3- Postmodernism

Question 1

The word “postmodernism” was first used
But today

Answer 1

The word “postmodernism” was first used in architecture but today applies to all forms of art. It first appeared as a criticism of the international style in architecture, a style that was found too cold, austere, and functional.

Question 2

In the Visual art, postmodernism

Answer 2

In the Visual art, the movement was based on relativism & the refusal of a hierarchy in culture and values. It was a reaction against art critics Clement and Grineberg’s theory

Question 3

Clement and Grineberg’s theory

Answer 3

that modern art abstract expressionism in particular was part of an aesthetic tradition in art and that pop art and commercial culture should be resisted.

Question 4

Post Modern art therefore relies heavily on

Answer 4

Post Modern art therefore relies heavily on subversion, irony, parody and a challenge of authority i.e a constant attempt to push the boundaries of what can be called art

The boundaries between painting & sculpture or even btw painting and photography have also often been blurred. And the previously limited view of art as painting & sculpture has broaden to include video, the Internet, installation and sound, many artists now using different media at one time or another.

Question 5

Post modernism was also accompanied by a post structuralist reflexion

Answer 5

Post modernism was also accompanied by a post structuralist reflexion upon the way signs pervade our lives, rubbing out all distinctions between the real and is representation, between truth and fiction, turning the real into the hyperreal

Finally, marketing and art or art and its packaging have often become indivisible

Question 6

What was modernism ?

Date, geographical places

Answer 6

name given to the movement which dominated the art and culture of the first half of the 20th century. It was the heart-wake in the arts which broad down much of the structure of the pre-conscious century practice in music, literature & architecture.

Vienna was one of the major place concerned at that time, between 1890 and 1910 but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually Britain in Art Movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism. Without an understanding of modernism, it is impossible to understand 20th century culture

In all the arts touched by Modernism, what had been the most fundamental element of practice were challenged and rejected.

Question 7

In all the arts touched by Modernism, what had been the most fundamental element of practice were challenged and rejected.

Answer 7

In music melody & harmony were put aside
Perspective and direct pictorial representation were abandoned in painting in favour of degrees of abstraction ;

In Architecture traditional forms and materials like domes, columns, wood, stones & bricks were rejected in favour of plain geometrical forms often executed in new materials like plate, glass & concrete.

In Literature, there was a rejection of traditional realism for example continuous narrative relate by omniscient narrator, chronological plot, closed endings etc, in favour of experimental forms of various times

Question 8

The period of High Modernism was date ?

Answer 8

The period of High Modernism was from 1910 to 1930

Question 9

Modernism - a few names

Answer 9

“High Priests” of the Movement were these peoples

T.s Eliot
James Joyce
Ezra Pound
Whyndham Lewis
Virginia Woolf
Wallace Stevens
Gertrude stein
Proust
Mallarmé
Gide
Kafka
Rainer Maria Rilke

Question 10

important characteristics of the literary modernism

Answer 10

A new emphasis on impressionism & subjectivity meaning on HOW we see rather than WHAT we see. This is evident in the use of the stream of consciousness technique.

Movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view & clear cut moral position

Blurring of the distinctions between genres so that novels tend to become more lyrical & poetic and poems —-

New linking for fragmented forms discontinuous narrative, random-seeming collages of disparate materials

Tendency towards reflexivity so that poems plays and novels raise issue concerning their own nature status and role

⇒ The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation & innovation.

=> After its high point, modernism seemed to retreat considerably in the third years, partly no doubt because of the tension generated in a decade of political and economical crisis but a resurgence took place in the 1960s. However, modernism never regained the preeminence it had enjoyed in the earlier period.

Question 11

J.A Cuddons def of postmodernism

Answer 11

J.A Cuddons : The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:
“an eclectic approach, [by a liking for] aleatory writing, [and for] parody and pastiche.

⇒ But this def doesn’t really explain the difference between modernism & postmodernism since the word “eclectic” suggests the use of fragmented forms which are characteristic of modernism. For instance, Eliott the Wasteland = collage of juxtaposed, incomplete stories or fragments of stories

Question 12

dadaist

Answer 12

In the same way, a literary writing, meaning a writing which incorporates an element of randomness or chance was important to the Dadaist of 1917 who for instance made poems from sentences plucked randomly from newspapers.

Question 13

paody & pastiche

Answer 13

Finally, the years of parody & pastiche is clearly related to the abandonment of the divine pretension of authorship implicit in the omniscient narratorial stance & this was already a vital dimension of Modernism.

Question 14

Jeremy Hawthorn

Answer 14

Jeremy Hawthorn Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory: in his glossary summarises the distinction btw Modernism & postmodernism : he explains that both give great prominence to fragmentation as a feature of 20th century Art & Culture. But they do so in very different moods.

The modernist features it in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an early age when faith was full and authority intact

For the postmodernist fragmentation is an accelerating phenomenon symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of beliefs

⇒ The modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernists celebrates it.

Question 15

high& popular art

Answer 15

Postmodernism rejects the distinction between high and popular art which was important to modernism and it believed in excess, gaudiness and in “bad taste” mixtures of quality.

Question 16

Eagleton, Terry : the typical post modern work quote

Answer 16

“The typical postmodern work of art is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentered, fluid, discontinuous, pastiche-like”

Literary Theory: An Introduction, London, Routledge, 1996:

Question 17

Eagleton, Terry : Literary Theory: An Introduction, London, Routledge, 1996:
postmodernity means..

Answer 17

“Postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense that those grand narratives of truth, reason, science, progress, and universal emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the Enlightenment onwards […].

