POSTMODERN LITERATURE


The postmodern period signifies the years from 1945 through the present.

The term postmodernity refers to the conditions of the postmodern period. On the level of
economics,  it has meant the growth of multinational corporations, the increasing focus on
consumption, and consequently the rise in the importance of advertising. Politically it has meant
the rise of democracy, but also the rise of external factors influencing the governing process,
such as businesses, media, organized crime. Technologically it has meant the age of computer and
world-wide communications. Socially, it has meant the movement toward movement toward equality
between men and women. It has also led to an increase in stress-related illnesses due to the fast
pace of life and the lack of time.

Postmodernism refers to the intellectual and cultural reaction to living in the postmodern world.
In a compliance with poststructuralism, postmodernism claims that all we can know are
interpretations and that objective truth does not exist.


Early postmodernism (up to 1968) is characterized by turning inward within both art and literature,
by looking at the literature itself. Writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Donald
Barthelme, produced so-called self-referential fiction. They explored the process by which stories
are narrated. They wrote fiction about the process of writing fiction.

High postmodernism - the first phase (60s to 70s) – was more socially and politically oriented. It
was reflecting and even creating the significant events of this period. The most important feature
of literature was the trend of women and people of various ethnic background writing. They did not
try to write like „great white males“, but instead became increasingly conscious that their own
forms of representation were needed to communicate who they are.

High postmodernism – the second phase (since 80s) – The division between the theorists and the
artists and writers has been eroded. It is difficult to separate literature from theory, art from
music, music from poetry. Theory becomes more radical, and art becomes less focused on
representation and expression, yet containing social and political critique and comment. New trends
appearing in this period: cyberpunk, post-punk, post-feminism, language poetry, performance art


Features of postmodern literature (according to Barry Lewis, in: The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism)

Temporal disorder: it disrupts the past, and also corrupts the present. This can be accomplished by
several

    means: apocryphal history, anachronism, or the blending of history and fantasy. (E. g. in
Flight to Canada by

    Ishmael Reed, Abraham Lincoln uses a telephone, and his assassination is reported on
television).

Pastiche: arises from the frustration that everything has been done before, so the writers can just
paraphrase

    what has already been said or written. Many contemporary novels are therefore written in the
form of the

    western (Tom Robbins: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), science-fiction (Kurt Vonnegut:
Slaughterhouse-Five)

    and the detective story (Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose).

Fragmentation: The postmodernist writer distrusts the wholeness and completion associated with
traditional

    stories, and prefers to deal with other ways of structuring the narrative. He introduces an
uncertainty principle

    into the book. One alternative is the multiple ending, which resist closure by offering
numerous possible

    outcomes for a plot. Another alternative how to make the text open and inconclusive is to break
up the text

    into short fragments or sections, separated by space, titles, numbers or symbols (novels and
short stories of

    Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme).

Paranoia: The protagonists of postmodern fiction often suffer from a dread that someone else is
patterning their

    life. The most distressing speculation is the conviction that society is conspiring against the
individual (Ken

    Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest, Joseph Heller: Catch-22, Don DeLilo: White Noise)

Vicious circles: appear in fiction when both the text and world  are permeable, to the extent that
we cannot

    separate one from the other. This happens when the author steps into the text (novels by
Vladimir Nabokov) or

    when real-life historical figures appear in fictions (E. L. Doctorow: Ragtime)


There are several versions about postmodernism in literature, the most frequent are:
1) postmodern literature and art takes certain modernist characteristic to an extreme stage (esp.
literature produced in the 1960s) Therefore, postmodernism can be considered the last phase of
modernism.
2) today we experience yet another phase of postmodernism which has not been clearly defined yet
3) the era of postmodernism ended at the turn of millenium/ with the fall of the twin towers.
Nowadays we live in the post-post-modern time.


Sources:
Jeremy Hawthorn. A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. NY: Oxford University Press,
1998
Barry Lewis. "Postmodernism and Literature", in: Stuart Sim (ed.). The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism, NY: Routledge, 1998