In literary theory, what is postmodernism?

Question

what are the tenets and who are the famous writers in this literary genre/era

Answer 1

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"Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.


Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.


The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.


From a literary perspective, the main characteristics of modernism include:


1. an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.


2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.


3. a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S. Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).


4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.


5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways.


6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.


7. A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.


Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.


But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.


Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism helps to clarify some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind of art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence). This first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century (about WWII); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism. The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism."

Answer 2

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 Baudrillard's "simulacra". For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author's "univocal" control (the control of only one voice). 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. A list of postmodern authors often varies; the following are a few common examples: Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Don Delillo, E. L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Paul Auster, Robert Coover, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Fowles, William Gass, Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, and Umberto Eco

Answer 3

What is Postmodernism, and Why is it Saying all these Terrible Things?

Postmodernism is a loose alliance of intellectual perspectives which collectively pose a challenging critique of the most basic assumptions of the modern educational enterprise. What are these perspectives? What do they have to say that can open new doors for educational research and practice? I would first like to sketch a personal view of postmodernist discourse, and then focus on its challenges to the foundations of most modern views of abstract conceptual learning. Going beyond critique, I would like to sketch some alternative, postmodern possibilities.

Modernism, like any intellectual movement, will ultimately be defined from the viewpoint of its successors. Postmodernism is beginning this process by offering a critique, a reaction against some intellectual trends that perhaps began as early as the Renaissance, but certainly became well established by the later 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the foundational period for the discipline of psychology and for educational theory and most of the social sciences, as well as for modern literary and fine arts criticism. Postmodernism is primarily, in its origins, a philosophical critique of the assumptions built into these disciplines in their formative years. The critique is gradually being extended today into the natural sciences, the inner fortress of modernist assumptions about knowledge and reality.

From the postmodern point-of-view, modernism is defined by its belief in objective knowledge, or at least in the possibility of objective knowledge, and by its assumption that such knowledge refers directly to an objective reality which would appear in the same way to any observer. A further characteristic modernist assumption is that knowledge is a product of the activity of the individual mind, fashioning its ideas or mental schemas to correspond with this objective reality.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, argues that what we call knowledge is a special kind of story, a text or discourse that puts together words and images in ways that seem pleasing or useful to a particular culture, or even just to some relatively powerful members of that culture. It denies that we can have objective knowledge, because what we call knowledge has to be made with the linguistic and other meaning-making resources of a particular culture, and different cultures can see the world in very different ways, all of which "work" in their own terms. It argues that the belief that one particular culture's view of the world is also universally "true" was a politically convenient assumption for Europe's imperial ambitions of the past, but has no firm intellectual basis.

Many postmodernists go further and point out that just as Europeans temporarily imposed their view on other cultures by force, so within European cultures, the upper social classes, and particularly middle-aged, masculinized males have dominated the natural and social sciences (as well as politics and business), and so this would-be-universal worldview is even more narrowly just the viewpoint of one dominant social caste or subculture.

Postmodernism traces its roots to the movements of structuralism and its counter-reaction, post-structuralism, mainly in the the French-speaking intellectual community of the 1960s and 1970s. Structuralism is either the last stage of modernism or the immediate precursor of postmodernism. The great spokesman for structuralism in this period was the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (e.g. 1963), who argued that the patterns of human culture, from village architecture to premodern myths, had the subtle regularities of mathematical structures (not quantitative ones, but combinatorial and symmetry patterns as in algebraic group theory). He was joined in this by Jean Piaget, who saw in the developmental movement of childen toward modern concepts of space, time, matter, and quantity a construction by the child's mind of just these same sorts of regularities in the operations it performed to make sense of the world (e.g. 1970, 1971).



Major theorists and writers:


Theodor Adorno Louis Althusser Roland Barthes
Michael Bakhtin Jean Baudrillard Walter Benjamin
Maurice Blanchot Kenneth Burke Albert Borgmann
Jacques Derrida Gilles Deleuze Terry Eagleton
Stanley Fish Michel Foucault Frankfurt School
Hans-George Gadamer Anthony Giddens Antonio Gramsci
Felix Guattari Jurgen Habermas Donna Haraway
Martin Heidegger Agnes Heller Max Horkheimer
Edmund Husserl Ivan Illich Fredric Jameson
Julia Kristeva Jacques Lacan Bruno Latour
Jean Francois Lyotard Georg Lukács Paul de Man
Herbert Marcuse Karl Marx Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Richard Rorty Jean-Paul Sartre Edward Said
Charles Taylor Paul Virilio Ludwig Wittgenstein



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