Postmodernism
Postmodernism
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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.
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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.
Difference

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.
Frederic Jameson:
modernism and postmodernism are cultural
formations which accompany particular
stages of capitalism.
 Three primary phases of capitalism which
dictate particular cultural practices
(including what kind of art and literature is
produced).
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3 primary phases of capitalism
1. market capitalism
 associated with particular technological
developments, namely, the steam-driven
motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics,
namely, realism
 occurred from the eighteenth through the late
nineteenth centuries in Western Europe,
England, and the United States (and all their
spheres of influence)
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2. monopoly capitalism
 associated with electric and internal
combustion motors, and with modernism
 occurred from the late nineteenth century
until the mid-twentieth century (about
WWII); this phase,
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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.
Postmodernity & modernity

Like Jameson's characterization of postmodernism in
terms of modes of production and technologies, the
second facet, or definition, of postmodernism comes
more from history and sociology than from literature
or art history. This approach defines postmodernism
as the name of an entire social formation, or set of
social/historical attitudes; more precisely,this
approach contrasts "postmodernity" with "modernity,"
rather than "postmodernism" with "modernism."
The Difference
"Modernism" generally refers to the broad
aesthetic movements of the twentieth century;
"modernity" refers to a set of philosophical,
political, and ethical ideas which provide the
basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism.
 "Modernity" is older than "modernism;" the
label "modern," first articulated in nineteenthcentury sociology, was meant to distinguish the
present era from the previous one, which was
labeled "antiquity."

'Postmodernism' is a broad range of
1.
2.
responses to modernism, especially refusals of
some of its totalizing premises and effects, and
of its implicit or explicit distinction between
'high' culture and commonly lived life,
responses to such things as a world lived under
nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a
world of faster communication, mass mediated
reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores
and a consequent pluralism,
3.
acknowledgments of and in some
senses struggles against a world in
which, under a spreading technological
capitalism, all things are commodified
and fetishized (made the object of
desire), and in which genuine
experience has been replaced by
simulation and spectacle,
4. resultant senses of fragmentation, of
discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche
rather than as a weave,
5. reconceptualizations of society, history
and the self as cultural constructs, hence
as rhetorical constructs.
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1.
2.
3.
4.
a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements
of modernist thought which are totalizing: which
suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an
explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may
be
a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of
contesting explanations none of which can claim
any authority,
parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and mastercode elements, including genre and literary form,
the challenging of borders and limits, including
those of decency,
the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life
and marginalized elements of society.
Breaking down grand narratives
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The 'problem' with grand narratives is that they
bring all of experience under one explanatory and
one implicitly or explicitly regulative order, and
hence are potentially (some would say, inevitably)
totalitarian and repressive
Is living without grand narratives an act of courage
and freedom in the face of inevitable doubt and
instability, or merely an opening of oneself to the
worst forces of the libido and an abandonment of
necessary principles?
 the
writing of reflexive or meta-fiction:
fiction which is in the first instance
aware of itself as fiction and which
may dramatize the false or constructed
nature of fiction, on the one hand, or
the inevitable fictionality of all
experience, on the other.

a reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of
modernist form -- of the dominance in
modernism of form and of the idea of the
aesthetic, which concept created a 'special
world' for art, cut off from the variety and
everydayness of life (a negative judgment on
this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply
aestheticizes everything, see the next point)

an attempt to integrate art and life -- the
inclusion of popular forms, popular culture,
everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of
'carnival', of joyous, anti-authoritarian,
riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration,
makes sense in this context and adds a sense
of energy and freedom to some post modern
work
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the notion of carnival is taken to the limit in the idea of
transgression, the idea that to live and think beyond the
structures of capitalist ideology and of totalizing
concepts
Violate what appear to be standards of sense and
decency, the methods of social and imaginative control
A more benign conception than transgression is the
concept of the paralogical: a revelation of the nonrational immediacy of life (considered thus to be
implicitly revolutionary, liberating)
as with ideas such as carnival and transgression, the
paralogical gives access to the energy of the world, and
allows us to experience outside of the strictures of the
grand narratives
the use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical
shifts, in order to undercut any legitimization of
reality, subject, ontological ground
 a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between
fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres,
between high and low culture
 a sense that the world is a world made up of
rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs
and images and symbols, none of which have
any necessary validity
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achieved through the notion of carnival, of the turning
upside-down of everything, and through the use of
parody, play, black humour and wit;
this refusal and these methods of undercutting
seriousness are associated as well with fragmentation,
as traditional notions of narrative coherence are
challenged
The 'problem' with seriousness is that it has no room
for the disruptions necessary to expose the oppressions
and repressions of master narratives, in fact seriousness
tends almost inevitably to reinforce them and hence the
ideologies they support
a crossing or dissolving of borders -between fiction and non-fiction, between
literary genres, between high and low
culture
 a sense that the world is a world made up
of rhetoric -- of language and cultural
constructs and images and symbols, none of
which have any necessary validity

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a move away from perspectivism, from the located,
unified 'subject' and the associated grounding of the
authority of experience in the sovereign subject and its
processes of perception and reflection
a fragmentation of the self (the unified, located
subject), or a disappearance or flatness -- the self, or
subject, is no longer a 'psychological' reality but
henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically
(in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject
matter, the situation), differently configured in
different situations
A greater emphasis on the body, on the human as
incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world.

