Postmodern literature
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Postmodern literature is a form of
Precursors to postmodern literature include
Sometimes the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from
Background
Notable influences
Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced the aesthetics of postmodernism include
Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]".[14][15]
Comparisons with modernist literature
Postmodern literature represents a break from the 19th century
Shift to postmodernism
As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance, the literary theorist Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel.[17]
The
Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of
Post-war developments and transition figures
Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the
The work of
Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ... Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work ... He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters.[22]
The "
Magic realism is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American "boom", a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America.
Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern.[23]
Scope
Some of the earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s:
The 1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature.
A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Carole Maso, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem—and publications such as McSweeney's, The Believer, and the fiction pages of The New Yorker, herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism.[13][27] Many of these authors emphasize a strong urge for sincerity in literature.
Common themes and techniques
Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list of features.
Irony, playfulness, black humor
Intertextuality
Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on
Pastiche
Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson's 1969 novel The Unfortunates; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose.[13][35][36]
Metafiction
Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien's 1990 short story cycle The Things They Carried, about one platoon's experiences during the Vietnam War, features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture the truth. David Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is non-fiction. He employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace. Giannina Braschi also has a namesake character and uses metafiction and pastiche in her novels Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana about the collapse of the American empire. [41][42]
Fabulation
Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators. Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.[43]
Poioumena
Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from
Historiographic metafiction
Temporal distortion
Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction Kurt Vonnegut's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version.[13]
is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many ofMagic realism
Technoculture and hyperreality
Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the "cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and one's understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, the virtual reality of "empathy boxes" in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a new technology-based religion called Mercerism arises. Another example is Don DeLillo's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment.[52][53][54]
Paranoia
Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Heller's Catch-22, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke".[55] This often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human.[13] This theme is likewise present in the satirical dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game Paranoia.
Maximalism and the "Systems Novel"
Dubbed
] hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work.In The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666,[56] (2014) Stefano Ercolino characterised maximalism as "an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to Europe and Latin America at the threshold the twenty-first."[56]: xi . Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Underworld, White Teeth, The Corrections, 2666, and 2005 dopo Cristo by Babette Factory.
Although Ercolino's "maximalist" examples overlapped with LeClair's earlier systems novel examples, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an ambiguous relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power."[56]: 6
Many modernist critics, notably
In a 2022 GQ article, "Is the 'systems novel' the future of fiction?", Sam Leith compared Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation with Dave Eggers' The Every. Leith wrote, "The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that responds to old-fashioned novels hasn't changed as fast as the world around it."[60]
Minimalism
Literary
Fragmentation
Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout the entire work.[62] In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit, a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos, one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature,[63][64] an almost telegraphic style is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax structure which complements the illustration of the main character's subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly chaotic world.[65]
Patricia Lockwood's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process.
Different perspectives
John Barth, a postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called "The Literature of Exhaustion" and in 1980 published "The Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "The Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "The Literature of Replenishment" Barth says:
My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett's Texts for Nothing... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and "contentism", pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction...[66]
Many of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II, one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war:
The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the 1950s. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle. I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat's Cradle.[67]
In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose', the novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon:
[P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. ... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.[68]
Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature:
It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian
Cat in the Hat runs for president.[69]
Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature:
Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative.[70]
See also
- Postmodernism
- Hysterical realism
- Metafiction
- List of postmodern critics
- List of postmodern novels
- List of postmodern writers
References
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- ^ Tore Rye Andersen (2001) "Ned med oprøret! - David Foster Wallace og det postironiske Archived 2016-08-18 at the Wayback Machine" in Passage, 37, 13-25.[1] Archived 2016-08-18 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Paula Geyh (2003) "Assembling Postmodernism: Experience, Meaning, and the Space In-Between". College Literature 30:2, 1-29.
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- ^ "Postmodernity And Brecht In Contemporary Theatre Film Studies Essay". UKEssays.com. Retrieved 2020-10-20.
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- ^ Pitchford, Nicola (2002), Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. Bucknell University Press: 21.
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- ^ "Hypertext fiction: The latest in postmodern literary theory". Findarticles.com. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
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- ^ Wagner, p. 194
- ^ McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987 and "Constructing Postmodernism" New York: Routledge, 1992.
- ^ Tore Rye Andersen. Det etiske spejlkabinet. Aalborg: Department of Language and Culture, 2007. p. 244.
- ^ Pöhlmann, Sascha Nico Stefan. (24 October 2006). "Gravity's Rainbow". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17 March 2013.
- ^ Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. p. 14.
- ^ John Barth. "Very Like an Elephant: Reality vs. Realism" Further Fridays. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.
- ^ Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. NY: Routledge, 2004.
- ^ Barth, John. "Postmodernism Revisited." Further Fridays. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.
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- ^ Richard Dyer (2004) Isaac Julien in Conversation in Wasafiri, Issue 43, 2004, p. 29.
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- ^ Historias tremendas de Pedro Cabiya, in Modernidad literaria puertoriqueña (San Juan: Isla Negra, 2005), 257–58, 260
- ^ Daniele Luttazzi (2004), Introduction to the Italian translation of Woody Allen's Complete Prose. Bompiani.
- ^ L.M. Popovich. Metafictions, Migrations, Metalives: Narrative Innovations and Migrant Women's Aesthetics in Giannina Braschi. International Journal of the Humanities, 2012.
- ^ Gonzalez, Madelena,United States of Banana (2011), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Fury (2001): Portrait of the Writer as the ‘Bad Subject’of Globalisation. Contemporary British Studies (2014)
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Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature.
- ^ Gonzalez, Madelena; Laplace-Claverie, Hélène (2012). Minority Theatre on the Global Stage: Challenging Paradigms from the Margins. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Program.
- ^ Things That Fall From the Sky, The Village Voice, May 7, 2002
- ^ Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. Ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
- ^ ’’Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction’’. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Duke University Press, 1994.
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- ^ "The Crying of Lot 49." "Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.: Spermatikos Logos" Archived December 14, 2007, at the Wayback Machine. The Modern Word. 4 February 2008.
- ^ a b c Ercolino, Stefano, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666. Bloomsbury, 2014
- ^ a b c d LeClair, Tom, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction University of Illinois Press, 1989.
- ^ Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. NY: Palgrave, 1998.
- ^ Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction: Postmodern Studies 38; Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature.
- ^ Leith, Sam. "Is the ‘systems novel’ the future of fiction?" GQ 4 January 2022
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- ^ H.T Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 88. Rutledge 2005.
- ^ Paul B. Roth, Preface to Dimitris Lyacos, Bitter Oleander Special Feature. The Bitter Oleander Journal, Volume 22, No 1, Spring 2016, Fayetteville, NY
- ^ http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/172059/4/chapter%20i.pdf, page 15.
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- ^ Heller, Joseph. "Reeling in Catch-22". Catch as Catch Can. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
- ^ Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose (translated by William Weaver). London: Secker and Warburg, 1985, pp 65–67.
- ^ David Foster Wallace. "E Unibus Pluram". A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.
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Further reading
- Barthes, Roland (1975). The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang.
- Barthes, Roland (1968). Writing Degree Zero, New York: Hill and Wang.
- Foucault, Michel (1983). This is Not a Pipe. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Hoover, Paul. ed. (1994). Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
- Jameson, Fredric (1991). ISBN 0-8223-1090-2)
- Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) ISBN 0-8166-1173-4)
- Lyotard, Jean-François (1988). The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985. Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. (ISBN 0-8166-2211-6)
- ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). This book's long and experimental first part is an application of Derridean "oto-biography" to postmodern life-writing.