Chapter 13: Postmodern Literature
I. What is postmodernism?
A. Categories: 範籌
It is an aesthetic style, a cultural situation, a critical practice, an economic
condition, a political attitude, etc.
B. Characteristics: 特徵
1. redemption 再生 (remotivation, refunctioning, rewriting, recycling,
reframing, reterritorialization, etc.)
2. poste (TV), the electronic, conduction 共導
(非 induction, deduction)
3. return to pleasure, mass culture, popular taste, etc.
(喜樂、大眾文化、通俗品味)
4. the hybrid 混雜
(biography & criticism, fiction & history, etc.)
5. the loss of “the real”
6. the replacement of “grand narratives” with “little narratives”
後現代建築：New York, Sony Building
後現代美術：Warhol, Readymade
後現代藝術：
Duchamp
Labyrinth:
後現代象徵
後現代藝術：pop art
後現代音樂：4’33” by Cage
1948 joined Black Mountain College
Visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard
The absolute zero
4’33” = 273 seconds
-273 degrees Celsius
Robert Rauschenberg blank canvases
C. Words Related to Postmodernism:
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appropriation (挪用), aberrant decoding (背離的解碼),
banality (平凡), bricolage (補貼創製), collage (美術拼貼),
consumption (消費), chance (機運), displacement (位移),
deconstruction (解構), democratization (民主化),
exchange value (交易值), everyday life, entropy (熵),
feminism, fashion, fetish (神物崇拜), heterogeneity (混
雜}, heteroglossia (雜語), image, indeterminacy (不定性),
iterability (重複性), intertextuality (文際性), implosion (內
爆熔合), jouissance (極樂), lateness, leveling (弄平),
montage (蒙太奇,湊合), overdetermination (多因至果),
parody (模仿), pastiche (雜集), performance (表演),
playfulness (好玩),quotation (引言), readymade (成品),
repetition, self-reflection (自我反射), sign, textuality (文
性), volatility (揮發性), etc.
D. Relations:
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conceptual art (如 Klein “Aerostatic Sculpture), computer,
compact disc, dandyism (花花公子氣息), ecology, film,
graffiti (塗鴉), happening (Kaprow, a performance, event or situation
as art), mechanic reproduction, media, MTV,
multi-national corporations, mime (Multi-purpose Internet
Mail Extension) , OULIPO (Workshop for Potential Literature), pop
art (everyday persons & objects), photography, situationists
(要 dialectical unification of art & life), site-specific art (考慮 location),
television, tape recorders, word-processor,
Xerox, yuppies (young urban professionals), etc.
II. When did postmodernism begin?
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1836, the Parisian La Presse
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1850, Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received
Ideas ( a dead-pan citation of everyday life)
1852, the Bon Marchè (百貨公司)
opened in Paris
1913, Duchamp’s “readymade” (挪用成品)
1946, Toynbee referred to “post-modern
historical age”
1952, the Lettrist International disrupted Charles
Chaplin’s Ritz Hotel press conference (以 freedom 毀 idol)
1962, Andy Warhol produced his first Campbell
Soup Cans (去除 abstract expressionism, 引進 pop art)
1971, Barry Commoner (美國生態學家)
The Closing Circle (Everything is connected to everything
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(第一個 commercial daily
newspaper, 代表用完即丟的 consumer commodity)
else. Everything must go somewhere)
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1972, the percentage of Americans employed in
service industries reached twice that in
manufacturing
III. When will postmodernism end?
Only God knows.
IV. Some Postmodern Works:
1. The Arcades Project
by 德國 Benjamin
2. Finnegans Wake
by 愛爾蘭 Joyce
3. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
by 意大利 Calvino
4. V
by 美國 Pynchon
5. “The Garden of Forking Paths”
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by 阿根庭 Borges
其他 ：Derrida’s Glas, Barthes’s S/Z, Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot,
Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, etc.
The Arcades Project
by Walter Benjamin
• It was to produce a book made up entirely of quotations.
• The book would be an enormous collection of writings on
the city life of 19th-c Paris. (Paris was the first city in the world to have
“arcades,” i.e., iron-and-glass covered shopping malls.)
• The materials would be taken from every cultural level.
• And they would be limited to found materials, that is,
“readymades.”
• The project testifies the postmodern practice of
appropriation (挪用) & remotivation (更新動機).
• But the project was never finished.
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
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It is a work of comic fiction written in an elaborate language of Joyce’s own devising: with puns,
portmanteaus, foreign words, allusions, names of people & places in Dublin, slang, phrases from
newspapers, popular songs, art, sport, etc.