1.
2.
This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism
and of the ideology of the Enlightenment. This
emphasis on the physicality of our being leads in
several directions, including
an emphasis on chance and contingency as
fundamental conditions of our being and
a positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism as
guide to truth, hence ultimately as the ground for
ethics.
a rethinking of modernism's break with history. There are
(at least) two directions in which this rethinking may go:
1. a greater awareness of history as a narrative, that is, a
human construct; history is accessible to us, but only as
text -- its documents are texts, its institutions are social
texts. This does not mean that history did not happen; it
means that what we know as history is known to us
only through what is configured for our understandings
by language, by narratives with their own shaping
forces, by figures of speech.
2 an insistence of the incarnate and the contingent,
human life as located, specific, grounded in the body
and in circumstance.
Postmodern literature

Postmodernism is a fact of everyday life.
We live in a world of uncertainty, of lapses
in--if not absence of--authority, of
fragmentation, of visual and auditory
overload, of the blurring of lines between
mass culture and elite culture. Such features
have found their way into contemporary
literature and particularly into the literature
labeled "postmodern."

The postmodern camp is inhabited by such
writers as William Burroughs, Robert
Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon,
Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and E.
L. Doctorow and African American writer
Ishmael Reed.
Features

a nonlinear plot, with jumps both in space
and in time, and confuses the identity of
ostensible author and the "I". Is the "I" the
author? Another character? Planting the
seeds of uncertainty in the reader regarding
the identity of authors and their relationship
to the text is one of the hallmarks of
postmodernism. By extension, it prompts us
to ask where "fiction" ends and "reality"
begins.
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postmodernism makes us question the
organization of the text itself
blurring of the admittedly artificial line between
historical narrative and fictional narrative
the problem of "author-ity" characterizes the text
both fiction and history are reconstructions and
that historical "objectivity" is impossible
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Postmodern fiction is challenging, pulling
the rug out from under readers, juggling
narrators, obscuring authorial voice,
fragmenting plot lines so that the old plot
diagram takes on bizarre geometric patterns
and calls attention to its own fictionality, the
result of which is known as metafiction.
Metafiction
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm

Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing
which self-consciously and systematically
draws attention to its status as an artifact in
order to pose questions about the relationship
between fiction and reality. In providing a
critique of their own methods of construction,
such writings not only examine the fundamental
structures of narrative fiction, they also explore
the possible fictionality of the world outside
the literary fictional text. (Waugh 2)

Spectrum: Metafiction is thus an elastic term
which cover a wide range of fictions. There are
those novels at one end of the spectrum which
take fictionality as a theme to be explored . ..
whose formal self-consciousness is limited. At
the center of this spectrum are those texts that
manifest the symptoms of formal and ontological
insecurity but allow their deconstructions to be
finally recontextualized or 'naturalized' and given
a total interpretation . . .Finally, at the furthest
extreme that, in rejecting realism more
thoroughly, posit the world as a fabrication of
competing semiotic systems which never
correspond to material conditions, ...(Waugh 1819)
Metafictional techniques
Metafictional techniques include everything
from the Dear-Reader convention to authors
confessing to the reader that they are tired
of a particular scene/character and want to
move on. Ex. Virginia Woolf's Orlando
 the authorial voice interrupts the narrative
to observe that in situation X, the
biographer usually does Y.
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John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's
Woman (1969) can be excerpted to illustrate
Fowles' using and subverting the
conventions of Victorian fiction and relying
on a favorite postmodern strategy: the
inclusion of alternative endings.
 Plot becomes fragmentary, characters are
eccentric, tone inconsistent, and language
frenetic, spiced with seemingly endless
allusions to mass culture.
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Las Meninas Brown, Jonathan. Velaquez: Painter
and Coutier. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
"Recent studies of Las Meninas, inspired by the ideas
of Michel Foucault, have paid considerable attention to
the seemingly novel relationship between the scene on
the canvas and the spectator. These ideas tacitly
assume that the picture was meant to be seen by the
public-at-large., as if it were hanging in an important
museum, as it is today. ...However. the original
placement indicates that this is not the case. In 1666,
the year after the death of Philip IV, Las Meninas was
inventoried in a room known as ...the office in the
summer quarters, ...a room destined for the personal
use of the king." (Brown 259).