poioumenon

Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s.Linda Hutcheon (1988) ''A Poetics of Postmodernism.'' London: Routledge, pp. 202-203. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.

Precursors to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes’ ''Don Quixote'' (1605–1615), Laurence Sterne’s ''Tristram Shandy'' (1760–1767), Thomas Carlyle's ''Sartor Resartus'' (1833–34), and Jack Kerouac's '' On the Road'' (1957), but postmodern literature was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers’ ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'' (2000), and Jennifer Egan’s ''A Visit from the Goon Squad'' (2011). These works, however, also further develop the postmodern form.

Sometimes the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture to historical theory to philosophy and film. Because of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: (1) Postmodernity is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present, which is different from the (2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others. The third category is the “cultural postmodernism,” which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism.

Background

Notable influences

Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced the aesthetics of postmodernism include August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, and Bertolt Brecht. Another precursor to postmodernism was Dadaism, which challenged the authority of the artist and highlighted elements of chance, whim, parody, and irony. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel '' Nadja'' and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars.Lewis, Barry. ''Postmodernism and Literature // The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism''. NY: Routledge, 2002.

Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel's ' (1910) and '' Locus Solus'' (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico's '' Hebdomeros'' (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor .

Comparisons with modernist literature

Postmodern literature represents a break from the 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, or explorative poems like ''The Waste Land'' by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. ''The Waste Land'' is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in ''The Waste Land'' says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's ''Finnegans Wake'' or Woolf's ''Orlando'', for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in ''The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'' (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern.

Shift to postmodernism

As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed '' The Third Policeman'' in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called ''The Dalkey Archive'' was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance, the literary theorist Keith Hopper regards ''The Third Policeman'' as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel.

The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the Katyn massacre, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk and Hypertext fiction).

Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes' '' The Cannibal'' in 1949, the first performance of '' En attendant Godot'' in 1953 (''Waiting for Godot'', 1955), the first publication of ''Howl'' in 1956 or of ''Naked Lunch'' in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida's " Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in ''The Dismemberment of Orpheus'' in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodern works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.

Post-war developments and transition figures

Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and magic realism) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures ( Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic.

The work of Alfred Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, ''The Bald Soprano'' by Eugène Ionesco is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says:

The " Beat Generation" was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac, who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust's '' In Search of Lost Time''. More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group ( John Ashbery, Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs published ''Naked Lunch'' in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the "cut-up" technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as ''Nova Express'' and '' The Ticket That Exploded''.

Magic Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American "boom", a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, ''modernismo'' and ''posmodernismo'' refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to ''modernism'' and ''postmodernism'' in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America.

Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, '' Lolita'' (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically ''Pale Fire'' in 1962 and '' Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle'' in 1969) are more clearly postmodern.

Scope

Some of the earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William Gaddis' ''The Recognitions'' (1955), Vladimir Nabokov's '' Lolita'' (1955), and William Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch'' (1959). It then rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Joseph Heller's ''Catch-22'' in 1961, John Barth's ''Lost in the Funhouse'' in 1968, Kurt Vonnegut's ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' in 1969, and many others. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel ''Gravity's Rainbow'' is "often considered as postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general."

The 1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature. Don DeLillo's ''White Noise'', Paul Auster's '' New York Trilogy'' and this is also the era when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history, charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Paul Maltby who argues that it was not until the 1980s that the term "postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing.

A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Carole Maso, Richard Powers

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