postmodernism in literature essay

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Postmodernism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 31, 2016 • ( 22 )

Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post- Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.

The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism . Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.

Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism’s use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche , which is the imitation of another’s style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not “real” but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land .

In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.

Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist

In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions.

This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism —both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre . In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called differance . In Postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance , a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.

The Postmodernist disbelief in coherence and unity points to another basic distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more rationality leads to more order, which leads a society to function better. To establish the primacy of Order, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other—which includes the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to establish the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, non-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Postmodernism, however, goes to the other extreme. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder.

Jean Francois Lyotard

The Modernist belief in order, stability and unity is what the Postmodernist thinker Lyotard calls a metanarrative . Modernism works through metanarratives or grand narratives, while Postmodernism questions and deconstructs metanarratives. A metanarrative is a story a culture tells itself about its beliefs and practices.

Postmodernism understands that grand narratives hide, silence and negate contradictions, instabilities and differences inherent in any social system. Postmodernism favours “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices and local events, without pretending universality and finality. Postmodernism realizes that history, politics and culture are grand narratives of the power-wielders, which comprise falsehoods and incomplete truths.

Having deconstructed the possibility of a stable, permanent reality, Postmodernism has revolutionized the concept of language. Modernism considered language a rational, transparent tool to represent reality and the activities of the rational mind. In the Modernist view, language is representative of thoughts and things. Here, signifiers always point to signifieds. In Postmodernism, however, there are only surfaces, no depths. A signifier has no signified here, because there is no reality to signify.

Jean Baudrillard

The French philosopher Baudrillard has conceptualized the Postmodern surface culture as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a virtual or fake reality simulated or induced by the media or other ideological apparatuses. A simulacrum is not merely an imitation or duplication—it is the substitution of the original by a simulated, fake image. Contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been thus replaced by false images. This would mean, for instance, that the Gulf war that we know from newspapers and television reports has no connection whatsoever to what can be called the “real” Iraq war. The simulated image of Gulf war has become so much more popular and real than the real war, that Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not take place. In other words, in the Postmodern world, there are no originals, only copies; no territories, only maps; no reality, only simulations. Here Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that the postmodern world is artificial; he is also implying that we have lost the capacity to discriminate between the real and the artificial.

Fredric Jameson

Just as we have lost touch with the reality of our life, we have also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume. If the media form one driving force of the Postmodern condition, multinational capitalism and globalization is another. Fredric Jameson has related Modernism and Postmodernism to the second and third phases of capitalism. The first phase of capitalism of the 18th -19th centuries, called Market Capitalism, witnessed the early technological development such as that of the steam-driven motor, and corresponded to the Realist phase. The early 20th century, with the development of electrical and internal combustion motors, witnessed the onset of Monopoly Capitalism and Modernism. The Postmodern era corresponds to the age of nuclear and electronic technologies and Consumer Capitalism, where the emphasis is on marketing, selling and consumption rather than production. The dehumanized, globalized world, wipes out individual and national identities, in favour of multinational marketing.

It is thus clear from this exposition that there are at least three different directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Postmodernism also has its roots in the theories Habermas and Foucault . Furthermore, Postmodernism can be examined from Feminist and Post-colonial angles. Therefore, one cannot pinpoint the principles of Postmodernism with finality, because there is a plurality in the very constitution of this theory.

Postmodernism, in its denial of an objective truth or reality, forcefully advocates the theory of constructivism—the anti-essentialist argument that everything is ideologically constructed. Postmodernism finds the media to be a great deal responsible for “constructing” our identities and everyday realiites. Indeed, Postmodernism developed as a response to the contemporary boom in electronics and communications technologies and its revolutionizing of our old world order.

Constructivism invariably leads to relativism. Our identities are constructed and transformed every moment in relation to our social environment. Therefore there is scope for multiple and diverse identities, multiple truths, moral codes and views of reality.

The understanding that an objective truth does not exist has invariably led the accent of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is of course plural and provisional. A stress on subjectivity will naturally lead to a renewed interest in the local and specific experiences, rather than the and universal and abstract; that is on mini-narratives rather than grand narratives.

Finally, all versions of Postmodernism rely on the method of Deconstruction to analyze socio-cultural situations. Postmodernism has often been vehemently criticized. The fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is disbelief, which negates social and personal realities and experiences. It is easy to claim that the Gulf War or Iraq War does not exist; but then how does one account for the deaths, the loss and pain of millions of people victimized by these wars? Also, Postmodernism fosters a deep cynicism about the one sustaining force of social life—culture. By entirely washing away the ground beneath our feet, the ideological presumptions upon which human civilization is built, Postmodernism generates a feeling of lack and insecurity in contemporary societies, which is essential for the sustenance of a capitalistic world order. Finally, when the Third World began to assert itself over Euro-centric hegemonic power, Postmodernism had rushed in with the warning, that the empowerment of the periphery is but transient and temporary; and that just as Europe could not retain its imperialistic power for long, the new-found power of the erstwhile colonies is also under erasure.

In literature, postmodernism (relying heavily on fragmentation, deconstruction, playfulness, questionable narrators etc.) reacted against the Enlightenment ideas implicit in modernist literature – informed by Lyotard’s concept of the “metanarrative”, Derrida’s concept of “play”, and Budrillard’s “simulacra.” Deviating from the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern. writers eschew, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this. quest. Marked by a distrust of totalizing mechanisms and self-awareness, postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author’s “univocation”. 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. Postmodern literature can be considered as an umbrella term for the post-war developments in literature such as Theatre of the Absurd , Beat Generation and Magical Realism .

Postmodern literature, as expressed in the writings of Beckett, Robbe Grillet , Borges , Marquez , Naguib Mahfouz and Angela Carter rests on a recognition of the complex nature of reality and experience, the role of time and memory in human perception, of the self and the world as historical constructions, and the problematic nature of language.

Postmodern literature reached its peak in the ’60s and ’70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth , Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon , “factions” like Armies in the Night and In Cold Blood by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote , postmodern science fiction novels like Neoromancer by William Gibson , Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the ’80’s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver . Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas t called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in (1985) or The Satanic Verses (1988) to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.

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Postmodern film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism trough the cinematic medium – by upsetting the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroying (or playing with) the audience’s “suspension of disbelief,” to create a work that express through less-recognizable internal logic. Two such examples are Jane Campion ‘s Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz ‘s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which the audience also sees. However, Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone ‘s epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the first postmodern film. Other examples include Michael Winterbottom ‘s 24 Hour Party People, Federico Fellini ‘s Satyricon and Amarcord, David Lynch ‘ s Mulholland Drive, Quentin Tarantino ‘s Pulp Fiction.

In spite of the rather stretched, cynical arguments of Postmodernism, the theory has exerted a fundamental influence on late 20th century thought. It has indeed revolutionized all realms of intellectual inquiry in varying degrees.

Postmodernism and Thing Theory

by Matthew Mullins

Matthew Mullins’s book, Postmodernism in Pieces , was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. A paperback edition has just been made available.

In 2016 I published a book entitled Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction in which I set out to answer a number of questions, including, “What does postmodernism have to do with thing theory?” For many literary scholars, these two concepts might seem unrelated, perhaps even antithetical. Postmodern literature is concerned with ideals, thing theory with materials. Postmodern literature dazzles us with formal and philosophical pyrotechnics; thing theory focuses on the mundane, the everyday, the quotidian. Postmodern literature represents things as symbolic objects circulating through a consumer society; thing theory strives to consider things in themselves. Didn’t postmodern literature free scholars from the necessity of reconciling the text with some material world outside it? Doesn’t thing theory construe the text as another thing among others in a material network? Didn’t postmodernism collapse all material into language, and doesn’t thing theory collapse all language into materiality?

This tension made the collision between postmodernism and thing theory inevitable for me. What I found as I looked back to some of the key figures in the pantheon of literary postmodernism was that many of them would make first rate thing theorists. For starters, these writers have little faith in ideals and generalizations, almost always preferring materials and particularities. In his essay “Postmodernism Revisited,” John Barth associates being a novelist with a predilection for particularity: “Fred and Shirley and Mike and Irma seem intuitively realer to me than does the category human beings ; the cathedrals at Seville and Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela seem more substantial than the term Spanish Gothic ; and the writings of Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon—even the writings of John Barth—have ontological primacy, to my way of thinking, over the category Postmodern fiction ” (16). Barth, like many of his postmodern compatriots, prefers to look at things rather than through them.

This compulsion to look at rather than through is central to thing theory. In his field-defining essay on “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown references a scene in A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale in which a dirty window leads a character to look at rather than through the pane and thus long for real, tangible objects (1). Just for fun, the character is a doctoral student who has reached the outer limits of his patience with Lacan and with deconstruction. There is a tension here. On the one hand, postmodern literature is committed to looking at , and yet the project of postmodern theory might well be defined as looking through , looking through whatever seems to be natural, normal, or given to reveal how those things are always already constructed, normalized, or made. We might even read the turn to things as a turn away from postmodernism, or at least from postmodern theory. And yet, this insistence on looking at resonated with my readings of postmodern fiction.

Postmodern fiction is preoccupied with looking at things which, under strict scrutiny, seem to dissolve. What had drawn me to postmodern literature in the first place was its brilliant and manifold ways of undoing what seemed certain. Ishmael Reed could tell a story so familiar that, when it began to smoke and sputter, I’d come to doubt everything I thought I knew. John Barth could play with the conventions of narrative in such a way that I’d feel as if I didn’t even know what a story was anymore. Postmodern fiction would turn its critical gaze on something “given” like race, history, gender, or class, and reveal that whatever it was we thought existed turns out to be a mirage, a fabrication, or—to use postmodern language—a social construction. The implication, for better or worse, was that these things were somehow fake, or that they didn’t really exist. This confused me because the language of “construction” seemed so very material to me; it seemed like the perfect fit with thing theory, which by then had become a branch of a larger tree scholars were calling “new materialism.”

It was reading new materialist scholars across disciplines—Brown in literary studies, Bruno Latour in science studies, and Jane Bennett in political science—that led me to ask a question I couldn’t find anyone else asking: constructed out of what? If postmodern literature was fixated on revealing the constructed nature of the general categories we rely on in our interactions with one another, then what were the particulars out of which those general categories were constructed? More specifically, was postmodern literature simply interested in revealing how race or gender were constructs, or was it actually more concerned with tracing the processes and the materials out of which they were constructed?

And so, postmodernism and thing theory came together because I saw that postmodern fiction was obsessed with the everyday objects out of which humans construct their worlds. Construction became more of a verb, more of a process, and less of a noun or a product. The novels asked me to investigate how race, or class, or history were socially constructed rather than to merely conclude these categories were social constructs. In Reassembling the Social , Latour points out that, for most of his colleagues in the social and natural sciences, “to say that something was ‘constructed’ […] meant that something was not true. They seemed to operate with the strange idea that you had to submit to this rather unlikely choice: either something was real and not constructed, or it was constructed and artificial, contrived and invented, made up and false” (90). This was my experience in literary studies as well. It seemed subtle at first, but the implications steadily grew: I wanted to talk, not about how Morrison could reveal that whiteness was a mere construct—though that is a key element in understanding her work—but about how she could help us come to terms with the historical emergence and construction of whiteness over time. What we needed, it seemed to me, was a more material postmodernism.

