POSTMODERNISM

A Short Introduction
 Participation in classroom
discussion

Assigned readings

Requirements Taking 60% of the plot tests

succesfully

Exam
 Plot Tests
◦moodle.elte.hu
◦3 random questions from a question bank
◦Only once
◦Time limit: 90 seconds
◦Available: 1 day before class, from 7 pm
1. Artistic tendency

◦A technique / style
◦An “-ism” – the narrowest sense
◦Describing what happens in art (architecture)
◦Artistic movement

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 2. Philosophy
◦Deconstruction
◦ Jacques Derrida
◦Poststructuralism
◦Jean-François Lyotard
◦Michel Foucault
◦The distrust of metanarratives = Postmodernism
◦Intellectual movement
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3. Condition, Age, Episteme

◦= condition of thinking
◦Post modernity
◦Everything lives in the same cultural space
◦Being in constant interaction

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◦Britain = extremely conservative culture
◦Postmodernism has a hard time there
◦Conservative intellectual climate
◦Postmodernism is a swearword
◦Artists are very anti-intellectual

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Postmodernism as a Set of Artistic
Features
◦2 waves
◦Sharing many features
◦1960s-70s : experimental, closer to ‚pure art’
◦1980s: much more political
◦History dominates
◦Very much a British thing
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First Canon (1960s)

◦50s: mainly conservative → 60s: civil rights

movement, student rights, emergence of new
sub cultures
◦Pop art was born in Britain

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 Metafiction
◦Self-reflexivity
◦Art = important subject matter
◦Started in Modernism
◦Narcissistic narratives
◦Solipsism
◦Emphasizing a text’s constructedness
◦Reminding the reader to be aware that they are
reading or viewing a fictional work. 2020. 09. 28.
◦Being self-conscious about language, literary form, and
storytelling, and works of metafiction
◦Drawing attention directly or indirectly to their status as
artifacts
◦A form of parody
◦ A tool to undermine literary conventions
◦Exploring the relationship between literature and
reality, life, and art
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Precursors of Postmodernism

◦Vladimir Nabokov
◦Italo Calvino
◦Jorge Luis Borges
◦Samuel Beckett

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◦Essayistic bits might be included
◦The narrator of Tom Jones (Henry Fielding, 1749) thinks
about art
◦Theory becomes part of art
◦Fabulation
◦Anti-mimetic, anti-realistic art
◦Creating an alternative reality
◦Science fiction, fairy tale, etc.

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Pompidou Centre, Paris

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◦Like a building under reconstruction
◦The skeleton of the building is usually hidden
◦Displaying devices (e.g. pipe-system, etc)
◦Baring the artifice
◦Like Avantgarde art = to get the idea behind art

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◦Modernism: hight art → popular art
◦Postmodernism: differs
◦Closing the gap bw. The 2?
◦Kurt Vonnegut
◦Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)→ incorporating
popular culture but doesn’t become part of it
◦Postmodernism: remains elitist in literature → film
(Tarantino, Guy Richie)
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◦Avantgarde sensibility
◦Artistic radicalism (political radicalism – Brecht)
◦Futurism
◦Breaking up structure
◦Anarchistic features
◦Questioning bounderies (art – life)
◦Happening → Flashmob

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◦Being difficult & scandalous
◦“I want to shake you up”
◦The 60s
◦In France: writers became “The Avantgarde” →
internationally known
◦→ Britain: disappeared, not canonised
◦B.S. Johnson
◦Christine Brooke-Rose
◦Alan Burns 2020. 09. 28.
◦Worrying about Realism
◦B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates
◦B. S. Johnson’s House Mother
Normal
◦Playfulness → Portland Building
◦Displaying its own artificality –
Albert Angelo

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B. S. Johnson

◦Compulsive truth-telling (Protestantism)

◦Fragmentation
◦Aleatory fiction
◦Shuffle novel
◦Cut-up novel

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◦Self consciously followed schematic patterns
◦Following music from note to note
◦Game structures
◦Dictionary novels
◦Avantgarde = a radical brake → Postmodern =
quotes
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 Harold
Washington
Library, Chicago
• Material →Form
• Plastic →
Corinthian Capital

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Past = Usable Repository of Arts

