Postmodernism

Modernism• Focused on the individual: saw the individual

as the basic foundation for the world– Interest in psychological aspects of the mind

• React/destroy the traditional way of seeing the world: experiment with new forms

• Truth is questionable: depends on how the individual sees it

• Reject religion and God• Attitude of irony• First person narrative/stream of consciousness• BUT: all of this non-traditionalism was an

attempt to FIND MEANING IN THE WORLD

Postmodern Connections to Modernism

• Use of irony as an attitude continues• Fragmentation/Incoherence of the

text continues• Lack of universal truth• Understanding of the dehumanizing

trends in the world

Postmodernism • Started around 1940s and peaked in

1960s/70s• While modernists are searching for

meaning, postmodernists have accepted that there is no meaning and so they “play” with meaning (they see it as not existing in the world – “let’s have fun with nonsense!”)

• Increased fragmentation/disconnection in the narration: nothing is attached to anything else: everything simply happens with no rhyme or reason

Postmodern Characteristics

• Black Humor: being funny about serious things; telling jokes about things that people would normally think are important– Example: when Jewish mob boss George

Appel was electrocuted, his last words were: “Well, gentlemen, you are about to see a baked Appel.”

Postmodern Characteristics

• Narration: often a first person narrator (like Modernism), but Postmodernists can make the text more fragmented by switching narration– First person to third person to second person

• Narrative: structure/organization can be all confused– Example: parallel storylines, flashbacks to

different moments in time, start at the climax of the story and work back/forward

Postmodern Characteristics

• Reject “Grand Narratives”– stories a culture tells itself about its

practices and beliefs– Example: A "grand narrative" in

American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness.

Postmodern Characteristics

• Pastiche: when authors combine multiple genres into one text– Example: Postmodernist author Thomas

Pynchon includes elements from science fiction, pop culture references, and detective fiction to create fictional cultures and concepts.

Postmodern Characteristics

• Metafiction: self reflection!–Writing that is aware that it is writing:

makes the reader aware this is fiction• Often undermines the authority of the

author

– Example: In Italo Calvino’s novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the first chapter is about the writing process of the novel

Postmodern Characteristics

• Not a lot of character development at all!

• The individual is de-emphasized: we think that we are all different, but that uniqueness is something we construct to view ourselves as different from others