But a more material postmodernism leads away from the very usefulness of general categories like, well, postmodernism. It does not have to lead away from categories full stop, but it diminishes the use of categories that take the form of isms because materiality resists the reduction of things to codified orthodoxies or doctrines. Postmodernism falls short of being an ism , and, I concluded, it marks the end of that way of organizing literary history. Like the poems of Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s Parables series, postmodernism’s total commitment to process, to change, represented an end to philosophical/theological categories (i.e. Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism) masquerading as historical/narrative categories. Rather than continuing to construct orthodoxies that we then challenge, deconstruct, and rewrite, postmodern literature marked a turning point in how scholars could conceive of history in view of literary production. The texts themselves resist the kind of classification that must, in turn, be dissolved.

Three years after its publication, Postmodernism in Pieces is being released as a paperback and I’m thinking more and more about books as objects. What are they for? How do they function? The answer postmodernism gave is that books question, critique, and reveal; they challenge, demonstrate, lay bare. Scholars in the postmodern tradition came to rely on literary texts for their inherent suspiciousness. As Rita Felski puts it in her essay, “Suspicious Minds,” they do “the work of suspicion for us” (217). In other words, postmodern literary criticism most often figured literary texts as suspicious objects. But if texts can call into question the things we take for granted, if they can show how those things are historically emergent and materially constructed can’t they also construct other, even better, visions of life?

I don’t know that I saw it at the time, but I was thinking through the uses and limits of suspicion in Postmodernism in Pieces . The works of fiction I examined attend to the materials out of which social categories get constructed, but they, themselves, are also things, things out of which our social spheres are constructed. What kinds of things are Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Don DeLillo’s Underworld ? They are certainly suspicious. Jazz offers multiple representations of the same events and entities over and over again. Which perspective is the true perspective? DeLillo experiments with history in a similar manner, giving readers multiple views of the same historical gaps to show that master narratives simply do not work. At root, these texts seem grounded in difference—by which I mean they tend to treat epistemological limitations as evidence of the fact that humans are fundamentally different and disconnected rather than similar and connected.

But these novels are also grounded in recognition. Difference and recognition are not quite at odds, but neither are they perfectly in sync. Postmodern fiction helps us recognize the limits of what we can know, but it does so by putting us in relation with others whose experiences differ from our own. The inevitable demystification of our own stories and assumptions is predicated upon an encounter with unfamiliar stories. If we recognize ourselves in the lives of those who differ from us, we can see the way our own lives are constructed; it becomes possible to imagine dramatically different perspectives, even if only by fits and starts. It is this more constructive and imaginative dimension of postmodernism that seems consonant with project of postcritique as articulated by Felski and others. Presuming the necessary work of suspicion, what other kinds of work can literature do? What worlds can it imagine? What bridges of difference can it cross?

Thing theory and postcritical reading offer new points of entry into the time and texts we once called postmodern. For a while, I thought I had written the last book on postmodernism, but now I can see that perhaps I just wrote the last book that used that old frame to talk about literary production in the postwar period. What other ways of reading may yet open to us?

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Thing Theory in Literary Studies

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Part 4: Romantic and (Post)Modernist Culture

4.101: postmodern and 21st century literature in america, postmodernity/postmodernism.

Our current period in history has been called by many the postmodern age (or “postmodernity”) and many contemporary critics are understandably interested in making sense of the time in which they live. Although an admirable endeavor, such critics inevitably run into difficulties given the sheer complexity of living in history: we do not yet know which elements in our culture will win out and we do not always recognize the subtle but insistent ways that changes in our society affect our ways of thinking and being in the world. One symptom of the present’s complexity is just how divided critics are on the question of postmodern culture, with a number of critics celebrating our liberation and a number of others lamenting our enslavement….

One of the problems in dealing with postmodernism is in distinguishing it from modernism. In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression. In this way, postmodern artistic forms can be seen as an extension of modernist experimentation; however, others prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break, one that is a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (especially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer. Many date postmodernity from the sixties when we witnessed the rise of postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see WWII as the radical break from modernity, since the horrors of Nazism (and of other modernist revolutions like communism and Maoism) were made evident at this time. The very term “postmodern” was, in fact, coined in the forties by the historian, Arnold Toynbee. ( Click this link for more about the aforementioned aspects of postmodernism.)

Postmodernist Literature

DeLillo in New York City, 2011

Literally, the term postmodernism refers to culture that comes after Modernism, referring specifically to works of art created in the decades following the 1950s. The term’s most precise definition comes from architecture, where it refers to a contemporary style of building that rejects the austerity and minimalism of modernist architecture’s glass boxes and towers; postmodernist architects retain the functionalist core of the modernist building but then decorate their boxes and towers with playful colors, forms, and ornaments that reference disparate historical eras. Indeed, play with media and materials, and with forms, styles, and content is one of the chief characteristics of postmodernist art.

While postmodernist architects play with the material of their buildings, postmodernist writers play with the material that their poems and stories are made of, namely language and the book. Postmodernist writers freely use all the challenging experimental literary techniques developed by the modernists earlier in the twentieth century as well as new, even more experimental techniques of their own invention. In fiction, many postmodernist authors adopt the self-referential style of “ metafiction ,” a story that is just as much about the process of telling a story as it is about describing characters and events. Donald Barthelme’s postmodernist short story, “The School,” contains metafictional elements that comment on the process of storytelling and meaning-making, as when the narrator describes how the “lesson plan called for tropical fish input” even though all the students in the schoolroom knew the fish would soon die. Who is telling this story? Bartheleme? The unnamed narrator? The lesson plan? The stories that make up history itself are often a playground for postmodernist authors, as they take material found in history books and weave it into new tales that reveal secret histories and dimly perceived conspiracies. David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” is a good example of the narrative excess found in postmodern literature. In this essay written for Gourmet magazine, Wallace uses his visit to the Maine Lobster Festival to tell a history of the lobster since the Jurassic period that eventually turns against the organizers of the festival themselves, who may or may not be covering up the truth about how much lobsters suffer in their cooking pots. The form of the essay cannot even contain Wallace’s ideas, which spill over into twenty excessively long footnotes, many of which are little essays in themselves. In addition to playing with the form of literature and the notion of authorship, postmodernist writers also often play with popular sub-genres such as the detective story, horror, and science fiction. For example, in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich evokes both the detective story and science fiction as she imagines a futuristic diver visiting a deep sea wreck in order to solve the mystery of why literature and history have been mostly about men and not women.

Not all works of postmodernist literature are stylistically experimental or playful. Rather, their authors explore the meaning and value of postmodernity as a cultural condition. Several philosophers and literary critics many of whose names have become synonymous with postmodernism itself have helped us understand what the postmodern condition may be. “Poststructuralist” philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard have argued that words and texts do not reflect the world but instead exist as their own self-referential systems, containing and even creating the world they describe. When we perceive the world, Derrida’s philosophy of “deconstruction” claims, we see not things but “signs” that can be understood only through their relation to other signs. “There is no outside the text,” Derrida famously claimed in his book Of Grammatology (1967). In this way, words and books and texts are powerful things, for in them our world itself is created an insight that many postmodernist creative writers share. Baudrillard, in turn, argues in his book, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), that the real world has been filled up with and even replaced by simulations that we now treat as reality: simulacra. These postmodern sensibilities are reflected in both Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” and our selection from DeLillo’s White Noise . In Ginsberg’s poem, food has become “brilliant stacks of cans” knowable only by their similarity to each other. The “neon fruit supermarket” is not even a simulation of a real farm but instead is a simulacra full of families who have probably never even seen a farm. In DeLillo’s novel, we find the insight that the collected photographs of “the most photographed barn in America” are more real than the physical barn being photographed. Nobody knows why this particular barn is the most photographed barn in America. The barn is famous simply because it is a much-copied text, valued more as a sign in relation to other signs (all those photos of the same thing) than as a thing in itself with a specific history and a particular use. In his book Postmodernism (1991), the leftist critic Frederic Jameson chastises postmodernism for being the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” which for him is a culture that erases the real meanings and relations of things such as the most photographed barn in America, replacing true history with nostalgic simulacra.

Read this excerpt about “the most photographed barn in America” from DeLillo’s White Noise (1985):

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”

These insights are thoroughly explored in the confessional, feminist, and multicultural American literature of this era, whose authors write from their subjective points of view rather than presuming to represent the sum total of all American experiences, and whose works show us that American history has been far from the same experience for all Americans. For example, both Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke have poems about their fathers, but their appreciation of their respective fathers is shaped by both their genders and their own personal histories. Roethke feels a kinship with his father. Plath, however, sees her father as an enemy. The Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko tells her story specifically from the point of view of a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, whose members use old stories about the Yellow Woman and the ka’tsina spirit to understand their tribe’s relationship to the rest of America. In the works of African-American literature in this section, we find similar explorations of cultural identity.

Read these excerpts from Almanac of the Dead (1991) by Leslie Marmon Silko:

James Baldwin uses the African-American music of the blues and jazz to describe the relationship between the two brothers in his story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Ralph Ellison, in the first chapter from his novel Invisible Man (1952), writes about the experience of attending a segregated school that keeps black Americans separate from white Americans. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, in their stories, explore the hybrid nature of African-American identity itself, showing us the tensions that arise when one’s identity is both American and black.

The varied, playful, experimental literature of postmodernism, the critic Brian McHale helpfully observes in his book Constructing Postmodernism (1993), presents readers not with many ways to know our one world but instead with many knowable worlds created within many disparate works in many different ways. Modernist authors all strove to devise new techniques with which to accurately represent the world, McHale observes. Postmodernist authors, however, are no longer concerned with representing one knowable world but instead with creating many literary worlds that represent a diversity of experiences. Thus, much as the American literature of the contemporary era presents us with a record of how the nation has known, questioned, and even redefined itself, so too does the literature of postmodernism present us with a record of how writers have known, questioned, and even redefined what literature is.

Literature in the 21st Century

In many ways, the literature of this century is still postmodern, as it challenges grand narratives, monolithic constructions of identity, and many traditions and techniques of literature of the past. (And if it is not, there is no term for what is post-postmodern!) One motif that has persisted and proliferated during this century revolves around the impact of technology on the topics postmodern writers addressed in the latter part of the 21st century. Cyberpunk , which dealt with the “down and out” struggling to survive or transform a dystopian setting in which technology both empowers and enslaves, and which rose to prominence in the 1980s with authors such as William Gibson, Pat Cadagin, and Bruce Sterling, set the groundwork for this genre.

William Gibson at a 2007 reading from his new book Spook Country at Bolen Books in Victoria BC Canada.

Fiction writers such as Alaya Dawn Johnson continue to question essentializing of sexual identity and practice, and a patriarchal, if not-so-dystopian society in a work such as The Summer Prince . Larissa Lai considers the same kind of topics with the integration and, at times, through the lens of Chinese mythology. The Circle by David Eggers confronts the loss of privacy and authentic selfhood via technology, and the question of if progress or self-definition is more important in an ever speeding up world. And M.T. Anderson’s Feed calls into question the supposed utopia of a world proming instant gratification at the expense of destroying the environment, dumbing down the citizenry, and a general loss of humanity.