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It uses the stream-of-consciousness technique, abounds in literary allusions, and has no
conventional plot, suggesting the dream associations in sleep.
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The book is about the Earwicker family (the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their children Shem,
Shaun, and Issy). HCE (Here comes Everybody) 代表 Dublin. ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle) 代表
Liffey 河. The setting includes the Phoenix Park near the River Liffrey. 第八章有 幾百個 names of
rivers woven into ALP’s life.
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The book begins and ends with the word “riverrun,” suggesting a cyclical nature. In it, there is a
rumor about HCE, ALP tries to exonerate him (免除其罪), and the sons try to replace him.
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“Finnegan’s Wake” is originally a comic song.
It has different levels of meaning.
The hod-carrier Tim Finnegan represents builders of all kinds. He fell from a scaffold and “died.”
Yet, at his wake (守屍), whiskey splashed on his corpse and he “woke up.”
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The work testifies the postmodern practice of appropriation, bricolage, parody, pastiche, and
remotivation, and it has the characteristics of heterogeneity and playfulness.
Thomas Pynchon’s V.
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It is a novel with two storylines: one about the exploits of Benny Profane (a
discharged U.S. Navy sailor) in his reconnection with the Whole Sick Crew ( a group of pseudobohemian artists & hangers-on in New York ), and the other about the quest of Herbert Stencil
(an aging traveler, whose father was a spy/diplomat) to identify and locate the mysterious entity he
knows only as “V.” The two lines finally converges in the last chapters, to
form a V-shape, as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.
In the Stencil chapters the mysterious entity “V” is variously identified: such
as Victoria Wren (a young woman murdered in Egypt), Veronica (a rat: a mad priest preaching to rats in Manhattan),
Vheissu (a place: Vesuvius, Venezuela, or Venus), Vera Meroving (人名: 在 Namibia 出現於 1922 siege),
Valletta (a place in Malta), an old or not-so-old woman crushed by a beam, and
one in love with a young ballerina.
The work is playful and it is a hybrid of reality and dream, and of travelogue
and detective story. It also suggests the postmodern characteristics of
“indeterminacy” and “the loss of the real.”
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
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It is a book about a reader trying to read a book called “If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveler.”
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The first chapter & each odd-numbered chapter are in second person,
telling you (the reader) what you are doing to get ready to read the next
chapter in the book.
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Even passages are first chapters of ten different novels of widely varying
style, genre, and subject-matter. All are broken off.
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The chapters : 有的 misprinted, 有的有 copies of the same chapter, 有的有
pages uncut or all blank.
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The work is playful. It has the postmodern characteristics of self-reflection
(on reading), appropriation and pastiche.
“The Garden of Forking Paths”
by Jorge Luis Borges
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In Liddell Hart’s History of World War I, p. 22, it is said that the British army had originally planned to attack the
German Serre-Montauban line on July 24, 1916, but for some reason it was delayed until July 29. The historian
guessed that it was due to a rainstorm, but in the short story Borges gave another “real” reason.
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Dr. Yu Tsun: a former professor of English at Tsingtao University working as a spy for the German Reich. He
knows where the British are hiding an artillery unit.
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Captain Richard Madden: an Irishman in the service of England. He comes to arrest Yu Tsun
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Dr. Stephen Albert: a sinologist (中國通) in love with Chinese culture. He has reconstructed a text written by Yu
Tsun’s ancestor.
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Ts’ui Pên : Yu Tsun’s ancestor. He wants to accomplish two things in his life: to build a labyrinth (a garden of
forking paths) and to write a novel outdoing Dreams of the Red Mansions.
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At the end, Yu Tsun learns from Albert that Ts’ui Pên’s double projects are in fact a single project: the novel is a
“labyrinth of time,” as it has all the “forking paths” of plot possibilities. Meanwhile, before he is arrested and
executed, he kills Albert with a gunshot as the way to inform the Germans that the artillery unit is located at a town
named “Albert.”
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The work is playful. It is a hybrid of the real (the historical) and the unreal (the fictional). It displays the
postmodern image of the labyrinth.
V. The Postmodernists:
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Ashbery, Bakhtin (carnival literature, dialogism, polyphony),
Barthes (readerly text vs. writerly text; various codes for reading),
Barthelme, Baudrillard (loss of the real),
Benjamin, Borges, Cage, Calvino,
Derrida (deconstruction), Duchamp, Godard,
Jameson, Joyce,
Lacan (the imaginary vs. the symbolic),
Lyotard (the grand narrative vs. the little narratives),
Pynchon, Rauschenberg, Sirk,
Warhol, etc.