A term you'll meet in literary history, roughly 1950s onward.
Postmodernism in literature names a loose
constellation of attitudes, techniques, and assumptions that
emerged in the 1950s and intensified through the 1960s–80s —
partly as an extension of modernism's experiments, partly as
a reaction against modernism's residual seriousness and its
faith that art could still make meaning against chaos. Where
modernism was anguished about fragmentation, postmodernism
tends to be playful about it, or at least ironic.
What postmodernism argues
The theoretical underpinning — Lyotard, Baudrillard,
Derrida, Foucault — is that the "grand narratives" of Western
modernity (progress, reason, humanism, the sovereign subject)
have collapsed, or have been exposed as ideological constructions
rather than neutral truths. Language does not refer to a stable
reality outside it; there are only other texts. Meaning is
not discovered but produced — and always unstable, provisional,
contested.
In literary practice, this produces several characteristic
moves:
Metafiction — fiction that explicitly
calls attention to its own status as a fictional
construction. "You are reading a novel" intrudes into
the narrative. The artifice is foregrounded rather than
concealed.
Pastiche and parody. Postmodern fiction
freely borrows, recombines, and parodies prior styles
and genres. There is no "original" style to be achieved;
all writing is a collage of existing voices. Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49, DeLillo's White Noise,
and Eco's The Name of the Rose all work through
genre pastiche.
Unreliable narration and multiple versions.
Where modernism's multiple perspectives (Faulkner,
Woolf) still implied a coherent underlying reality
you could triangulate, postmodern fiction sometimes
insists there is no underlying reality to be found.
John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman
offers two incompatible endings; Borges's fictions
describe impossible, self-contradicting worlds.
Intertextuality. The text is explicitly
made of other texts. Pynchon, Borges, and Calvino
weave literary allusion, historical quotation, and
invented sources into fiction that refuses the boundary
between "real" and "made up."
The collapse of high/low culture.
Modernism was largely elitist — difficulty was a
badge of seriousness. Postmodernism deliberately blurs
the line between high culture and popular genre fiction,
advertising, comic books, and television. The mixing
is itself a statement about the arbitrariness of
cultural hierarchies.
Key figures
Jorge Luis Borges — the godfather; his labyrinths, libraries,
and impossible fictions anticipate almost everything.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979)
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
Samuel Beckett — the hinge between modernism and postmodernism
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979)
Postmodernism vs. modernism
The simplest way to hold the distinction: modernism believed
that the collapse of old certainties was a crisis — and art
should rise to meet it, seeking new form, new myth, new order.
Postmodernism tends to view the collapse as permanent and
irreversible — and either celebrates the freedom this creates
(everything is playful, everything is available) or examines
the political and psychological consequences of a world without
stable reference points.
Both movements are interested in form. But modernist formal
experiment usually aims at something — a harder, cleaner
representation of reality. Postmodern formal experiment often
aims at nothing in particular — or at the demonstration that
"aiming at something" is a fiction we have inherited and should
interrogate.
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