Johnson in 2013

In drama Jennifer Haley has written plays suggesting there today exists a blurring of the material and digital in relation to video games ( Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom ) and virtual reality ( The Nether ). And Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime addresses the possibilities and limitations of technology for filling the gap of losing a loved one and preserving one’s “existence” after death.

What this era is and will be known as is still unclear, and the dominance of visual and aural narrative forms is likely pushing the written narrative to a less pervasive and influential role than anytime before the emergence of the alphabet. But, then again, what constitutes literature is also changing with the times, as everything from video games to websites have been analyzed as forms of literature this century. So, maybe this is a transformational time for literature and we will just have to wait to see how the changes play out.

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6.6: Postmodernism

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Berke, Bleil, & Cofer
Middle Georgia State University, College of Coastal Georgia, & Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College via University of North Georgia Press

Postmodernism is difficult to define. Don DeLillo is recognized as one of America’s premier postmodernist novelists, yet he rejects the term entirely. “If I had to classify myself,” he explains in a 2010 interview in the Saint Louis Beacon , “it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.” Literally, the term postmodernism refers to culture that comes after Modernism, referring specifically to works of art created in the decades following the 1950s. The term’s most precise definition comes from architecture, where it refers to a contemporary style of building that rejects the austerity and minimalism of modernist architecture’s glass boxes and towers; postmodernist architects retain the functionalist core of the modernist building but then decorate their boxes and towers with playful colors, forms, and ornaments that reference disparate historical eras. Indeed, play with media and materials, and with forms, styles, and content is one of the chief characteristics of postmodernist art.

The culture of postmodernism in general exhibits a skepticism towards the grand truth claims and unifying narratives that have organized culture since the time of the Enlightenment. In postmodern culture, history becomes a field of competing histories and the self becomes a hybrid being with multiple, partial identities. In his provocative study, The Postmodern Condition (1979), the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard argues that what defines the present postmodern historical era is the collapse of “grand narratives” that explain all experience, faiths, and truths, such as those found in science, politics, and religion; in place of all-explaining master narratives, he argues, we now know the world through smaller micro-narratives that don’t all fit together into a greater coherent whole. These insights are thoroughly explored in the confessional, feminist, and multicultural American literature of this era, whose authors write from their subjective points of view rather than presuming to represent the sum total of all American experiences, and whose works show us that American history has been far from the same experience for all Americans. For example, both Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke have poems about their fathers, but their appreciation of their respective fathers is shaped by both their genders and their own personal histories. Roethke feels a kinship with his father. Plath, however, sees her father as an enemy. The Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko tells her story specifically from the point of view of a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, whose members use old stories about the Yellow Woman and the ka’tsina spirit to understand their tribe’s relationship to the rest of America. In the works of African-American literature in this section, we find similar explorations of cultural identity. James Baldwin uses the African-American music of the blues and jazz to describe the relationship between the two brothers in his story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Ralph Ellison, in the first chapter from his novel Invisible Man (1952), writes about the experience of attending a segregated school that keeps black Americans separate from white Americans. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, in their stories, explore the hybrid nature of African-American identity itself, showing us the tensions that arise when one’s identity is both American and black.

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Postmodernism by Tim Woods LAST REVIEWED: 13 June 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 22 August 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0048

“Postmodernism” has been a notoriously difficult term to define, and it has had a complicated history across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the idea largely emerged in the late 1950s in the humanities to indicate a sense that modernism had been superseded by a new cultural, aesthetic, and critical agenda. Some theorists have treated “postmodernism” as an epochal or historical term, while others have regarded it as an aesthetic or formal characteristic that is not limited to a particular era. Initially, it found its principal purchase in cultural philosophy, literature, architecture, art, and cultural theory, but it has subsequently affected and influenced debates across a wide range of disciplines, including international politics, psychology, law, history, sociology, and even town planning and medicine. As its concepts and ideas found purchase within intellectual debates, many saw in postmodernism an emancipation from the institutional straitjacketing of culture, while others, in turn, regarded postmodernism as an abandonment of social and intellectual responsibility that was symptomatic of a cultural decline with the ascendancy of late capitalism. Despite this wrangle over its political and ideological implications, in broad philosophical terms postmodernism tends to focus on reconceptualizing notions of subjectivity and gender, concepts of temporality, history, space, and place, and the relationships of power between races, ethnicities, and different cultural spheres of influence across global communities. The advent of postmodern thought has been a story of uneven development across various disciplines. This has meant that in certain disciplines where postmodern theory arrived early, there has been little recent theoretical development of postmodern ideas, while some disciplines have seen major theoretical discussions emerging since around 1990. However, since postmodernism has been around in intellectual debates since the 1960s, we have reached a stage where a history of postmodernism can now be written. Furthermore, it would be fair to say that more recently, across disciplines like literature, art, and history, the debate has switched from discussing the opportunities opened up by postmodern ideas to considerations of whether it has had its day and what its trajectory and future legacy to theoretical and cultural concerns might be.

The difficulties in unraveling the nuances and explaining the refinements of the concept of postmodernism have led to numerous attempts to illuminate the term. Ranging between approving and fiercely skeptical tones, such introductory books are nevertheless useful springboards for diving into more detailed investigations. Appignanesi and Garratt 1995 is part of a longstanding series that seeks to offer cultural explanations through the medium of the cartoon and is very accessible for that reason. Silverman 1990 and Tester 1993 offer sets of essays on the impact that postmodernism has had on a variety of disciplines. Although most of the overviews are introductory by nature, Taylor and Winquist 1998 seeks to provide a thorough coverage of the different fields influenced by postmodernism, stretching to four volumes of extracts, manifestos, and key essays. Generally, these books are best read in conjunction with others, and Taylor and Winquist 2001 is a very helpful short-entry companion that can act as a supplementary aide to most overviews on the subject. One major source of research discussion that has rapidly become the standard journal for the cultural concept is Postmodern Culture , whose very digital medium facilitates debates about the innovative formal and experimental styles of postmodern literature and culture. Madsen 1995 and McCaffery 1986 between them provide excellent specialist bibliographical sources to support the bibliographies found in most reference books and general introductions.

Appignanesi, Richard, and Chris Garratt. Postmodernism for Beginners . Cambridge, UK: Icon, 1995.

Offering the series’ familiar cartoon-style approach to intellectual concepts and ideas, this book covers postmodernism across art, theory, and history in an approachable and humorous fashion.

Madsen, Deborah. Postmodernism: A Bibliography, 1926–1994 . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

DOI: 10.1163/9789004647282

An exhaustive bibliographical list of articles and books that engage with postmodernism.

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-bibliographical Guide . Westwood, CT: Greenwood, 1986.

The scope of the work is broad, with European and Latin American influences well represented. Recommended for research that emphasizes fiction of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Postmodern Culture . 1990–.

Postmodern Culture has become the leading electronic journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary cultures. As an entirely web-based journal, PMC publishes still images, sound, animation, and full-motion video as well as text.

Silverman, Hugh J., ed. Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Arts . New York: Routledge, 1990.

A range of readable essays, in which the first part raises general theoretical questions about the language and politics of postmodernism, and the second part focuses on some particular “sites”—architecture, painting, literature, theater, photography, film, television, dance, fashion. Contains a helpful bibliography of books, articles, and journals on postmodernism.

Taylor, Victor E., and Charles E. Winquist, eds. Postmodernism: Critical Concepts . 4 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Seeking exhaustive coverage of the whole range of the humanities and some social sciences, this is a monumental multivolume collection of key essays and theorists. The four volumes are organized into “Foundational Essays,” “Critical Texts,” “Disciplinary Texts: Humanities and Social Sciences,” and “Legal Studies, Psychoanalytic Studies, Visual Arts and Architecture.”

Taylor, Victor E., and Charles E. Winquist, eds. Encyclopedia of Postmodernism . London: Routledge, 2001.

Organized alphabetically, this is a thorough coverage of the ideas that led up to postmodernism, its key concepts, key theorists, major works, and targeted supplementary reading lists. Written in dictionary-style short entries, it is also helpfully cross-referenced.

Tester, Keith. The Life and Times of Postmodernity . London: Routledge, 1993.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203216989

This book offers an introductory albeit skeptical appraisal of postmodernism as a “great transformation.” It regards postmodernism as a reflection of the problems of modernism, focusing on issues of identity, nostalgia, technology, responsibility, and the other.

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Slaughterhouse-Five

Study Guide

Kurt Vonnegut

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Literary Context Essay: The Postmodern Novel

Slaughterhouse-Five , which was published in 1969, is commonly cited as an example of a postmodern novel. Postmodernism, a movement that took shape after World War II, is difficult to define, in part because it is not confined to literature. The ideas of postmodernism have appeared across a range of other disciplines: film, art, architecture, music, fashion, and even technology. In addition, scholars disagree about what exactly postmodernism is and precisely when it began. What they do agree on is that postmodernism emerged out of another artistic movement called modernism , which reached its peak between 1910 and 1930. Modernist writers, like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, rejected the boundaries between genres as well as between high and low forms of art. Combining high and low art often resulted in writing that was playful, ironic, and fragmented. Thus, modernist classics like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), both of which frustrate conventional ideas of time, history, and narrative, were significant precursors to postmodern novels like Slaughterhouse-Five .

In modernism, narrative fragmentation functions as a sad reflection of life in an increasingly mechanized world. However, modernist writers still sought to unify human experience and create meaning with their novels. In postmodernism, however, this same fragmentation is celebrated. Postmodern writers usually accept that the world is meaningless, that experiences are random, and that there is no such thing as historical progress or a universal set of morals. Postmodern writing, including Slaughterhouse-Five , tends to present a self-conscious critique of culture, society, politics, economics, and religion. The resulting works can usually be described as fragmented, discontinuous, and even chaotic. In visual art, the works of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are held up as prime examples of postmodernism. In film, classic examples include The Matrix, Blade Runner, and Inception.

While writers including Jorge Luis Borges had produced works that are now considered to be postmodern (including Borges’s short story “ The Library of Babel ”) prior to and during World War II, postmodern works appeared much more frequently after the war ended in 1945. The boom in postmodern novels includes works by writers such as Vonnegut who used postmodern techniques to convey their own experiences during wartime. As a prisoner of war in February 1945, Vonnegut survived the infamous bombing of Dresden in Germany, which lies at the heart of Slaughterhouse-Five . Another plausible example is Joseph Heller’s 1961 postmodern novel Catch-22 . Scholars debate the extent to which author Heller’s experiences as a World War II fighter pilot fed into his classic anti-war and anti-military novel, it is difficult to believe there is no connection. Other well-known postmodern novels of the postwar era include A Clockwork Orange (1962), by Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez.

Postmodern novels from the period after the postwar era include Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984) . Like Slaughterhouse-Five , these novels rely on elements of satire, pastiche, and deadpan delivery to create humor and irony. What’s more, these works, like Vonnegut’s, portray acts of violence and are concerned with human brutality. However, the later postmodern novels, further removed from the horrors of World War II, tend to focus primarily on the damaging effects of capitalism, racism, consumer culture, and the everyday pressures of our technology-driven age rather than on war and its aftermath. Postmodern works in the current century include Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Swing Time (2016), Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).

