Postmodern literature
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Postmodern literature arose after World War II as a series of reactions against the perceived norms of modernist literature.
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[edit] Background: modernism and comparisons with postmodernism
Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism, in which a story was told from an objective or omniscient point of view. 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 Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction, reflective of the works of Swedish dramatist August Strindberg and the Italian author Luigi Pirandello.
Unlike postmodern literature, however, modernist literature saw fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis or a Freudian internal conflict. In postmodern literature this crisis is avoided. The tortured, isolated anti-heroes of, say, Knut Hamsun or Samuel Beckett, and the nightmare world of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, make way in postmodern writing for the self-consciously deconstructed and self-reflexive narrators of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Sorokin, John Fowles, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, or Julian Barnes.
[edit] Shift to postmodernism
As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year Irish novelist James Joyce and British novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start.
Another common divide is the end of the second world war, which saw a critical assessment of human rights in the wake of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Holocaust, the Bombing of Dresden, and Japanese American internment. It also coincides with the beginning of the Cold War, the American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) and the beginning of movements which worked towards: (a) the end of Colonialism, (b) the Partition of India, (c) the 1947 UN Partition Plan, and (d) the development of Postcolonial literature [1]. Finally, it reflects the influence of the computer which garnered new importance during the war. During this time, computers became integrated within postmodern fiction often referred to as Cyberpunk [2]. Indeed, the book Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology [3], in section VI, "Technoculture" discusses cyberpunk as a form of postmodern literature:
- "Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is an exemplar of 'cyberpunk' science fiction...while cyberpunk represents a fast-forward vision of the present, contemporary science fiction is also the site for a peculiarly postmodern technological retrospection. William Gibson's...1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is widely regarded as one of the most influential futuristic visions in American literary history" (page 510).
Other sub-genres which developed in conjunction with this area include Electronic literature and Hypertext fiction.
Also of note is the recent emergence of Neo-Existential literature, which combined elements of Post-Modern and Existential thought. The term was first used to explain the shift away from individual being-towards-death, which was characteristic of traditional existentialism, to society as a whole recognizing its own being towards death. This movement in particular stresses the fact that whereas a traditional existentialist might look to the act of creation as a means to defy one's own death (via art, thought and reproduction, i.e., those things which survive one's death so that one in a sense goes on), the neo-existential feels the being-towards-death of all things (according to one Neo-Existential writer, if one adds enough time to the equation of life, eventually everything will die, will become without relation to what is or was, and will thus become insignificant to our current life-world). The realization of this fact creates a new angst for which there is no relief, no possible escape, only at first confusion, then surrender and at the end perhaps joy in realizing and accepting what is and must be.
Neo-Existential writers have also focused more on the post-modern end of Neo-Existentialism, creating stream of consciousness narratives that depict the confusion of post-modern, neo existential angst, as well as the bitter resignation to a blind, uncaring corporate world which alienates individuals from their own individual meaning so that rather than becoming to be "something" (the actualization of their potential), they become rather "nothing" (by the disvaluing and disregard of their potential they are never able to actualize themselves in society as productive members of a process directed towards an end), they become a mere tool to be used and dispensed with as needed. Novels such as Fight Club deal with these themes.
[edit] Criticism
Literature of this era does not set itself against modern literature as much as it develops and extends the style, making it self-conscious and ironic. In such literature, one finds a shift in the role of the "inner narrative of the self," from the self at war with itself to the self as arbiter, pointing to the phenomenological roots of postmodern thought. Authors such as David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow satirise the paranoid system-building of the kind associated, by postmodernists, with Enlightenment modernity.
Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson-Rubin hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work.
Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto, attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, or James Chapman's Stet, where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment.
[edit] Postmodern authors
- See main article: list of postmodern authors.
[edit] Postmodern critics
- See main article: list of postmodern critics.
