The Post-Modern Fracturing of Narrative Unity; Discontinuity and Irony

WHAT IS POST-MODERNISM?

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an
area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a
concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture,
music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it
temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.

Narrative Unity (Postmodernism)

A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit) in critical
theory and particularly in postmodernism is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning,
experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion
of a (as yet unrealized) master idea.
"Meta" is Greek for "beyond"; "narrative" is a story that is characterized by its telling (it
is communicated somehow).
According to John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, a metanarrative "is a global or
totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience"– a
story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within conceptual models
that assemble the "little stories" into a whole. Postmodern narratives will often deliberately
disturb the formulaic expectations such cultural codes provide pointing thereby to a possible
revision of the social code.
An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. They can be found
in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. The term was coined in 1961
by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While unreliable narrators are almost by
definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of
unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and
television, and sometimes also in literature.
 Discontinuity (Postmodernism)

Discontinuity and continuity according to Michel Foucault reflect the flow of history and
the fact that some "things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterised, classified,
and known in the same way" from one era to the next. (1994).
In developing the theory of archaeology of knowledge, Foucault was trying to analyse the
fundamental codes which a culture uses to construct the episteme or configuration of knowledge
that determines the empirical orders and social practices of each particular historical era. He
adopted discontinuity as a positive working tool. Some of the discourse would be regular and
continuous over time as knowledge steadily accumulates and society gradually establishes what
will constitute truth or reason for the time being. But, in a transition from one era to the next,
there will be overlaps, breaks and discontinuities as society reconfigures the discourse to match
the new environment.

Irony (Postmodernism)
Post-irony (from Latin post (after) and Ancient Greek eirōneía, meaning dissimulation
(or feigned ignorance) is a term used to denote a state in which earnest and ironic intents become
muddled. It may less commonly refer to its converse: a return from irony to earnestness, similar
to New Sincerity. Noted surreal humor comedian Tim Heidecker portrays a man living a post-
ironic lifestyle in The Comedy.
In literature, David Foster Wallace is often described as the founder of a "postironic"
literature. His essays "E Unibus Pluram" and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"
describe and hope for a literature that goes beyond postmodern irony. Other authors often
described as postironic are Dave Eggers,[4] Tao Lin, and Alex Shakar.
Irony is the central mode of consciousness of postmodernism and one of the main forms
of expression of postmodernist literature. It marks the postmodern attitude of disenchantment
toward the totalizing narratives that legitimate Western culture (history, philosophy, religion,
science, etc.) and is also one of the main strategies used by postmodernist fiction to retain the
ability to represent the world while raising awareness of art’s own status as cultural artifice and
potential instrument of power.