Eagleton, Terry : Literary Theory: An Introduction, London, Routledge, 1996:

Question 18

Brian McHale Postmodernist Fiction, London and New York: Routledge, 1987

The dominant of postmodernist fiction
The dominant of modernist fiction

Answer 18

“The dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like: Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?”

“The dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as: “How can I interpret the world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known? Who know it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty? How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability? How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower? What are the limits of the knowable? And so on.

Question 19

By who postmodernists were influenced ?

Answer 19

Postmodernists were influenced by post-Structuralism and Derrida’s concept of Deconstruction, which shows that the obvious meaning of a text often hides an opposite, subconsciously suppressed meaning.

Question 20

Postmodern and place of the author ?

Answer 20

⇒ Authors no longer control the meaning of their works, history is constantly open to revision.
⇒ It meant the denial of any “master narrative” and of the author’s authority, as Barthes stated in “La mort de l’auteur”.

Question 21

What consequences of the questioning of the authority of the author ?

Answer 21

Since the authority of the author is now questioned, postmodern writers now tend to break the illusion of reality through metafiction and intertextuality and to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hence the use of “magic realism.”

Postmodernists also tend to collapse the distinctions between high and popular culture, as well as between languages and cultures, something clearly apparent in post-colonialist literature.

Question 22

Some recurring characteristics of postmodern fiction:

Answer 22

• The attempt to represent the world disappears in favor of self-reference.
• Conventions are subverted, or, rather, used only to be undermined through irony and parody:
• Traditional fixed boundaries disappear : between genres, between high art and popular culture forms, Between the text and other texts
• History is demystified

*The tendency is to tease readers, play with them, defamiliarize rather than create complicity

• Though postmodernist writers satirise the dehumanisation of the world and the dominance of technology and commercialism, they do not respond to this view with the terror and despair of their modernist predecessors.

Question 23

• The attempt to represent the world disappears in favor of self-reference. This leads to metafiction and reflexivity

Answer 23

This leads to metafiction and reflexivity: the text is concerned with itself as a text and highlights its own status and the problems of writing. The readers are continually made aware that they are reading a novel, the artificial conventions of which are constantly underlined. The author no longer tries to be unobtrusive.

Question 24

Conventions are subverted, or, rather, used only to be undermined through irony and parody:

Answer 24

character and plot are rejected, even meaning is shown to be delusive. Instead, writing is marked by discontinuity and fragmentation in time and space.

Question 25

Traditional fixed boundaries disappear
between genres

Answer 25

between genres (elements from science fiction, pulp fiction or detective fiction become part of mainstream literature and it is often difficult to classify a work as novel, essay, autobiography or history)

Question 26

Traditional fixed boundaries disappear
Between high art and popular culture forms (

Answer 26

between high art and popular culture forms (which means a challenge to traditional cultural hierarchies);

Question 27

Traditional fixed boundaries disappear
Between the text and other texts

Answer 27

Between the text and other texts (this leads to intertextuality, which often takes the form of parody, pastiche or even collage).

Question 28

History is demystified

Answer 28

History is demystified, with fictional characters meeting real ones and the myths of history being questioned.

Question 29

The tendency is to tease readers,

Answer 29

The tendency is to tease readers, play with them, defamiliarize rather than create complicity. The readers can no longer identify with the hero (who is more often than not an anti-hero) and constantly need to be on the alert in order to find their way in the novel, which they often have to partly create themselves.

Question 30

Though postmodernist writers satirise the dehumanisation of the world and the dominance of technology and commercialism, they do not respond to this view with the terror and despair of their modernist predecessors
name of their perspective ? + what it allows

Answer 30

Their non-representational perspective allows them to enjoy the playfulness and artificiality of writing.

Question 31

Main postmodernist writers in the US:

Answer 31

Main postmodernist writers in the US: John Barth, Richard Brautigan, William Gass, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Paul Auster, etc.

Question 32

Postmodernism in White Noise, a short introduction

Answer 32

→ the hybridity of the text and the subversion of conventions. White Noise is a mixture of the campus novel, the existential drama, the disaster novel, and the domestic melodrama, as well as the ecological novel.

→ the characters’ search for identity. Let’s take the example of Jack, who describes himself as a college lecturer who “invented Hitler Studies in North America in March 1968”

→ Construction of the self, and example of the conflicted individual, “struggling against the chaotic world of commodified forces to construct a stable and coherent sense of who they are”2: perfect example of Orest Mercator, Heinrich’s friend who wats to break the world record for sitting in a cage with poisonous snakes. He is described as “creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration” (268). (+ name Mercator)

→ Postmodern spaces: supermarket and mall = “iconic postmodern spaces. They exemplify the overwhelming plenitude of the commodity environment, they organize consumption, they are prime examples of the triumph of the image over material reality.”3 They are a kind of refuge, of safe place, outside of time: “Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless.” (38). + The Mid-Village Mall

→ The cloud is also a postmodern spectacle. It contains “a whole new generation of toxic waste” (138). Waste is identified as an inevitable by-product of the culture of consumption which then forms the poisonous residue of contemporary living4.

→ This accumulation of terms to refer to the airborn toxic event underlines the fact that it is impossible to name it, that the event is blurred and cannot, in a way, be stabilized, and at the same time it hints at the fact that the cloud is something that moves, which makes it impossible to define it: as soon as it is named, it has already moved, has been altered.

→ The “postmodern sunset”: Jack sees “another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery” (227). “The sunset is postmodern because its spectacular, lurid colors are a result not of natural, organic splendor, but of the “airborne toxic event” that is affecting the weather and possibly ruining Jack’s health. But it is also self-consciously “postmodern” because it is merely a shorthand copy of endless descriptions of other sunsets that have become a literary cliché, leaving Jack to recognize the futility of trying to find an original expression for it”5: “Why try to describe it? It’s enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event.” (227).