◦Intertextuality (in architecture as well)

◦Neutral evocation = pastiche
◦Postmodern architecture = contextualist
architecture

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 Intertextuality

◦ “Every text is made up as a mosaic of citations, all texts

are the absorption and transformation of another text”
(Kristeva, Sémiotikè (1969) 145).
◦ Postmodern intertextuality → visual representations
◦ Hypotext-hypertext
◦ New product
◦ Unifying three loosely connected strands
◦ Montage, mise-en-scène and cutting
1. intertextuality: one text’s actual, but eidetic
appearance in another one. It is a relation that springs
from the coinstantaneous existence of two or more
texts. It can be further divided into three practises:
quotation, plagiarism, allusion.
2. paratextuality: prefaces, epilogues, subtitles,
chapter titles, additional notes
3. metatextuality: the commentary on the text that
links one to another but does not quote or invoke.
4. hypertextuality: a relation, which links a later B text (that
is the hypertext) to an earlier A text (that is the hypotext).
‘B’ can be also called a “second degree” text as it is
superimposed on A.
◦ This kind of textuality has two subcategories: derivation
and transformation.
◦ Derivation: B text is “talking” about another one
(Aristotle’s Poetics about Oedipus Rex),
◦ Transformation: B never mentions A, but without knowing
the source or the “original” work it cannot be understood
Intertextuality & Metafiction
◦ Inseparable
◦ Generic references (to genres)
◦ Using generic conventions, clichés
◦ Postmodernism: calling attention to its own
intertextual conditioning
◦ Theory enters literature
◦ Alasdair Gray: list of his own plagiarisms

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1. Positive Attitude

◦Modernism: breaking with the past

◦→ Postmodernism:
◦Mixing styles
◦Past = a set of available discourses
◦Norhing is excluded
◦Assimilation, quotation
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◦Playing around styles
◦Pastiche = collage, neutral
◦Imitation without criticism
◦Retro = referring to recent styles
◦No nostalgia
◦No anxiety to break with the past
◦An interest in past discourses

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◦→ Postmodernism cannot be described in stylistic
deatures
◦Essential non-identity
◦Pretending to recreate lost texts
◦Robert Nye, Peter Ackroyd

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2. A More Sinister Aspect (negative
attitude)
◦ Borges’ Utopia of a Tired Man
◦ Postmodernism = literature of exhaustion
◦ A limited range, a limited set of plots
◦ → claustrophobic language / literature
◦ To invent sg essentially new – impossible
◦ No novelty is possible
◦ “The Library of Babel” - finite
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Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

◦Texts: generated by structures

◦Structuralist view
◦Author: not in control
◦Calvino: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
◦Impossibility of reading
◦Limitedness of literature
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Martin Amis – The Rachel Paper
◦ Quest for an older woman (Rachel)
◦ He’s absolutely Narcissistic
◦ Being an obsessive writer
◦ Nothing is real unless he/she becomes a character
◦ Charles can recognise
◦ Experience is cripted
◦ No direct road to realism
◦ No outside of text
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Peter Ackroyd – English Music
◦Past inhabiting the present
◦1920s-1930s
◦Timothy & his father
◦Alternative chapters on the boy’s education +
dream chapters
◦Great Expectations, Tristam Shandy, English Music,
paintings, Blake’s visionary images mixed up
◦Like a palimpsest
◦Ventiloquism 2020. 09. 28.
◦Realism – Bildungsroman
◦Modernism – Künstlerroman
◦Postmodernism (50s-60s) – a book / chapter about
artist block
◦Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
◦Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince
◦Anthony Burgess’ Enderby
◦80s: protagonists = professional readers, critics,
philolohists, librarians
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 Leserroman
◦ A.S. Byatt’s Possession
◦ Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
◦ Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
◦ Geoffrey Braithwaiter – amature Flaubert expert
◦ Parrot = the missing link bw. reality – Flaubert’s fiction
◦ Parrot = real referent behind Flaubert’s text
◦ Ironically rewriting Madame Bovary as his own story
◦ Flaubert’s impossibilité
◦ Repetition – nothing original to say 2020. 09. 28.
The Second Canon

◦Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

◦Martin Amis’ Money
◦A.S Byatt’s Possession
◦Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion
◦Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things

