Postmodernism (Literary period)
Postmodernism is a literary period that emerged as a response to modernism, typically traced back to the late 1950s in the postwar context. Characterized by its rejection of traditional narrative forms, postmodern literature includes elements such as fragmentation, unreliable narrators, and metafiction, which highlight the artificiality of storytelling. This movement is marked by a decentralized structure, lacking clear leaders and cohesive direction, and embraces chaos and disorder in both its themes and styles. Influenced by historical events like World War II and the rise of consumer culture, postmodern authors often portray a world perceived as disconnected and dehumanizing.
Key features include intertextuality, where texts reference one another, and a blending of "high" and "low" culture, pushing boundaries even further than modernist experimentation. Major themes prevalent in postmodern works encompass feelings of alienation, anxiety, and a sense of meaninglessness in the human condition. Prominent authors associated with this movement include Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, while the philosophical backdrop is enriched by thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Overall, postmodernism represents a complex literary landscape that invites readers to engage with its multifaceted narrative approaches and existential questions.
On this Page
Postmodernism (Literary period)
An expression of the wider cultural movement known as postmodernism, postmodern literature is typically interpreted as an outgrowth of modernism, its direct predecessor. Though the postmodern literary period has no precise starting point, scholars usually trace its emergence to the postwar period of the twentieth century, particularly to the late 1950s.
Postmodern literature is broadly defined by an acceleration of modernism’s rejection of tradition and by stylistic elements including fragmentation, unreliable narrators, a broad rejection of realism, and self-aware or self-referential narrative features commonly described as metafiction. From a critical standpoint, the concept of intertextuality is central to postmodern literature itself and to scholarly interpretations of it.
Just as it lacks a tangible beginning point, postmodernism also lacks a clear end. Some scholars argue that the postmodern aesthetic has continued to define literary and cultural production through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others argue that postmodernism ended about the turn of the millennium but that the defining traits of its unnamed successor movement have yet to fully coalesce.
Background
The term postmodernism suggests a direct relationship to the modernist movement that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century and went on to dominate literary culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Embracing experimentation, the leaders of the modernist literary movement consciously broke with established forms and traditions, defying convention and introducing innovative new approaches to every genre of literature.
In many ways, modernism was a celebration of individualism. Many works of modernist literature focused on individuals rather than larger social units or groups, an approach that allowed authors to create detailed examinations of the many ways in which a fast-paced, rapidly changing world impacted people on a human level. Subjectivity was another key feature of modernist literature, with authors frequently exploring narratives from multiple contrasting viewpoints.
Postmodernists pushed the features of modernism beyond their established limits and in some cases, to extremes. The modernist and postmodernist movements share multiple other points of contact, including a conscious rejection of traditional distinctions between “low culture” and “high culture” along with the free use of parody. However, postmodernism also displays clear breaks from the modernist aesthetic in a deliberate effort to move beyond it. According to many literary experts, this is most clearly expressed in the divergent ways in which the two movements deal with the existential crises at their cores. Modernists tended to view the modern world as the source of a deep social and spiritual challenge, which they sought to resolve through their artwork. Postmodernists instead surrender themselves to the impossibility of solving any such crisis in such a chaotic world.
Key historical events that influenced the rise of postmodernism include World War II (1939–1945), the early phases of the Cold War (1947–1991), postcolonialism, and the rise of globalist consumer culture. These events and movements combined to shape a world viewed by postmodernists as disconnected, disordered, and dehumanizing. Instead of attempting to create order out of the chaos the way modernists did, the postmodernists instead embraced the disarray and incorporated the resultant loss of meaning as a central element of their aesthetic.
Overview
Like the world it portrays, the postmodern literary movement is disordered and decentralized, lacking the clear, identifiable leaders that modernism had in figures such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Bereft of any central, unifying thrust, the postmodernist literary movement evolved around deeper fragmentation and even more extreme explorations of individuality and subjectivity than its modernist predecessor. Postmodern literature also pushes the modernist rejection of traditionalist approaches to form, structure, and convention to the point of incoherence. Linear treatments of time often vanish, allowing postmodern authors unprecedented freedom in exploring the temporal elements of narrative forms.
Postmodernism also pushes the modernist rejection of distinctions between “low culture” and “high culture” to new levels, often intentionally blending the two. It is also heavily influenced by the rapid development of technology and the proliferation of information, which typically surface as defining elements of the chaotic worlds depicted in postmodern literature. Postmodernist authors embrace this lack of meaning, echoing it by intentionally frustrating readers and critics who attempt to extract coherent messages from their literary works.
Stylistic features of postmodern literature include the intentional imitation of other literary styles, intertextuality, temporal fragmentation, the use of unreliable narrators, distortions of time, and a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction. Intertextuality, a concept that describes direct relationships between various literary texts, is a common feature of both postmodern literary production and criticism. It follows from the distinctively postmodern idea that originality is functionally impossible and that all new texts are essentially reworkings or reinterpretations of old texts. Metafiction, which deliberately invokes a self-referential awareness of the artificial nature of literature, is another defining element of the postmodern aesthetic.
Major themes of postmodernism include alienation, anxiety, uncertainty, paranoia, and an ironic inability to communicate despite the ready availability and ubiquity of communication tools. Postmodern literature also tends to present the human condition as ultimately meaningless and unsolvable, a disturbing existential reality that postmodern characters tend to react against by filling their lives with fleeting relationships and illusory sources of psychological and emotional security.
Authors commonly cited by critics as embodying the postmodern aesthetic include Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, among many others. Postmodern literature was also heavily influenced by cultural theories forwarded by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. The strong representation of French theorists in the pantheon of postmodern philosophers has led some commentators to identify France as the birthplace of the postmodern movement.
Bibliography
Connor, Steven. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 62–81.
Fedosova, Tatyana. “Reflection of Time in Postmodern Literature.” Athens Journal of Philology,Vol. 2, No. 2: pp. 77–88. doi.org/10.30958/ajp.2-2-1. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.
McHale, Brian and Len Platt (eds.). The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature.Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Ning, Wang. “Introduction: Historicizing Postmodernist Fiction.” Narrative,Vol. 21, No. 3 (Oct. 2013): pp. 263–270.
“Postmodern Literature.” Valley Cottage Library,30 Jan. 2023, guides.rcls.org/postmodernliterature. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.
“Postmodern Literature Guide.” MasterClass,7 Jun. 2021, www.masterclass.com/articles/postmodern-literature-guide#69LqalMMLvv40X3XRSQNf6. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.
Püchmuller, Andrea. “Postmodern Literature.”OER Commons, 28 Jan. 2016, oercommons.org/authoring/4137-posmodern-literature/view. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.
Salberg, Daniel, et. al. “Postmodernism and Its Critics.” University of Alabama,2023, anthropology.ua.edu/theory/postmodernism-and-its-critics/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2023.