252- ] English Literature
Postmodernism Summary
Any
of several artistic movements since about the 1960s that have challenged the
philosophy and practices of modern arts or literature. In literature this has
amounted to a reaction against an ordered view of the world and therefore
against fixed ideas about the form and meaning of texts. In its reaction
against Modernist ideals (see Modernism) such as autotelic art and the original
masterpiece, postmodern writing and art emphasize devices such as pastiche and
parody and the stylized technique of the antinovel and magic realism.
Postmodernism has also led to a proliferation of critical theories, most
notably deconstruction and its offshoots, and the breaking down of the
distinction between “high” and “low” culture.
Postmodern literature
Common
Themes and Techniques of Postmodern Literature
The
term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of
postWorld War II literature (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation,
paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment
ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like
postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on
the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.
However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's concept
of the "metanarrative" and "little narrative", Jacques
Derrida's concept of "play", and Jean Baudrillard's
"simulacra." For example, 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. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author and
his own self-awareness; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft
and employ metafiction to undermine the author's "univocation" (the
existence of narrative primacy within a text, the presence of a single
all-powerful storytelling authority). The distinction between high and low
culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of
multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed
fit for literature. Background Notable influences Postmodernist writers often
point to early novels and story collections as inspiration for their
experiments with narrative and structure: Don Quixote, 1001 Arabian Nights, The
Decameron, and Candide, among many others. In the English language, Laurence
Sterne's 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, with
its heavy emphasis on parody and narrative experimentation, is often cited as
an early influence on postmodernism. There were many 19th century examples of
attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature,
including Lord Byron's satire, especially Don Juan; Thomas Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus; Alfred Jarry's ribald 190
Ramen Sharma and Dr. Preety Chaudhary Ubu parodies and his invention of
'Pataphysics; Lewis Carroll's playful experiments with signification; the work
of Isidore Ducasse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde. Playwrights who worked in the
late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an
influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August
Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and
theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism
celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and attacked the central role of the
artist.[clarification needed] Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a
Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random
words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced
postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages
using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the
collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which
developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while
celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of
Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play
a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his
novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the
overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte's
experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an
important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is
occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the
1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was
not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period.
Comparisons with modernist literature Both modern and postmodern literature
represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both
modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external
reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on
modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of
Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T.
S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore
fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is
often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The
poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but
the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against
my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme
subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, 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. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's
Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for example) and they may seem very
similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central
and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Common Themes
and Techniques of Postmodern Literature Shift to postmodernism . As with all stylistic eras, no definite
dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year
in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both
died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. The
prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather,
it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second
World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva
Convention, through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese
American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war
events: the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United
States, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal
computer (Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction). Some further argue that the
beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications
or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with
the first publication of John Hawkes' The Cannibal in 1949, the first
performance of Waiting for Godot in 1953, the first publication of Howl in 1956
or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in
critical theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play"
lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in The Dismemberment of
Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although
many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is
characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are
primarily concerned with questions of ontology. Post-war developments and
transition figures Though postmodernist literature does not refer to everything
written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature
(such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and Magic Realism) have
significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively
labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel
Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel
García Márquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern
aesthetic. The work of Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello
and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the
Absurd. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin
to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus's
concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel
postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène
Ionesco is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One
of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and
Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as
marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close
ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his
work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one
of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett
had a Ramen Sharma and Dr. Preety Chaudhary revelation in 1945 that, in order
to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man
as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in
inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse
is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says,
"Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity
of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and
the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative
form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and
drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after
1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own
theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and
genres. Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still
(1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts
of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of
his previous work [...] He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern
movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical
coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically
explained characters." "The Beat Generation" is a name coined by
Jack Kerouac for the disaffected youth of America during the materialistic
1950s; Kerouac developed ideas of automatism into what he called
"spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called
the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
"Beat Generation" is often used more broadly to refer to several
groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York
School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have
occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see
especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by
Donald Allen). Though this is now a less common usage of
"postmodern", references to these writers as
"postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this
group (John Ashbery, Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear
often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with the Beat
Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S.
Burroughs. Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961;
this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is
fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in
elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction;
it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts,
friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also
noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the "cut-up"
technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which
words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged
to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as
Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Magic Realism is a technique popular
among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) 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 Common Themes
and Techniques of Postmodern Literature
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 Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez,
Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling,
however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America,
modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements
that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English.
Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is an
imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin
America. Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is
Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before
the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his
most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a
postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or
Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern, see Brian
McHale. Common themes and techniques All of these themes and techniques are
often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for
irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list
of features. Irony, playfulness, black humor 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. 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. Though the idea of employing these
in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often
playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In
fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively
labeled black humorists: John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt
Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc. 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. A good example of
postmodern irony and black humor is found in the stories of Donald Barthelme;
"The School", for example, is about the ironic death of plants,
animals, and people connected to the children in one class, but the
inexplicable repetition of death is treated only as a joke and the narrator
remains emotionally distant throughout. The central concept of Joseph Heller's
Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic "catch-22", and the
narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon
in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly
wordplay, within a serious context. The Crying of Lot 49, for example, contains
characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called
KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. Intertextuality Ramen Sharma and Dr. Preety
Chaudhary 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. Critics point to this as an indication of
postmodernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés. 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. In postmodern
literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales – as in works
by Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, and many other – or in references to
popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. An early 20th century
example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists is “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, a story with significant
references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with
its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with
postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream.
Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism is John Barth’s The
Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke’s poem of the same name. Often
intertextuality is more complicated than a single reference to another text.
Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice, for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice. Also, 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. Pastiche Related to postmodern intertextuality,
pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In
Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles.
It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched
aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to
create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: 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, Derek Pell relies on
collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so
on. Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, many other
elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in
the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). For example, Thomas Pynchon
includes in his novels elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and
war fiction; songs; pop culture references; well-known, obscure, and fictional
history mixed together; real contemporary and historical figures (Mickey Rooney
and Wernher von Braun for example); a wide variety of well-known, obscure and
fictional cultures and concepts. In Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public
Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon
interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam
and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can also refer to compositional technique, for
example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another Common Themes and
Techniques of Postmodern Literature 195 example is B. S. Johnson's 1969 novel
The Unfortunates; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers
could assemble it however they chose. Metafiction Metafiction is essentially
writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", making the
artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and
generally disregards the necessity for "willful suspension of
disbelief". It is often employed to undermine the authority of the author,
for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for
emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example,
Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader
attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used
this technique: the first chapter of his 1969 novel SlaughterhouseFive is about
the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence
throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own
experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out
the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously
fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien's
1990 novel/story collection The Things They Carried, about one platoon's
experiences during the Vietnam War, features a character named Tim O'Brien;
though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien
calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents through
out the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story",
questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the
narrator says, would be unbelievable and heroic, moral war stories don't
capture the truth. Fabulation Fabulation is a term sometimes used
interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It
is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a
created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus,
fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional
structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example—and integrates other
traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as
magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. By
some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The
Fabulators. A good example of fabulation is Salman Rushdie´s Haroun and the Sea
of Stories. Poioumena Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek:
ποιούμενον, "product") is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer
to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of
creation. According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer
opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of
narrative truth."[18] In many cases, the book will be about the process of
creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common
examples of this Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy which is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his
own story. A significant Ramen Sharma and Dr. Preety Chaudhary postmodern
example is Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims
he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but
the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in
what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious
narrator in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children parallels the creation of his
book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Other
postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy,
Malone Dies and The Unnamable); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook; John
Fowles's Mantissa; William Golding's Paper Men; and Gilbert Sorrentino's
Mulligan Stew. Historiographic metafiction Linda Hutcheon coined the term
"historiographic metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize
actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in
His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar), Flaubert's
Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
(which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung),
and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the
Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon's
Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring
George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly
with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenant's Woman. In regards to
critical theory, this technique can be related to The Death of the Author by
Roland Barthes. Temporal distortion This is a common technique in modernist
fiction: fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both
modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is
used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic
metafiction (see above) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central
features in many of Kurt Vonnegut's non-linear novels, the most famous of which
is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in
time". In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with
anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also
overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in
Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the
author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one
section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and
so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. Magic
realism Literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly
painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The
themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and
with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this
kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the
fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, Common Themes and Techniques of
Postmodern Literature convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots,
miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even
surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt
shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to
the work of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian who in 1935 published his
Historia universal de la infamia, regarded by many as the first work of magic
realism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez is also regarded as a
notable exponent of this kind of fiction – especially his novel One Hundred
Years of Solitude. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier is another described as a
"magic realist". Postmodernists such as Salman Rushdie and Italo
Calvino commonly use Magic Realism in their work. A fusion of fabulism with
magic realism is apparent in such early 21st century American short stories as
Kevin Brockmeier's "The Ceiling",
Technoculture and hyperreality Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the
"cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism"
implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information
age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift
into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity
people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in
many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the
real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with
characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillo's White Noise
presents characters who are bombarded with a "white noise" of
television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William
Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction techniques to
address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. Steampunk, a
subgenre of science fiction popularized in novels and comics by such writers as
Alan Moore and James Blaylock, demonstrates postmodern pastiche, temporal
distortion, and a focus on technoculture with its mix of futuristic technology
and Victorian culture. Paranoia Perhaps demonstrated most famously and
effectively in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the work of Thomas Pynchon, the
sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos
of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no
ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd. The
Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon has many possible interpretations. This
often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example,
in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes
violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he
is the only human. Maximalism Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling
canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers has generated
controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the
standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the
style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and
198 Ramen Sharma and Dr. Preety
Chaudhary points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by
François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson hails as the
exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. Many
modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto,
attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with
language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore
empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's
Mason & Dixon and Minimalism
Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description
where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story.
The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.
Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism,
the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and
necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate
to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every
minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the
reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist,
literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Samuel Beckett.
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