Literary Postmodernism
"In a universe where no more explanations are possible, all that remains is to play with the pieces. Playing with the pieces, that is postmodernism" (Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images 29].
Outline
theories of postmodernism:
Lyotard, Jameson, Hutcheon postmodernism and:
originality
representation
politics and history
intertextuality examples from literature and film Canadian fiction and postmodernism
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
(1979/1984)
modernism: 'grand narratives' (totalizing narratives or metadiscourses of modernity]-> the Progress of Spirit and the March to Freedom -> provide a unified and communicable meaning
postmodernism: 'little narratives' (or micronarratives, petits recits) -> no claim to a universal truth; questioning and problematizing the unified meaning, conventions, assumptions; self-critical
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984)
postmodernism is a "cultural dominant"
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industrial capitalism -> cultural dominant of realism
colonial (imperialist) capitalism -> modernism
post-industrial, multinational, or late capitalism -> postmodernism
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modern and postmodern painting (Jameson)
Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes
(1887]
Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes
(1980]
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989)
"What I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political. Its contradictions may well be those of late capitalist society but whatever the cause, these contradictions are certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of'the presence of the past'"
(A Poetics 4).
"a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society, a recalling of a critically shared vocabulary of
architectural forms"
(Hutcheon, A Poetics 4)
Hutcheon's postmodernism
"critical revisiting and ironic dialogue" [A Poetics 4)
"a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges" [A Poetics 3)
the postmodern paradox -> critique and complicity at the same time [The Politics 14)
Hutcheon's historiographic metafiction
-> novels which are "both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages" ("The Canadian Postmodern" 25)
-> its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs
-> challenges notions such as historical truth and accurate knowledge of the past
E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975]	
• 'imitating' a historical novel	
• blurring fact and fiction	
• intertextuality	Si
• ambiguous narrator	11
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Tfeomos Wynchons
the Crying of got 49
A SIZAR RE, SATURNALIAN PLUNGE INTO THE UNDERGROUND. "A STREAMLINED DOOMSDAY MACHINE."
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UNDERWORLD
Postmodernism and originality
pull away from the modernist focus on originality and authenticity
deconstruction of the idea of the artistic genius
poststructuralism and Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" (1967)
> is it still possible to produce an original work of art today?
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1998), film adaptation dir. Stephen Daldry (2002)
Virginia Woolf writing Mrs. Dalloway in the 1920s
Laura Brown reading Mrs. Dalloway in the 1950s
Clarissa Vaughn living Mrs, Dalloway's story in early 2000s
postmodernism and intertextuality
• metatheatre
- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead [1966]
• postcolonial rewhtings
- J. M. Coetzee, Foe
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
- Peter Carey Jack Maggs
- Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
• pastiche
- Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
- David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down
postmodernism: a problem of representation?
• representation of fiction -> metafiction
- e.g. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000)
• representation of subjectivity -> meta-autobiography
- e.g. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975)
- e.g. A. S. Byatt, i4 Biographer's Tale (2000)
overview of literary postmodernism
• skepticism towards objective truth and universal structures
• self-reflexivity
• instability of meanings
• surrender in the face of originality/authenticity
• problematizing mimetic (transparent) representations
• emphasis on difference and plurality
• ironic appropriation of existing images/texts
• metafiction and metatextuality
• mixing fact and fiction, history and fiction, high and low genres
Linda Hutcheon, "The Canadian Postmodern:
English Fiction since 1960"
• 1960s - flourishing of CanLit
• 1970s/1980s - "postmodernism had arrived to Canada" and it took a distinct form (Hutcheon 18]
• Canadians are 'ex-centrics': position in the margin, off the centre but in relation with it:
- Canada's position between the US and Britain in international politics
- Canada as culturally marginal (a former colony]
- Canada's identity has stemmed from regional impulses, e.g. Quebec, the West, the North/Arctic, the Maritime...
The Canadian Postmodern
• 'ex-centricity' -> the Canadian, the postmodern, the feminist - seems to share the self-defining challenge to the dominant tradition, all write from the 'ex-centric' position of marginalization
• a relation between the national search for Canadian cultural identity and feminist search for a distinctive identity -> takes shape of the postmodern, the paradoxical, the contradictory, contesting the power of dominant cultures (British/American, male...]
• literary tradition: Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Trail, Emily Carr, Margaret Laurence, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro...
The Canadian Postmodern
• parody to question authority -> inscribing canonical texts (identified as male, British/American, ...) and then subverting their status and authority (e.g. Timothy Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage)
• "Parody then, becomes a major form of critique, allowing a writer to speak to her or his culture from within it but without being totally co-opted by it" (Hutcheon, "The Canadian Postmodern" 23)
• recalling the texts of the past (literary or historical) and then re-narrating or re-conceptualizing the past, becoming intertextual: e.g. Atwood's The Penelopiad
The Canadian Postmodern
•  emphasizing difference in Canadian postmodernism through:
- ethnicity
- feminism
- regionalism (the Pacific North West; the Maritime; Southern Ontario, the North.... + Francophone Quebec)
"To render the particular concrete, to celebrate ex-centricity: this is the Canadian postmodern" (Hutcheon, "The Canadian Postmodern" 28)
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972)
MARGARET ATWOOD
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interplay of national identity gender roles/feminist agenda, regionalism
exploring and transgressing several dividing lines: city -country; Anglophone Canada
- Francophone Canada; US -Canada; men- women; nature
- culture; human-non-human;