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Post-Modernism in Literature

The 20th-century literature in its stylistic and ideological variety is non-comparable to the literature of the 19th century, where it was possible to allocate only three or four leading movements. At the same time, modern literature has not given more great talents, than the literature of the 19th century.

The previous century appeared as the richest in the variety of literary movements, including directions such as the literature of the absurd, Angry Young Men, Harlem Renaissance, Magic realism, Modernism and etc. One direction that should be specifically outlined is post-modernism. In this research post-modernism as a literary movement will be presented as an analysis of the historical background, writing style, and remarkable authors.

European and American post-modernism have developed in the late sixties and the beginning of the seventies. Unlike classical modernism with its cult of aesthetic novelty and the high aesthetic form, and also gravitation to a system in outlook, postmodernism was based on the cultivation of the art citation, the unoriginal plot, and the simplified language was oriented on simpler taste. The movement has occurred, having in its basis the philosophy of the end of human history, the philosophy of the natural person who is giving in to the dictatorship of psycho-physiological requirements.

The problems of postmodernism’s occurrence, functioning along with their theoretical judgment became the object of consideration of scientists since the sixties of the 20th century. Postmodernism can be considered, as a peculiar level of knowledge in the most developed societies. As it is known, this level of knowledge shows the cultural totality, which can be conditionally called tradition. Postmodernism, as defined by Jean-François Lyotard, represents the position of culture after the transformations which influenced the rules of scientific, artistic, and literary games, since the end of the 19th century. (Lyotard).

It was the end of the 19th century when society experienced a peculiar crisis connected with the formation of utopian ideals of modernism which should have become “a new, unprecedented era”. (Berman 3) Modernism as an aesthetic phenomenon became a tradition antonym. Modernist literature could be characterized by its depth, but postmodern writers aimed at depicting the truth of real-life without trying to make it better or to hide what could arouse resentment in readers.

However, modernism could not achieve its primary goals in the literature: the validation of science and scientific knowledge through the story and the creation of an original set of morality, capable to create as much accepted consensus variant as possible between the author and the reader. Therefore it was obvious, that society and literature were at a new step in the development of thinking and perception, where postmodernism has become such a step.

Postmodernism in the literature started to take a shape in the sixties and the seventies of the 20th century and, as well as modernism, promised salvation. This salvation and social release were imposed on the public in a rather aggressive way. The announcement of the death of the author, the novel, the story, and true art became the main installations of postmodernism. As stated by Federman, one of the theorists of a postmodernism and the author of six novels in such style, “Post-modern fiction experimented with death, or rather with its own death ” (Federman).

Literary postmodernism can be called quotation literature. Playing with citations can be considered as a form of inter-textuality. According to Barthes, it “cannot be reduced to a problem of sources and influences; it is a general field of anonymous formulas whose origin is seldom identifiable, of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks.” (Love) In other words, it only seems to the author that he creates, in reality, the culture creates the works using the author as a tool.

In the postmodernism theory, similar literature began to be characterized by the term “the death of the author”, identified by Barthes. (Barthes) It means, that each reader can tower to the author’s level, receive the legitimate right to recklessly finish the work, and attribute to the text any meanings, including the ones initially not assumed by the author. Despite such criticism, the postmodernism literature introduced several notable authors that can be representative of such movements.

One of such authors as Jorge Luis Borges. Jorge Luis Borges – born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 24, 1899, is an Argentinean prose writer, poet and a publicist. Borges is known for the laconic prosaic imaginations which are often masking reasoning on serious scientific problems or taking the form of adventure or detective stories. The effect of the authenticity of fictional events is reached in Borges’s works by introducing a narration of episodes of Argentina’s history and names of contemporary writers, and the facts of own biography. (Ruch) This helps to convince the readers that the events depicted in the work are real, not invented because it is named for the unhidden truth that some readers valued post-modern literature.

When considering Borges as another post-modern writer, it should be mentioned that he, in fact, did not refer to the post-modern era. It is just that some of his works possessed the features characteristic of postmodernism. In regards to the death of the author, in Borges’s works, it is rightfully to talk not about the disappearance of the author as is, but about the change of the quality of the author’s consciousness. The author’s truth is dissolved in the multilevel dialogue of the points of view. As a result, the occurring model of the world looks paradoxical even against modernist paradoxes.

A characteristic example is Borges’ poetry, where Borges’ world consists more likely of texts than from objects and events. In that sense, his story “The Library of Babel” represents not as much dreadful phantasmagoria, as a sufficiently exact model of this world, which is “made of infinite spiraling shelves and staircases endlessly reflected in numbered mirrors.” (Bertens, Bertens and Natoli 3) The word “Babylon” in the name of the story did not mean the ancient city, but apparently, for the author, it was a generality synonym, as well as in “The Lottery in Babylon”, where all population of the fictional city was involved in the lottery. The story was written in Borges’ usual fictional essay form, therefore, practically there was no narration, describing a special, created by the author’s imagination, library-universe.

Another notable author is Thomas Pynchon. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American writer, one of the founders of the school of black comedy, and a leading representative of the postmodernist literature of the second half of the 20th century. He is the winner of the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year in 1963, and the winner of the National Book Award in 1974. (Daw)Born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, Pynchon has “most exhaustively covered the hyperreal terrain mapped by postmodern prophet Jean Baudrillard.” (Bertens, Bertens and Natoli 265).

Right from the first acquaintance with Pynchon’s creativity, it shows the number of obstacles that should be overcome to come nearer to understand them. Reading Pynchon, readers incessantly get into traps and are compelled to observe how soon the built logic designs collapse in their eyes. The created system of references, allusions, and mutual reflections, the informational capacity of which is as the capacity of a powerful computer, has made Pynchon a favorite object of academic researches. In “Vineland” for example “Pynchon pays considerable attention to master narratives. He points out the foolishness of such belief systems by undermining the reasoning behind them; he accomplishes this through Sister Rochelle’s anecdotes, Zoyd’s wedding memories, and his own invention of the Thanatos.” (Sullivan).

Last but not least, one of the most famous representatives of literary postmodernism, along with Thomas Pincher, is John Barth. John Barth was born in 1930 in Maryland. After leaving school he studied in one of the most prestigious the Juilliard School of Music, after which he went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where the future writer majored in Journalism. After finishing University, John Bart was engaged in teaching activities. His first novels, “The Floating Opera” and “The End of the Road “, were published in 1957 and in 1958. The popularity of Barth was brought by the book “The Sot-Weed Factor” after the publishing of which is 1960, the public opinion included the author in the list of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. In 1965 after “Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus” had been published, John Barth was considered as one of the top American writers. For the following book, the trilogy “Chimera” (1972), the writer has been awarded the prestigious National Book Award. His subsequent books “Letters”, “The Tidewater Tales “, and the collection “The Friday Book” were considered as classics of postmodern literature. (Mahoney).

As an example of his postmodern books, “Letters” is a bright example of such works. The novel consists of letters that are issued according to strict English rules of etiquette. Each letter has not only a reference, an address, and a date, but also instructions concerning what aspect the message is bearing. Through the characters’ letters, Barth recreates his thoughts, aspirations, and experiences concerning the literature. Therefore epistles differ in a fanciful and mysterious psychological analysis by the means of which, the processes of formation of thoughts, feelings, and author’s intentions are reproduced. (Bertens, Bertens and Natoli 35-38) Embodying his own postmodernist feeling, Barth creates a book about the present’s new and historical reality of the US. Reflecting by the means of images from the “LETTERS”, Barth as a critic acts in the novel as a philosopher and as an art theorist, analyzing literary tendencies which were appearing and disappearing during American history.

Discussing the works of writers who were created in the period of postmodernism, it can be stated that all of them strongly influenced the movement. They affected the essence of literature, its primary goals, and some components which used to characterize the preceding literary tendencies. Firstly, postmodern writers changed the subject depicted in their works. Whereas modern literature was aimed at seeking meaning in the chaotic world, postmodernists only imitated this seeking. The works created in this period of time are the parody of questing the meaning with the writers’ denying its possibility in a playful and sometimes humorous way.

What’s more, postmodern writers changed the way of narration in their works. Little narration started to be used in postmodern literature and the writers were apt to generalize the ideas they expressed in their works avoiding stating their personal opinion which, perhaps, can be regarded as unwillingness to bear responsibility for possibly distorted facts.

Finally, the writers of postmodern literature changed character development and the themes of their works. Subjectivism was typical for postmodern character development; the writers stopped evaluating the characters and information objectively and their works turned into irrational, discontinuous, and shallow. They started paying more attention to the depiction of emotions and immortal issues of friendship, love, and death.

In a conclusion, it can be seen that despite the criticism of the postmodernism movement as a whole, its most bright representatives put a distinct mark in the history of literature. Although in later periods postmodernism decreased in its influence on literary works, the long term made it possible to evaluate postmodernism as a phenomenon of culture and a specific direction in philosophy and literary criticism. Postmodernism absolutely consciously revised the entire literary heritage. Today it becomes an existing cultural context – a huge cultural unwritten encyclopedia, where all texts relate to each other as parts of inter-text. Our culture consists of a cultural context. The literature is a part of that cultural context in which we live. We can use these products and they are a part of that reality which we create for ourselves.

Thus, it is possible to draw a conclusion that postmodernism as the philosophical and literary system actively functioning at present, continues to remain in the center of attention of domestic and foreign authors and critics, causing brisk discussions and receiving mixed opinions.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. 1977. Ubu.com. 2009. Web.

Berman, Art. Preface to Modernism. University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Bertens, Johannes Willem, Hans Bertens, and Joseph P. Natoli. Postmodernism: The Key Figures. Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Web.

Daw, Larry. “A Man Born through a Sea-Change from out of an Oyster”. 2000. The Modern World. 2009. Web.

Federman, Raymond. “Before Postmodernism and after (Part One & Two)”. Re-Vista. 2009. Web.

Love, Tim. “Allusion”. 1996. University of Cambridge. 2009. Web.

Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Postmodern Conditiona Report on Knowledge – the First Five Chapters”. 1979. Marxists.org. 2009. Web.

Mahoney, Blair. “Lost in the Barthhouse”. 2000. The Modern World. 2009. Web.

Ruch, Allen B. “Biography Libraries and Garden Labyrinths: A Dream of Childhood”. 2004. The Modern World 2009. Web.

Sullivan, Bruce A. “Totalizing Postmodernism: Master-Narratives in Pynchon’s Vineland”. 2006. The Modern World. 2009. Web.

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Encyclopedia of Humanities

The most comprehensive and reliable Encyclopedia of Humanities

Postmodernism

We explain what postmodernism is and what its main characteristics are. In addition, we explore postmodern society and postmodern architecture.

What is postmodernism?

Postmodernism is a philosophical, cultural and artistic movement that emerged in the late 20th century as a reaction to the intellectual and philosophical ideas of modernity. It gets its name for being the school of thought following Modernism.

Postmodernism rejects the idea of an unmediated, objective reality independent of the human being , which it dismisses as naive realism. It is characterized by skepticism or rejection of the Enlightenment.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) analyzes postmodern culture in The Postmodern Condition as the end of metanarratives or "grand narratives", the main characteristic of modernity. Examples of these are reductionism and teleological interpretations of Marxism and the Enlightenment, among others.

Rather than denying the identity of what was known until then, postmodernism grounds in the concept of "difference" as productive mechanism . It argues that thought (and what compels humans to act) is a matter of sensitivity rather than reason.

