Post-modern Literature: An Overview

Post-modernism

Post-modernism is the name given to the literary movement following Modernism. It was set in the post-1950s, a time marked by the Cold War and the excesses of consumption. It differs from Modernism by blurring the conventional boundary between "high" and "low" culture, by a completely loosened structure in both time and space, and by multiple openings rather than a closure in itself. It rejects to conform to popular taste and proposes a combination of heterogeneous elements, making it cater to a more sophisticated reader.

Post-modernism was characterized by an attempt to establish transhistorical or transcultural validity, it claims that search for reality is pointless, as the "real" is conditioned by time, place, race, class, gender, and sexuality. There is no knowledge or experience that is superior or inferior to another.

Having started in the second half of the twentieth century, it was largely influenced by a number of events that marked this period. Genocide that occurred during the Second World War, Soviet gulags, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, mass destruction caused by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insecurity of Cold War Era, post colonialism issue, as well as the supremacy of multinational corporations and post-industrialism with new technologies, violence, counter culture and consumer culture shaped the perception of new authors.

While Post-modernism had a little relevance to poetry and only a limited influence on modern drama (applied only to the Absurd Theatre), it had a huge impact on fiction, especially to the novel.

Common features and techniques of Post-modernism:

        

Although Post-modernism is said to be dependent on the time, place, race, class and other features which affect its expression, some features seem to be common to most of the fiction written during the last years.

·         Irony, playfulness, black humor: It has been claimed that Post-modern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks and that much of it can be taken as jokes. This irony, along with black humor are among the most recognizable aspects of Post-modernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the Post-modernists (the Modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many Post-modern works. It's also common for Post-modernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way.

·         Intertextuality: Post-modernism represents a decentralized concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of Post-modern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Critics point to this as an indication of Post-modernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés. Intertextuality in Post-modern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. An example of this feature is Tom Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and Guildestern are dead (1964), a play in which Two minor characters from Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to deviate from them. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-pdf-d220470383 )

·         Metafiction: It is essentially writing about writing, as it's typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregarding the necessity for "willing” suspension of disbelief. For example, Post-modern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself.

Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/if/if-on-a-winter-s-night-a-traveller )

·         Temporal distortion: This is a common technique in modernist fiction. Fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both Modern and Post-modern literature. Temporal distortion in Post-modern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://pdfdownload.me/pricksongs-descants-fictions ).

·         Magic realism: It is the literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Post-modernists such as the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie commonly use magic realism in his works. Rushdie’s Midnight's Children (1981) is set on the Indian subcontinent, it combines magical realism with historical fiction; this work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/midnight-s-children-pdf-d286300634 )

·         Technoculture and hyperreality: Post-modernism has been called the "cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Post-modernity has been claimed to be defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In Post-modernity, people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of Post-modernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction popularized in novels and comics by writers such as Alan Moore, who demonstrates Post-modern pastiche, temporal distortion, and a focus on technoculture with its mix of futuristic technology and Victorian culture. A good example of this genre is Moore’s V for Vendeta, a novel set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://freepdfdb.org/pdf/v-for-vendetta )

·         Paranoia: This is another recurring Post-modern theme. This feature is most famously demonstrated and effectively dealt with in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world. For the Post-modernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/catch-22-pdf-d12602881 )

·         Maximalism: Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The Post-modern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents. Many modernist critics 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.

·        Minimalism: Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story.

Top 10 Works of Post-modern Literature

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

A triple-whammy from the master abstract minimalist, whose technique of viewing objectively the subjective world was taken to its zenith in this trilogy of meta-fictional neurosis, in which characters lives and situations seem to splice together until it becomes apparent they were the fictions of one person all along.

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

A labyrinth of ergonomic structure, Danielewski’s novel has become a recent cult classic and by simply opening its pages its conspicuous that there’s no other book like it: encoded typography, color-word associations and the meticulous inclusion of mythological and metaphysical references turn this roaring institution of a novel into a Rorschach test on a mini scale.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

Though Slaughterhouse Five may be his best-known work, this is the one that should be included in the pantheon of solipsistic narration. Often overlooked as self-indulgent and uneven, Breakfast is a personalized account of the phrase “perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” Pontiac salesman Dwayne Hoover becomes obsessed with the work of sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, eventually spiraling into acute eruptions of anxiety when he believes that he is the sole human combating a world of humanoids. Black satire at the peak of its powers.

Labyrinths, Jorges Luis Borges

The works of Borges are impossible to describe without a depth of analysis, since he has the power to include in five pages a universe of infinite captivation. Even today, many of the short stories in this collection are open to interpretation.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

The Gonzo journalist epic is included here for its superior attempts to splice fact and fiction through surrealist imagery to construct the greatest drug and political satire of its epoch.

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

No other book of its kind is as gruesome, funny, polemical or disturbing as the story of Wall Street yuppie Patrick Bateman as he calmly iterates the details of his homicidal life, all in an apathetic tone that combines magical realism with minimalism in a way no other book can. Its swift change from comedy to horror happens in such breakneck speed that its stream of consciousness takes on a new level of apprehension.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

The most paradoxical war novel ever written, Heller’s novel is widely recognized as one of the greatest novels ever written, its structure centering on irony and repetition that would grow irritating in lesser hands. Cemented Heller’s mastery in the literary world.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

To faithfully describe this novel is to end in failure: a pastiche of paranoia, pop culture, sex and politics that turns narration on its head with subtle metaphorical discipline, as the lives of several people center around the parabolic venture of the rocket “0000.” Comparisons of the novel and its symbols to Ulysses and Moby-Dick do not do justice to its singularity.

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

So much has already been written about this book’s impact that to go further would seem superfluous. Arguably the novel that put Post-modernism on its contemporary path, filtering paranoia, drugs and influences from erotica to detective fiction to science fiction comprises one of the most influential and unforgettable works in modern literature.

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

This is the most intriguing, in-depth, comedic, sorrowful, apprehensive and overall sagaciously maximalist read in the Post-modern canon. The parallelism between the Enfield Tennis Academy and the Ennet Drug and Alcohol Recovery House using alternating esoteric and colloquial words (and his trademark endnotes) creates the most epic and exhausting novel of modern times.