuralism in France.

To some, the stakes were more than epistemological. The philosopher Israel Scheffler, for instance, argued that the ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge embodies a sort of "moral principle" protecting society from its authoritarian and tribal tendencies. In this way, with the addition of the poststructuralist influence, the debate about science expanded into a debate about Western culture in general.

The French political philosophers Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry began a series of responses to this interpretation of postmodernism, and these inspired the physicist Alan Sokal to submit a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal, where it was accepted and published in 1996. Although the so-called Sokal hoax proved nothing about postmodernism or science, it added to the public perception of a high-stakes intellectual "war" that had already been introduced to the general public by popular books published in the late '80s and '90s. By the late '90s, however, the debate had largely subsided, in part due to the recognition that it had been staged between strawman versions of postmodernism and science alike.

Literature

In 1971, the American literary theorist Ihab Hassan made "postmodernism" popular in literary studies with his influential book, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. According to scholar David Herwitz, American writers such as John Barth (who had controversially declared that the novel was "exhausted" as a genre), Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon responded in various ways to the stylistic innovations of Finnegans Wake and the late work of Samuel Beckett. Postmodern literature often calls attention to issues regarding its own complicated connection to reality. The postmodern novel plays with language, twisted plots, multiple narrators, and unresolved endings, unsettling the conventional idea of the novel as faithfully reflecting the world.

In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that postmodern works developed out of modernism, moving from concern with what is there ("ontological dominant") to concern with how we can know it's there ("epistemological dominant"). McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007) follows Raymond Federman's lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism. Others argue that postmodernism in literature utilizes compositional and semantic practices such as inclusivity, intentional indiscrimination, nonselection, and "logical impossibility."