See also: Existentialism

Characteristics of postmodernism

The postmodernist movement held that:

Modern Western philosophy creates dualisms. Postmodernism maintains a hybrid or pluralistic stance on reality.
Truth is a matter of perspective or context rather than something universal or absolute. This idea arises from Nietzschean perspectivism: Nietzsche states that "there are no facts, only interpretations".
Language shapes the way of thinking and there can be no thought without language. Authors like Derrida work on this idea.
Language is capable of literally creating reality. Austin's performativity elaborates a theory in this regard.

Postmodern philosophy

Postmodern philosophy emerges as a break from modernism . Though it is difficult to pinpoint the origin of postmodernism, its start can be roughly marked in the 1960s, in France. Most postmodern thinkers are also post-Nietzschean: Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, Nancy, Barthes and Lacan, among others.

Postmodernism arises as a reaction or attempt to depart from the ideals of the previous era. Many of its authors are concerned with existentialism , deconstruction, posthumanism and contemporary literary theory. All of them break with the primacy that modernism gave to the individual and reason.

Central ideas of philosophical postmodernism are Derridean logocentrism, binary dichotomy and power relations , which are illustrated in works such as Foucault's The Order of Things , Derrida's Of Grammatology , or Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus .

Regarding the concept of difference , various authors adopt similar though not entirely reconcilable positions.

For Derrida, there exists the concept of différance or "difference", which is the simultaneous overlap of deferral and difference. This concept first appeared in his 1967 book Of Grammatology , which discusses language and writing not as sign but as a gramma or "differentiated" inscription.
Deleuze develops the Bergsonian multiplicity as a form of difference.
For his part, Foucault treats episteme as a singularity modified by the exercise of power.
In Lyotard's case, he coined the term "dispute", asserting that it is no longer possible to legitimize the historical truth claims of the various Western philosophical systems.

Postmodern art

Postmodernism broke with the established rules in art giving way to a new era of freedom in which "anything goes" . It is inherently an anti-authoritarian movement, as it refuses to acknowledge the influence of any style.

In order to challenge the boundaries of collective taste, the postmodernist movement may acquire a humorous, ironic and even ridiculous tone . It takes an anti-dualistic stance opposed to classical preconceptions such as east and west, male and female, rich and poor or black and white.

Examples of postmodern art include minimalism, conceptual art, land-art, happenings and interventions, all of which assert the failure of avant-garde art . Postmodern artists hold that avant-gardes are nothing but a failed response to established canon, since once they make their critique and mark their artistic difference, they end up being part of canon.

Postmodern architecture

Postmodern architecture is characterized by its undefined type , which does not oppose traditional styles while managing to differentiate itself from them. It replaced modern aesthetics (unadorned and with right angles) with irregular lines and unusual surfaces.

Some examples of postmodern architecture include: the State Gallery of Stuttgart (Germany), the public square Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (United States) and the Scottish Parliament Building in Holyrood (Scotland).

Modern architects often regard postmodern buildings as vulgar or having a populist ethic. Conversely, postmodern architects may see modern works as having soulless and bland facades.

Postmodern Literature

Postmodern literature features a style of fragmentariness, diversity, paradox, unreliable narration, parody and "black humor" . It rejects the distinction between genres and forms of writing.

Latin America literature in the 1990s experienced a trend towards postmodernism. Major figures of postmodernism include Ricardo Piglia, Diamela Eltit, Rafael Humberto Moreno-Durán, José Balza and José Emilio Pacheco.

Postmodern authors typically blur the line between fictional discourses and essays : they write fiction about literature and essays in fiction style.

Postmodern society

The development of postmodern society meant a shift from production-based to consumer economies and even to compulsive consumerism which has caused harmful consequences that can be seen today.

To counteract the negative consequences, postmodernism began to question environmental disasters caused by the overexploitation of natural resources and the amount of toxic waste generated. It called for a reappreciation of planet Earth and a rise of awareness for its care.

Criticism of postmodernism

In all the fields where postmodernism has been observed, there has been resistance and rejection of the general ideas it puts forward . Whether in architecture, art or literature, generations of artists, writers and thinkers maintain that postmodernism is the symptom of a declining society whose foundations have been lost in time.

One of the most famous examples is the book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science , written by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, where they highlight the relativism to which postmodernity is subject. They criticize both the abuse of scientific concepts by philosophers and the use of non-communicative language by authors like Derrida or Heidegger, who tend to write in a non-predicative playful style as a display of thought.

The philosophers and thinkers most criticized by Sokal and Bricmont are Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Jean Baudrillard.

Ballesteros, J. (1989). Posmodernidad: decadencia o resistencia . Tecnos.
Baudrillard, J., Habermas, J., Said, E. y otros. (2000). La posmodernidad . Kairós
Lyotard, J.-F. (2008). La condición postmoderna: Informe sobre el saber . Cátedra.
“Postmodernism”. Encyclopaedia Britannica .
“Postmodernism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
“Postmodernism”. Literary Theory and Criticism .

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Postmodernism, Really

In the mind of an avid—or even slightly aware—reader, certain dates of the last three centuries denote massive literary movements. This vague timeline sits comfortably nestled in the conscious of literary enthusiasts: In the early 18 th century, the stodgy Enlightenment came into power; within the century, an unprecedented flourish of political and poetic expression concurrent with the French Revolution dethroned the Enlightenment, and established Romanticism—the sublime, humanity untethered from logic—in its place. As Romanticism evolved in American Literature, the twin impulses of the early-to-mid 19 th century grew: Transcendentalism and Gothicism. By the middle of the 20 th century, Realism and Naturalism had taken the reins, and within a few decades Modernism—encouraged by the World Wars—sat in its throne at the head of literary art worldwide.

At this point, we can take a breath: From here, it becomes increasingly clear that literature falls victim of a devaluation rather than a renaissance. Dadaism, Surrealism and the OULIPO—each originating in France—cheapened and stretched the bounds of traditional expressionist literature. Modernism as a serious emotional reaction to conservative Realism begins to fail, and, in the early 1950s, Postmodernism moves in, bringing its (unwieldy) baggage.

In this era, psychoanalysis, plurality, irony, and skepticism become the hallmarks of literature. Geographically, Postmodernism denotes a period where, due to ever expanding forces of globalization, normative literature no longer happens in separate quadrants, relegated to European, American, Asian spheres; these denotations stand now as political descriptors rather than literal delineations. The “realities” of previous years are foregone in favor of a scathing appraisal about the nature of life, and humanity in it.

Each of us can identify a work of Postmodernism fairly readily; we know what Postmodernism “looks” like. However, interestingly enough, the authors that founded the postmodern aesthetic are mostly ignored or unknown, certainly in the halls of academia. This troubles me; we can easily identify the figureheads of other movements: Kant, Franklin, and Spinoza for the Enlightenment; Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley for Romanticism; Whitman, Emerson, Poe, Melville for Transcendentalism/Gothicism—etc, etc.

Postmodernism’s representatives, on the other hand, are little known. It’s easy to point out postmodern authors and their work, but not so easy to choose the “founders”—if such a stiff term here applies—of the movement. In few classes are the patriarchs of postmodernism taught. Though there are many wonderful examples of the aesthetic, its founding principles are being lost. “Postmodern” has become a popular catch phrase like “hipster” or “beat,” or something readily aligned with David Foster Wallace—even though his work is close to inscrutable without a firm foot in the basics of the theory.

I hope in this essay to recover Postmodernism from history’s abstruse gape. For my purposes here, I will list the three kings of postmodernism—one philosopher, one writer, and one semiotician—who not only established the principles of the aesthetic, but also employed them to wonderful results. It is important that the reader not consider these writers a totalizing list of postmodern influencers, but rather primers or professors of the style. The three I am about to list (suspenseful, no?) are not the ‘first’ apostles of postmodernism, but they are the most distinguished, most self-aware, and in my quiet opinion, the best. The three are Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Donald Barthelme.

Barthes was born in 1915, while Derrida and Barthelme were born fifteen years later, within a year of each other. Barthes was a literary theorist and semiotician who examined the structure of sentences and their effect in a larger narrative; the work I’ve chosen to briefly feature below is From Work to Text , an essay from his lauded piece Images—Music—Text (1977). Derrida was a philosopher and literary theorist who proposed the critical theory deconstructionism, and eschewed long-standing binaries of textual appraisal; we’ll be looking over his work Of Grammatology (1967). Barthelme, a lauded author of (surrealist) fiction, radically reinvented and refreshed the structure, conduct, and mode of the short story; I’ll discuss his story, Indian Uprising (1968).

I review these works briefly below, discussing the most obvious theories and styles in order to produce an abridged, coherent, and accessible argument for a more serious consideration of postmodernism; in the space allotted, my analysis will be fatefully macroscopic—however, I strongly urge the reader to find these authors as soon as possible. They engineered the course of modern thought. By considering these artists’ works together, it will be evident that: The growth of postmodernism is beholden to simple logic; Postmodernism, as a movement, did not have a conscious aesthetic until the later half of the 20 th century—though the over-zealous like to peg its commencement as early as ’45; and that literary theory is essential and necessary to a powerful aesthetic.

Oh—as a quick and premonitory note, the selection of two Frenchmen does not betray a bias, but instead an important and oft-overlooked fact: Most literary innovation of the last century did not come out of the United States. On the contrary, it mostly came out of France. And, of course, some readers will disagree with my selection; I cannot offer a selection of three postmodernists that will please everyone—undoubtedly, there are many great proponents of the aesthetic. However, in peaceful reflection or measured research, I believe the reader will find those that I have chosen excellent, or at the very least, important.

Central to any emergent movement is the proposition of a core set of theories that make the proposed movement unique, different—and often opposed—to what came before. The theories catalyze a change in perception and interpretation of the value of reading that precedes a shift in literary conduct. In the case of postmodernism, Roland Barthes was one of the first to create a new signification of critical interpretation. In Modernism and preceding movements, the reader interacted with a concrete, unchanging work. The work was subject of certain interpretations, without specific plurality; certain interpretations were right, and others wrong.

In response to the absurdity of a single, knowable interpretation, Barthes makes a revolutionary division: He splits the Text from the Work. The work, basically, is the individual writing of the book—it exists almost as a separate, noumenal object. Contrastingly, the Text is the multifaceted, live, and indefinable body of words as it is perceived by a reader; a reader who, necessarily, brings a host of personal and external contexts to the act of reading, coloring the text in multitudinous ways. On this dichotomy, he writes:

The work is a fragment of substance, occupying a portion of the space of books (in a library, for example); the Text on the other hand is a methodological field.

In Barthes theory , there exists no single ‘definition’ for a literary work; there are no equations or certainties or moralizations that allow a reduced, correct interpretation of a Text. “The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed,” Barthes writes. “What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.”

It is important to Barthes to emphasize the mutability of the Text. “[The Text] is plural. This is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural.” With this straightforward framework, Barthes revolutionizes the idea of what a literary work is—it is not, he writes, something that can be pinned down, or dissected. It is live, and personal, and indefinable. Postmodernism rests on this sturdy foundation.

