Post-modernism

## Definition

A disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20thcentury Western culture that succeeded the reign of high Modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid-1950s. Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.

As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring selfconsciously 'depthless' works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above.

## Features

Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counter-traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist 'high art' by recourse to the models of 'mass culture' in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music.”

**Movement:**

* heterogeneous
* eclectic
* contradictory
* complex
* non-traditional
* anti-authority and anti-establishment

**Style:**

* playful
* ironic
* parodic
* self-reflexive

**Some postmodern assumptions:**
• All cultural practices are imbued with oppressive undertones and therefore offer sites of productive political struggle.
• Any communicational act is conceived, made and interpreted within ideology.
• Emancipatory movements dedicated to the vocalization of previously marginalized politics (liberation movements such as feminism, gay rights and the racially and religiously dispossessed) should be encouraged.

## Post-modernism in Literature

### Main Features

* blending literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful
* resisting classification according to traditional literary rubrics
* playing with contradictory orders of reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world
* giving voice to the "other"
* recycling, revisiting, reconsidering, rereading, rewriting the classics

The playful, irreverent liberties taken with language, narrative structure, typology and the reader/text interface by these novelists suggested an exhaustion with the modes of traditional expression and championed an artistic freedom that allowed the celebration of non-literary media derived particularly from popular culture within the text.

### Key Categories

* **Metafiction:** fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
	+ **Historiographic metafiction:** those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also claim to historical events and personages.
* **Parody:** one of the major forms of modern self-reflectivity, inter-art discourse, and imitation characterized by ironic inversion.
* **Pastiche:** a patchwork of words, sentences or complete passages from various authors or one author
* **Bricolage:** an assemblage improvised from materials ready to hand, or the practice of transforming "found" materials by incorporating them in a new work
* **Absurdist fiction/drama:** to subvert the foundation of our accepted modes of thought and experiences so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence

## Sources

Mussetta Mariana. "Postmodernism." Literature II, 19 November 2020. Prezi presentation.

1. ↑  Baldick, Chris. *The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms*. Oxford University Press, 2001.