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◦British, Canadian & third world
◦1st canon: France, German, etc – Avantgarde in
sensibility
◦Return to old-fashioned stories – plot, characters
◦“Return” – more playful
◦Much more political
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◦ 1st wave: interested in “big things” – e.g. language
◦ 2nd wave: language as a discourse (Foucault, Barthes)
◦ As it shapes the world & the narrative world
◦ How language creates the world?
◦ Antropological interest in language
◦ Who has the power to represent?
◦ Not so much aesthetic as referential
◦ Interested in story telling
◦Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones
◦ Graham Swift’s Waterland
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◦Theory is still there
◦Gender / postcolonial theory
◦Historical sensitivity
◦Why Britain?
◦From the 80s: innovative British literature
◦Cultural criticism – a British thing
◦New sensibility
◦Realising multiculturalism
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Postcolonial and Diaspora Literature

1. Historical novels about the Empire

2. Present-day consequences of the colonial
enterprise
◦The whole world was affected by colonisation
◦Part of our mindset

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◦Best post-colonial literature: not realist – post
modernist
◦Our world = a world of representations
◦Descriptions = re-descriptions
◦Playful postcolonial fiction → rewriting
◦John Coetzee’s Foe, Michel Tournier’s Friday
(Robinson Crusoe)
◦Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, Marina Warner’s
Indigo (The Tempest)
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◦Globalisation of English literature
◦Non-English writers’ English texts
◦Salman Rushie’s Midnight Children
◦English → Lingua Franca
◦Global writers
◦80s: awareness of the colonial condition

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◦Historical contingency
◦Re-thinking the Empire
◦Cultural Turn – came from Britain
◦Thatcherism: a shock → amazing cultural
production
◦Returning to history as a subject matter
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Postmodern Historical Fiction

◦Modernism: History is not interesting

◦Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: “History is a
nightmare”
◦1980s: history massively returned
◦John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman – a
major breakthrough
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1. Writing old-fashioned historical novels
2. Not a return to Walter Scott
◦History is what happened → assumptions
◦Walter Scott: taking history for granted
◦History as an object – natural sciences
◦Humanities = verstehen
◦Natural sciences = erklären
◦→Postmodern historical novel + historiography
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◦Histories are texts – only access → constructing the
past
◦Facts are made
◦Documents with own generic traditions
◦Greek historiography – legends & anecdotes
(Herodotus)
◦The rise of micro-history = everyday life → traditional
historiography

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◦Historiography obeys certain rules + generic traditions =
narratives
◦History uses tropes, rhetorics → telling stories
◦Epistemology = possibility of knowing history
◦Hermeneutics = the connection of the present & past

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Epistemology
◦Is history knowable?
◦History is reality – intruding our lives → being
beyond our control
◦→ history is traumatic
◦History = real – beyond representation
◦Being there before language

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◦ Paradox: no outside history
◦ History: being there in language → produced,
constructed by representations
1. we’re always within history
2. We cannot represent history
→Historiographic Metafiction
◦ Pet Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy,John Fowles’ The
French Lieutenant Woman, Graham Swift’s Waterland
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Hermeneutics
◦History as an object
◦Historian – scientist
◦Remaining unchanged by experiments
◦→ challenged
◦Past-Present – crucial relationship
◦How the past is seen
◦Writing about history = interpreting→ changing you
◦A hermeneutic exercise 2020. 09. 28.
◦Past = Otherness
◦Always a dialogue
◦History becomes legacy (Graham Swift’s
Waterland, Angela Carter’s Wise Children)
◦Tension between present & past (Peter Ackroyd’s
Hawskmore)
◦Contemporary historiography: full of ghosts

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Political Aspect

◦History: always about the present

◦Constructing an official version of history – power
◦Post-colonialism + feminism: crucial in rewriting
◦History = Western European concept
◦Cause + aim, teleology
◦→ other cultures: natural cycles
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◦ Contemporary fiction: questioning European ideas
of metaphysical, teleological history
◦ Apocryphal stories
◦ Julian Barnes’ The History of the World in 10 and ½
Chapters
◦ Not caliming to have the final truth
◦ Postmodernism undermining “history as a cotton-dry
version of the past”

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