Derrida, building upon the idea of the Text, distinguished between the Text and work as considered socially, historically, and politically. Derrida, like Barthes, noticed that past ways of considering texts had been absolutely, absurdly flawed. Since the ancient Greeks, Derrida found, literary criticism and appraisal had been couched in structures and complexes of historical non sense. Derrida noticed that the texture of our human culture is founded in binaries—such as presence/absence, good/bad, right/wrong—that share no apparent correlation in reality.

Derrida called these pairings, simply enough, “binary oppositions.” These oppositions to which we’re predisposed allow the propagation of inaccurate biases that damage our interpretation and perception of literary works. He argued that the foundation of the West was in these “violent hierarchies,” where “one of the two terms governs the other.” For example, when we appraise Milton’s Paradise Lost on the basis of Satan’s inherit badness and God’s innate goodness, we read God’s character with favor, changing the text in major and damaging ways. From this understanding of the falseness of binaries, Derrida famously wrote, “There is nothing outside the text.” This means, simply, that no reader can access a literary work without bringing to it an entire reality, a matrix of experience.

A text cannot, Derrida posits, be accessed from a distant and objective plane, but rather must be considered as a system of symbols, rendered in each reader’s individual reality. “From the moment there is meaning, there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs, ” Derrida writes. Therefore, it’s difficult to differ between signs-as-literature, and signs-as-reality; ultimately, we must consider the text as an inextricable facet of existence. From this solid theoretical parapet, Derrida develops his most important critical theory in Of Grammatology : Deconstructionism.

The theory champions a leaving behind of all boarders and considering a text as an interwoven, borderless field of symbols. He says of the theory: “One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.” Working from Barthes’ delineation between work and lively Text, Derrida extends the essence of verbal enterprise into a vast, indiscernible, all-encompassing tapestry from which no reader can separate themselves. Each new text becomes an integral asset of its reader’s existence.

Donald Barthelme was not a theorist or philosopher, and actually shied away from the label “postmodern” his entire life. However his writing so strongly values and employs the principles established by Barthes and Derrida, that to ignore him as a master and father of the postmodernist generation would be an exercise in absolute ignorance. His texts are multifaceted, methodological, and varied; he employs a vast swath of various styles and forms to create an often humorous, reductive, ironic, or satiric commentary on our culture and conduct.

Though postmodern authors have come before him, I strongly believe—and with evidence—that his work most clearly and skillfully represents the aesthetic, and exercises its province with the greatest effect. A work of his that accessibly espouses these values is The Indian Uprising , a multidimensional story of love and war. In the story, Indians are attacking the narrator’s city, and simultaneously—though in spatial and temporal remove—the narrator experiences various romances of odd and impressive sorts.

We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. “Do you think this is a good life?” The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. “No.”

In this story, Barthelme establishes a clear binary between man/woman, but he undercuts it at every possible moment; he highlights the clichéd connection between warfare and love, but also reduces it to absurdity. Throughout the plot of these various romances—one violent, one human—a meta-narrative is maintained, in which the speaker feels watched, filmed, recorded.

And when they shot the scene in the bed I wondered how you felt under the eyes of the cameraman, grips, juicers, men in the mixing booth: excited? Stimulated? And when they shot the scene in the shower, I sanded a hollow-core door working carefully against the illustrations in texts and whispered instructions form one who had already solved the problem.

Nothing, assuredly, is more postmodernist than this impulse of removed, mysterious scrutiny. This story, though it’s unsexy to say it, astounds me. Barthelme somehow maintains a coherent and interesting plot structure while also calling it into question at every available point. The reader here sees a jumbling of disparate elements, a pseudo-dreamscape where the interactions of characters and the effects of those interactions are considered simultaneously. Ultimately, the narrator finds no answer to his romantic and textual investigations:

I decided I knew nothing. Friends put me in touch with a Miss R., a teacher, unorthodox they say, excellent they said, successful with difficult cases, steel shutters on the windows made the house safe…”You know nothing,” she said, “you feel nothing, you are locked in a most savage and terrible ignorance, I despise you, my boy, mon cher , my heart.” You may attend but you must not attend now, you must attend later, a day or a week or an hour, you are making me ill…

Investigation without result, overarching scrutiny, the uncertainty and warfare of a textual nature—these are the hallmarks of a postmodern aesthetic, which Barthelme employs masterfully time and again to impressive ends. His work draws no clear boarders, offers no responsible parties; in the end, his writing answers only to the intricate twists of a jumbled reality, not unlike our own.

Inarguably, these three authors solidified a generation of contemporary thought, the effects of which are immeasurable. Building on the precepts of each other’s work, they improved and refined a radical aesthetic, heretofore unrivaled. Each played their part: Barthes made the simple but important distinction between a lifeless work—an impractical noumen—and the lively, vital Text as irreducible object. Derrida dissolved the boundaries and binaries of obsolete tradition in order to propose a Text that not only left its work, but also became an irremovable element of the reader’s reality. Barthelme employed these philosophies—the text-as-borderless—to make works of fluid, boundless, and multileveled proportion.

Together, these masters solidified the postmodernist generation. The postmodern literary work is not one that can be reduced to simple appraisals and interpretations; instead, it is an ineffable, impressive, and interwoven catalogue of symbols that contribute to the reader’s grand experience—an addition that influences the reader’s reception of every critical work thenceforth.

Unfortunately, best-seller lists and popular e-books have little examples of such a finely tuned postmodernism. Instead, many writers have retreated into a purposefully ignorant romanticism. The label “postmodern” is used thoughtlessly to describe a range of production from boy bands to t-shirts. This dilution of terms does a disservice to all of us who hope to react, originally, to the philosophies that precede us.

We must own this generation, and either perpetuate it or destroy it; in any case, we should not reduce it to trends in popular culture, music, and fashion. It is my desperate hope these masters will be excavated from literary obscurity, and that their impressive works will gain the attention and audience that they truly deserve. Otherwise, the potency of these artful philosophies may be forever lost to the worst of attitudes—indifference.

2 responses to “Postmodernism, Really”

INcredible article!!! Thanks for another great read!

Well I agree, it’s a goddam shame that most of Barthelme’s books are out of print (I humbly suggest though that your excellent description of what he did also describes Beckett’s fiction). It comes as a surprise to me (who knows nothing of academic trends) that Barthes and Derrida are being left behind in academia. I was under the impression that they – the latter in particular – were very well known.

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Postmodernism in Literature

Postmodern literature The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (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 difficult 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 "meta-narrative" and "little narrative", Jacques Derrida's concept of "play", and Jean …show more content…

Surrealist Rene 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 though he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magical realism was not fully realized until the postmodern period.[2] Comparisons with modernist literature Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism, in which a story was told from an objective or omniscient point of view. 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

Modernism In A Soldier's Home

Modernist literature began between 1915-1935, writers mainly wrote fiction this is because they started to question what the future was going to bring since they were living through both World War. Modernists wrote their stories in first person which made their stories seem like a stream of consciousness, irony and satires. This type of literature was mainly written in English and became well known due to the increase of globalization, which was more about how the people felt about the events going on and how the people were affected in other words it spoke from the inner self of the writer. Many famous writers including Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that the increase in new technology was leading to the decrease in civilization which was making individuals lonely.

Compare and Contrast the Ways in Which the Theme of Isolation Is Presented and Explored by Sebastian Faulks and T.S Eliot in ‘Engleby’ and ‘Selected Poems’.

Throughout both ‘Engleby’ and ‘Selected Poems’ there is a prevailing sense of ‘apprehension of the tenuousness of human existence’ which is evident in the protagonists’ confining inability to communicate with the world around them, as seen in Prufrock’s agonised call, ‘so how should I presume?’. ‘The Wasteland’ was written by Eliot to ‘address the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of [contemporary] culture’, questioning mankind’s ability to move forward into cohesiveness despite the ‘more pronounced sense of disillusionment and cynicism’ which came about as a ‘direct

The Literary Modernism Time Period

6 Works Cited

The literary modernism time period was a movement in literature that started in the early 1890s and was very eventful. During this era there were many considerable events taking place such as The Great War (also known as “World War One”), which started in 1914. This War lasted for four years and finally ended in 1918, but its effects lasted much longer. The financial instability of Europe and death caused by this First World War gave people a sense of patriotism that unified them. It made people think of not only the society as a whole, but themselves as individuals ("Modernism."). This new individualist mindset made people think more about their thoughts and actions than they had ever previously done before. Because individuals thought

Postmodernism Analysis

Authors Hanan Al-Shaykh, Bessie Head, and Ngugi Thiong’O lived in a time where the idea of a universal truth deteriorated because of the ceaseless wars in the twentieth century. As a result, postmodernism took its roots in literature as people attempted to make sense of the world around them that no longer made sense. Postmodernism is the freedom to pick one’s truth from a series of truths. Short stories “Wedding at The Cross”, “The Women’s Swimming Pool”, and “The Deep River” capture this idea of competing truths as they all utilize a tone of uncertainty throughout the story. However, “The Women’s Swimming Pool” and “Wedding at The Cross” best embody this spirit compared to “The Deep River,” as the characters begin to rely less on the close figures to define their truths for them. By doing so, both stories show in more detail how post-modern movements have affected our understanding of truth as people start to independently define their own truths.

Catch 22 Satire

The great death and suffering of WWII caused many to focus their writings more on the killing and power-hungry desires of the society we live in, and thus gave birth to the genre. Most works of postmodern literature were written to criticize the darker and controversial issues of society and human behavior through satire and

Fahrenheit 451

The post modern literary period started after World War II, it is characterized by the reliance on narrative techniques such as paradox, unreliable narrator, pigmentation, etc.

The Things They Carried Postmodernism Analysis

Post Modernism in The Things They Carried Links: http://www.shmoop.com/things-they-carried/norman-bowker.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literaturi In the chapter Speaking of Courage, part of the novel The Things They Carried, the author Tim O'Brien uses intertextuality to emphasize the presence of postmodernism throughout the novel. The chapter starts out with Norman Bowker, a veteran of the Vietnam War, cruising around in his automobile thinking back about the good old times and continues on with Bowker attempting to find people who he could speak about courage. His valor, if only had stretched more, would have meant the Silver Star.

21st Century Spin On Literature

In today’s 21st century of life, there are millions and millions of books, short stories, and poems. Authors have been scripting out different tales since before the 1st century. Therefore giving one plenty of options when it comes to not only reading, but analyzing, evaluating, and even interpreting the literature standpoint that you receive from picking up a good book. The three themes from the book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, written by Thomas C. Foster, can be applied to pieces of literature such as Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, and “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Several themes in How to Read Literature Like a Professor like “Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires,” “Now Where Have I Seen Her Before?,” and “Is That a Symbol?” play into the famous short stories mentioned above. “The Acts of Vampires” is a theme that deals with “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and how the corrupt older male strips away the females virtues and youth. “Now Where Have I Seen Her Before?” deals with the short story “The Lottery” and how every story comes from another story, and nothing is original because it is always a spin off of another book. Lastly, “Is That a Symbol?” deals with “The Minister’s Black Veil” and how symbolic the minister’s black veil really is.

