Post Modernism Excerpt

Postmodern Literature

English Literature Development

What Is Postmodern Literature?

Postmodernism is a literary movement that rejects definitive meaning in favor of play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality. The literary movement developed to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction to modernist literature's search for meaning in the aftermath of World War II's grave human rights violations.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller are all instances of postmodern literature. Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard are among the literary scholars who crystallized postmodernism in literature.

What Are the Origins of Postmodern Literature?

Modernist (or modern) literature, postmodern literature's forerunner, highlighted the author as an enlightenment-style maker of order and mourned the chaotic world—examples include James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.

However, following a series of human rights violations during and after World War II (including the Holocaust, atomic bombings of Japan, and Japanese internment in the United States), writers began to believe that finding meaning was an impossible task, and that the only way forward was to fully embrace meaninglessness.

Thus, postmodern literature rejected (or built on) many of modernism's ideas, such as rejecting meaning, deepening and glorifying fragmentation and disorder, and launching a dramatic shift in literary tradition.

Postmodern writers use black humor, wordplay, irony, and other playfulness strategies to confuse and complicate their stories.

2. Playfulness

Postmodern works reject absolute meaning in favor of randomness and disorder, often using unreliable narrators to obscure meaning.

1. Embrace of randomness

5 Characteristics of Postmodern Literature

Postmodern writing emphasizes meaninglessness and play, emphasizing the artifice of their work and reminding readers that the author is not an authority figure.

4. Metafiction

Postmodernist literature shifted literary works to collage-style structures, temporal distortion, and character changes.

3. Fragmentation

5 Characteristics of Postmodern Literature

Example of the postmodern poem:

Postmodern authors used collage-style writing, pastiche, and a blend of high and low culture to create their work, often addressing issues previously thought inappropriate for literature.

5. Intertextuality

5 Characteristics of Postmodern Literature

Notable Postmodern Authors

• John Barth: Barth wrote an essay of literary criticism titled The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), detailing all writing as imitation and considered by many to be the manifesto of postmodern literature.

• Samuel Beckett: Beckett's "theatre of the absurd" emphasized the disintegration of narrative. White Noise (1985) reframes postmodernism through consumerism, bombarding characters with meaninglessness.

• John Fowles: Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is a historical novel with a major emphasis on metafiction.

• Joseph Heller: Heller's Catch-22 (1961) tells many storylines out of chronological order, slowly building the story as new information is introduced.

• Thomas Pynchon: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is the poster child of postmodern literature, using a complex, fragmented structure to cover various subjects such as culture, science, social science, profanity, and literary propriety.

• Kurt Vonnegut: Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969) is a non-linear narrative in which the main character has been "unstuck in time," oscillating between the present and the past with no control over his movement and emphasizing the senseless nature of war.

• David Foster Wallace: Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) embodies postmodernism through its eclectic, encyclopedic structure, characters trapped within the postmodern condition, obsessive endnotes and footnotes, and meandering consciousness.

Open Ended

What Is the Difference Between Modernist and Postmodernist Literature?