The Challenges of the “Real” and Depth in Maus Essay

The Postmodernist movement begun after World War II in which, high and low culture are questionable in the view of society and Art. The postmodernist movement in literature creates a new set of ideals for fiction, such as the metafiction, the fable like representation in novels, the pastiche, irony, and satire. Fredric Jameson speaks about the movement and its theory in his essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. He questions postmodernism in society as it creates the new societal norm of popular culture. On the other hand, Jean Baudrillard analyzes the simulacra of postmodernism in “The Precession of Simulacra”. Baudrillard speaks of the “truth” and “reality” also as a questionable representation for the reader. Yet, both critics

A Model Of Christian Charity Essay

Literature can be branched as a form of art with the way authors or artists can express themselves through their work. Literature inspired a spirit of defining the changing views on politics, religion, territory, and societal ways. Authors such as Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet, William Bradford, and many more got swept across this literary movement. As the world was changing around each author who contributed to literature, so did each of their realities. It was how people lived that presented the various forms of literature throughout time. Literature defines culture through words whether it be from the influence of identity, religion, or conflict. During the Pre-Colonial period, these elements were all that fulminated.

Examples Of Modernism In The Great Gatsby

The time period of 1915-1935 was affected by the great depression and World War I. Modernist authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather helped shape this time period with their use of modernism. Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes. All these writers use examples of modernism. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a well-known modernist author. He is famous for his short story called The Great Gatsby.

Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Rolling into the late 19th and early 20th century, modernistic literature became the style of writing. Modernistic thinking was a rebellion against realism, in which the literature was very abstract. The writers of that time period were experimental and used unusual techniques. There were four sub-categories of modernism: surrealism, cubism, existentialism, and dadaism. Surrealism and existentialism were the most popular of the four. Surrealism was very dreamy-like writing, such as the work done by an artist named Daly. Existentialism dealt with the belief that the human existence had free will- there were no gods and humans had control of there own philosophy. Writers such as Camus were existentialists. The final literary movement that will be discussed is postmodernism. Postmodernism was an attempt by many artists to arrive at a united, global culture. Postmodernists had optimistic views that things could get better. Instead of concentrating on the fragments of destruction, they gathered all of the fragments together and made an optimistic outlook.

Postmodernism : What Is Post Modernism?

Post modernism is a difficult view point to interpret or describe in a few words, as to provide an insightful description that remains succinct is quite ironic as postmodernism opposes the attempt to ascribe one broad meaning to any “thing”. Postmodernism has often been referred to as the destruction of the Metanarrative. Thought-out all cultural eras society has usually had a focal point in their cultures. The age of enlightenment used God, modernists used technology, postmodernism seems to have disregarded structure all together. We can only truly understand what postmodernism is if we can understand the ideas that modernism portrayed. Postmodernism is the rejection of the ideas and structure that is the foundation of modernism. The rise of postmodernism can be drawn down to the rejection of trust in authority and the beginning of questioning everything. Postmodernism can be evident and demonstrated through a multiple of mediums such as art, architecture and literate. It breaks sharply away from the past, takes elements from the past, but doesn’t endorse their original purpose.

Analysis of The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot Essay

This reinforces Eliot's claim that, 'Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood'. The theme's that run throughout 'The Wasteland', such as sterility, isolation and death, are applicable to both the landscapes and the characters. When drawn together, it is these themes that give the poem structure and strength, and the use of myth mingled with historic, anthropological, religious and metaphysical images reinforce its universal quality.

Analysis of The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot Essay example

3 Works Cited

The Waste Land, written by T.S. Eliot, is poem portraying the lack and/or the corruption of culture in England during the post WWI period. Eliot uses a form of symbolism, in which he uses small pieces from popular literary works, to deliver his message. He begins by saying that culture during the post WWI period is a “barren wasteland.” Eliot goes on to support this claim by saying that people in England are in a sort of shock from the violence of World War I. Eliot believes that the lack of culture open doors for immorality to grow among the populace.

Post Modernity and Postmodernism in Literature

Mary Klages has neatly differentiated among three terms: modernity, modernism, and postmodernism to define post modernity.

Introduction : Post Modernity

Table of Contents

Mary Klages has neatly differentiated among three terms: modernity, modernism, and postmodernism to define post modernity. Regarding modernity, she suggests that it encompasses all the “ideas which influenced the artistic movement” (Klages 28) of modernism. She further asserts that modernity aims to create “order” out of “disorder,” which she identifies as centered around “rationality” and the rationalization of ideas associated with modernism. Klages derives this concept of “order” from two other concepts: Francois Lyotard’s “totality” and Derrida’s “totality,” aiming to bring modern society to stability and completeness through “grand narratives.” These grand narratives, she argues, serve to reinforce the “belief system and ideology ,” which are fundamental in establishing stability and order within a society. According to her, this period began around 1750, marked by the emergence of modernity-driven ideas such as the free market, the establishment of new American democracy, concepts like the superman and freedom of expression, evolutionary theories, and advancements in medical science, psychoanalysis, and anti-war sentiments.

Modernism and Post Modernity

Modernity, as a conceptual framework, encapsulates the pursuit of “order,” “stability,” and “totality” within societal structures. Modernism, then, manifests as the artistic and literary movement that emerges in response to the ideological underpinnings elucidated by modernity. From a literary perspective, modernism manifests through distinct attributes, including impressionism or impressionistic techniques, subjective explorations akin to the Romantic tradition, utilization of first-person narrative employing techniques like “stream of consciousness” as exemplified in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” employment of third-person narrations as seen in the works of Ernest Hemingway, and the utilization of fragmented structures to construct cohesive poetic compositions, as evidenced in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Moreover, modernist literature favors spontaneity and creativity over rigid formalism, thereby reflecting a departure from conventional literary norms.

The thematic undercurrent within modernist works often evokes a profound sense of melancholy or disillusionment with the prevailing state of affairs. Such sentiments serve as the artistic expressions of the tumultuous transitions and existential uncertainties brought forth by the overarching ideologies of modernity. Indeed, the emergence of modernism marks a pivotal epoch wherein novel literary forms and genres are crafted to reconcile the apparent chaos inherent in the modern condition with the human impulse towards order and coherence.

While delineating precise temporal boundaries for the modernist period proves challenging due to its fluid and multifaceted nature, scholars approximate its inception around 1910, with its zenith extending from the 1930s to the 1970s. This timeframe encapsulates the vibrant and dynamic landscape wherein modernist literature flourished, exemplifying the artistic response to the socio-cultural upheavals and existential inquiries characteristic of the modern era.

Postmodernism and Post Modernity

In delineating the transition from modernity to postmodernity, the shift from embracing “grand narratives” to the valorization of “mini-narratives” marks a fundamental departure in both philosophical and educational paradigms. Postmodernism, as a cultural and intellectual movement, signifies a rejection of overarching meta-narratives that seek to impose universal truths or ideologies, instead advocating for the recognition and validation of diverse, localized perspectives and experiences. This shift from the global to the local reverberates across various domains, including education, where functional knowledge takes precedence over the traditional dichotomy of “good” or “bad” knowledge. Functional knowledge, characterized by its emphasis on practical skills and utilitarian application, underscores the importance of experiential learning and adaptive training methodologies.

At the forefront of educational transformation in the postmodern era is the pervasive influence of digitalization, epitomized by the widespread integration of computers for the dissemination, acquisition, and storage of knowledge. The advent of digital technologies not only revolutionizes the educational landscape but also underscores the centrality of information access and technological literacy in navigating contemporary socio-cultural realities.

Furthermore, postmodernism accentuates the significance of fragmentation as a counterpoint to the grand narratives of modernity. This emphasis on fragmentation, coupled with the rejection of overarching narratives, engenders a fertile ground for the proliferation of fundamentalism, wherein localized ideologies or belief systems assert themselves in opposition to perceived global homogenization.

Within the realm of literary discourse, the postmodern ethos fosters a dynamic interplay between globalization and regionalism. The ascendancy of literary “mini-narratives” serves as a conduit for the globalization of regional voices, facilitating the dissemination and recognition of diverse cultural perspectives on a global scale. Consequently, regional writers find newfound resonance and popularity beyond their immediate geographical confines, contributing to a rich tapestry of global literary expression characterized by its plurality and heterogeneity.

Works Cited

Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: The Complete Guide . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Relevant Questions about Post Modernity

How has postmodernity reshaped our understanding of truth and knowledge in various fields such as literature, art, and philosophy?
In what ways has postmodernity challenged traditional structures of power and authority, particularly in political, social, and cultural contexts?
Can we identify any emerging trends or movements within postmodernity that offer potential paths forward in navigating its complexities and contradictions?

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116 Postmodernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best postmodernism topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 interesting topics to write about postmodernism, 📌 simple & easy postmodernism essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on postmodernism, ❓ questions about postmodernism.

Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “What Is Postmodernism” Of interest was the fact that the society came to accept the importance of painting. Although the audience knows that falling in love with Viola is normal because she is a woman, to the eye […]
Postmodernism in the “Yours” Short Story The pumpkin is the first symbol in this story, which is also the symbol of Halloween. In that way, according to the story, Allison is kind, honest, and eager to help, which directly contradicts Clark’s […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
From Modernism to Postmodernism The desire to move out of the era of modernism to postmodernism was desirable. The change of modernism to postmodernism is an evolution of traditional believes and practices to a modern way of thinking.
Postmodernism and Education Postmodernism is the word used by sociologists and other scholars to refer to a the intelligence that has developed in the western world.
Paradigm Shift From Modernism to Postmodernism Ways of Thinking Specifically, Freud invented the subconscious part of the mind, the superego, which helps in analyzing how one thinks, in other words, evaluating the correctness of the thinking. On the part of the ego, Sartre acknowledges […]
Postmodernism in Robert Coover’s The Babysitter The foremost feature of postmodernism – challenging Enlightenment – that arouses in the text is the attempt of the author to show the subconscious behavior of the characters.
Postmodernism in Anthropology Thus, the change of epochs in the human philosophy was also the shift in the scientific focus on society, i.e.the social sciences could not escape the influence of the shift and followed it, adjusting the […]
Postmodernism: Decor of a Room, Proliferation of Surfaces or Something Else? Having outlined the field of interest which is the notion of postmodernism in relation to popular culture, Storey observes the evolution of postmodernism from its origin to nowadays and makes the effort to define the […]
Postmodernism and Social Constructionism The concept of social constructivism gives people the power to create and encourages them to create a positive world that they will exist in peace.
“Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics” The third condition is where members should have the freedom to exit or associate with a group; for instance, the case of intercultural marriage. Gender is one of the main fields that have created major […]
Researching of Postmodernism Theories The concepts emphasize a multiplicity of perspectives and diversity of human experiences. Postmodernism theories challenge the notion that creativity and diversity are common and should be appreciated.
Contingent Foundations: Feminism and Postmodernism Feminism offers women theoretical bases on which to interrogate the issues of womanhood while Postmodernism takes this away by arguing for the “death of subjects”.abolition of the foundations of the ideals of reality.
O. J. Simpson Case: Myths and Postmodernism One of the issues that it raised among researchers was the emergence of myths about the criminal justice that can affect the justice system.
Discussion of Postmodernism in Modern World Postmodernism and social constructionism inform my work by influencing the selection of interviewing techniques and the readiness to accept the multiplicity of perspectives on the same issue in clinical contexts.
Postmodernism and Social Constructionism in a Clinical Setting Effects of social constructivism on the subject at hand: gradual identification of the probable solution and the creation of the vaccine. Collaboration and knowledge sharing as the cornerstone principles of development.
The Clash of Postmodernism, Secularism and Pluralism Due to the increase in the extent of exposure to numerous threats to the integrity of faith and their virtue, people need the guidance of an effective leader and the support of a faithful community.
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism I agree with the statement because people with different cultures have different ways of doing things and architecture is one of the crucial tools used to express the culture of the people.
After-Postmodernism Era Suggestions It can be said that postmodernism is the current cultural and philosophical paradigm that determines the structure and content of various fundamental ideas and arts. It means that after-postmodernism will deny the concepts of subversion, […]
Mix of Non-Traditional Media and Images in Postmodernism Art It can be seen in the materials, which is the objects of these work made of. The use of color is bright and contrasting.
High Design, Stereotype, Postmodernism What is the most complicated about the heavenly goods is that one and the same object cannot be changed in a way which would distinguish it greatly from the objects of the same kind.”Beyond a […]
Relevance of Postmodernism to Theory and Practice in Educational Research When discussing about research it is important to discuss about the definition of research and according to various sources, research is any activity that is conducted or based around investigations on an intellectual foundation and […]
How Modernism Evolved Into Postmodernism Modernism comprised the activities of people who felt that the traditional forms of art were turning out to be out-of-date in the new social-economic circumstances of a rising industrialized globe.
Postmodernism in the Church Analysis Milbank, John observes that one of the things to note of the postmodernism ideology is that its elaborate and rudimentary forms and implications have crept into the church itself.”The influence of postmodernism has been experienced […]
Understanding Postmodernism Through the Emerging Church Another perspective on this term is connected to the connection to anything of the current and that which has been approved and is also appealing to the human being.
The Shift From Modernism to Postmodernism Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism theory is considered to be “the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so consistent thing […]
Postmodernism, Realism, Anti-Realism in Nursing The effects of postmodernism in our society are real. Equally, in our hospital prayers held for the inpatients and outpatients attest the effects of postmodernism in nursing.
The Church and Postmodernism-Driven Attitudes of People The pivotal goal of implementing change processes concerning the church is to achieve the convergence in how God and people view others.
Church Mission and Postmodernism The following mission statement can be proposed: The church proclaims the principles of the Christian faith to help people understand God’s words and will and improve their reason to act as adults against the evil, […]
Postmodernism Era: Body and Popular Culture To understand how the body is constructed and deconstructed in modern western society, it is important to analyze the significance of the corporeal factor in the culture of postmodernism.
Postmodernism Building and Understanding In the field of art, postmodernism refers to the new approaches that were taken by modern artists as the world experienced various changes. However, his works on art are generally believed to have shaped postmodernism […]
Scholars on Postmodernism as Social Theory In addition to this, the ideological argument claims that objectivity is a deception and that it is aimed at undermining the minority groups in all parts of the world and especially in the third world […]
Postmodernism Characteristics in Trafford Centre De-differentiation is used in the shops to make products of a particular firm look completely unique. Hyper-reality and de-differentiation are used in the shopping centre to change the outlook of products or to make counterfeit […]
Postmodernist Anthropology and Its Impact on Translation Practice Indeed, one of the fundamental tasks of anthropology is understanding different cultures, which “inevitably involves either the translation of words, ideas, and meanings from one culture to another, or the translation to a set of […]
How Postmodernism Can Be Used as a Theoretical Approach to the Humanities There are myriad of practices, methods and ideals that encompass the concept of postmodernism, especially in regards to humanities. Some of the most common theoretical applications of postmodernism have been witnessed in humanities, post-structuralism and […]
Epistemological Approaches of Empiricism and Postmodernism Locke believes that the world is physical and thus in his account of solving the mind body problem, he says that the mind and body are just one and the same thing and continues to […]
Postmodernism and Autonomy Discourse As a matter of fact, the contemporary architectural skills heavily borrowed from the ideals of postmodernism When architectural areference, ornament and wit’ returned, postmodernism was fast put into place and adopted across the world as […]
Postmodernism in the Works of Ettore Sottsass The era of Postmodernism in art and culture is associated with the middle years of the 20th century when the top point of its development in design is the 1980s.
Reading the Notes of Desolate Man: Zhu Tianwen and Her Postmodernist Talent However close people can explore the life of the other and predict the deeds of the rest of the people, there will always be a certain element of secrecy about the other personality and the […]
Modernization, Postmodernism and the Third World In addition it holds the reality of being dependent on the interested parties and the nature of those interests. The argument for the significance of the term implies that there has been establishment of decentralization […]
Postmodernist Trends in Projects by Ashton Raggatt McDougall It is easy to see how these principles took shape in one of ARM’s most significant and famous projects, which is the National Museum of Australia.”Avoiding traditional museum interpretations, the architects developed a post-modern structure […]
Alternative Culture and Postmodernism The lyrics of one of the songs in the album stated that “Modern hip hop has grown from the dancing and shaking moves to just plain rapping”.
Postmodernism and Its Impact on Modern Society
Implementing Postmodernism in Changing the Role of School Administrators in America’s Schools
The Idea of Postmodernism in the Novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
The Concept of Postmodernism and Mainstream Feminism
An Analysis of Postmodernism as an Intellectual Movement
An Analysis of the Concepts of Postmodernism and Social Constructionism
Architecture Hi Tech and Postmodernism
Postmodernism and A Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Postmodernism in Rushdie and Roy’s The God of Small Things
Rebellion to Assimilate Into Individuality: Postmodernism and Capitalism
Globalization, Postmodernism, and Civil Disobedience
Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age
Effects of Postmodernism in Relation to Communication and Society
The Role of Postmodernism in Cultural Revolution
The Defiance of Postmodernism to Modernism Movement
The Effects of Postmodernism in Relation to Communication and Society
Postmodernism in White Noise by Don Delillo and Rabbit, Run by John Updike
How Postmodernism Defines Bartleby ‘s The Handmaid Tale
Videotape: Don De Lillo’s Illustration of Postmodernism
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Postmodernism, Hyperreality and the Hegemony of Spectacle in New Hollywood
Postmodernism: Jean-François Lyotard and Big Stories
History of Photographic Images and Postmodernism
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Postmodernism, Politics and Culture of 1988
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The Benefit of Postmodernism, an Intellectual Movement
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A History of Contemporary Political Economy and Postmodernism
A Critique of Fredric Jameson’s Paralysis of the Political Imagination in the Face of Postmodernism
Postmodernism in American Literature
Renaissance to Postmodernism: The Beatnik Impact
The Relationship Between Gender and Modernism/Postmodernism
The Artistic Movements of Modernism and Postmodernism
White Noise and Defining Postmodernism and Postmodernity
The Real Inspector Hound: A Discourse of Postmodernism
Postmodernism Multiculturalism Tolerance and Political Correctness
Postmodernism in 20th Century Fashion
Chief Problems in Defining Postmodernism
Concepts and Phiosophies on Postmodernism
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How Does Postmodernism View Christianity?
What Is the Problem With Postmodernism?
How the Church Handles Postmodernism Theology Religion?
What Are the Main Characteristics of Premodernism?
What Is the Difference Between Modernism and Postmodernism?
Does Tristram Shandy Demonstrate That There Can Be Postmodern Texts Before Postmodernism?
What Does Postmodernism Focus On?
Does Postmodernism Believe in God?
How Has Postmodernism Rejected the Modernism Movement?
What Is the Impact of Postmodernism on Research?
What Led to Postmodernism?
What Is Postmodernism in Simple Words?
How Valid Are the Notions of Postmodernity and Postmodernism?
What Does Postmodernism Think of the Soul?
What Are the Critical Principles of Postmodernism?
What Are the Features of Postmodernism?
Who Is the Father of Postmodernism?
How Postmodernism Defines Bartleby’s the Handmaid Tale?
How David Lynch’s Blue Velvet Is a Postmodernism Parody?
What Is the Central Message of Postmodernism?
Does Postmodernism Entail a Disregard for the Truth?
What Are the Characteristics of Postmodernism?
When Did Postmodernism Begin and End?
Is Postmodernism an Ideology?
What Is the Main Focus of Postmodernism?
What Are the Key Features of Postmodernism?
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What Are the Basic Assumptions of Postmodernism?
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Modernism and Postmodernism in Literature

Updated 18 August 2023

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Category Literature

Topic Modernism , Literature Review , Poetry

The Wastelands by T.S. Eliot and Seafarer by Ezra Pound are two texts that articulate the themes and characteristics of modernism and postmodernism. The text wastelands by Eliot is more of a modernism oriented text that displays such a science-leaning society while Pounds Seafarer reveals the themes and characteristics of postmodernism. The modernism and the postmodernism ideologies differ in a wide range of the spectrum. While modernism approves reason and science as the rationale for reaching accuracy and objectivity, postmodernism dupes them as human myths. Modernism also approves that through reasoning, humans can solve their problems while postmodernism argues that reasoning cannot be used as the only rationale for formulating solutions to problems faced by the human population. In his text, Eliot argues from a modernism view where he beholds reasoning and science immensely while on the other hand, Pound sides with postmodernism and argues in multiple manners against modernism.

In the Wastelands, Eliot assumes that the truth is independent of human consciousness. The perception is significant of modernism since modernism assumes that by application of reasoning, you can know the truth even when it is not outright. The assumption of modernism can be seen in the 5th line of the poem where he states, “Winter kept us warm, covering.” (Eliot 5) From the known truth, winter is a cold period. However, by application of reasoning, everybody is prepared for the winter. People buy warm clothing in preparation for the winter. Through reasoning, people still keep warm throughout the winter since they have warm clothing. It is, therefore, true that the truth is not absolute without reasoning according to the author. The aspect of modernism is therefore stressed vehemently in his work.

The Seafarer by Ezra Pound, on the other hand, seems to be more of a postmodern sidelines text. The poem articulates vehemently against the view of a universal truth even with the application of reasoning. In the 25th line of the poem, Eliot quotes, “Not any protector.” (Pound 25) The statement eats the normal reasoning that could arise from a modernism view which would otherwise argue that there exists a protector who would be known in abstract view or even after reasoning. The postmodernist view of the poem shows that the poem rejects any reasoning and truth and confirms that there is not abstract truth even after reasoning. In the 38th

line, Pound articulates more on the issue of realism and states, “For this, there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst.” (Pound 38) By the statement, the author makes a view of the earth as a lofty place where everyone is driven by their perception of things. The postmodernism approach of the poem, therefore, shows a more politically inclined text as opposed to Eliot's work.

Modernism and postmodernism approach, especially in literature, are highly vindicated. Different authors adopt different approaches depending on the side they affiliate with. The modernism approach is one who hails reasoning or the rationally known ‘school of thought.' Rational thinking and reasoning are applied using the modernism approach as showed by Eliot in his the Wastelands. The author heavily utilizes rational reasoning which makes the larger part of the poem. Postmodernism is, on the other hand, a belief of the irrationality of life. The approach as applied by Pound in his poem Seafarer shows a rather irrational politicized world where nothing is real even after reasoning. The two works are therefore vindictive of the applicability of the modernist and postmodernist approaches in literature but in diverse ways.

Works Cited

The Wastelands by T.S. Eliot

The Seafarer by Ezra Pound

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