POSTMODERNISM

DEFINITION

 Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked, both

stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary
conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often
unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia,
dark humor and authorial self-reference. Postmodern authors tend to
reject outright meanings in their novels, stories and poems, and,
instead, highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or
a complete lack of meaning, within a single literary work.
 M O D E R N I S M V S.
POSTMODERNISM
 M O D E R N I S M V S.
POSTMODERNISM
 M O D E R N I S M V S.
POSTMODERNISM
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
PA S T I C H E

 Pastiche: The taking of various ideas from previous writings and

literary styles and pasting them together to make new styles.
 EXAMPLE#1
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” is
a tragicomedy written by Tom Stoppard. It is one of the best
examples of pastiche. It develops upon two minor
characters: “Rosencrantz” and “Guildenstern.” These
characters appear for a brief moment in Shakespeare’s
“Hamlet”. The title is taken from Hamlet’s Act 5, Scene 3
when an ambassador from England announces,
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” The two
characters, standing behind the curtains, express their
confusion on the vents of the main play “Hamlet” enacted
of the stage
 EXAMPLE#2
David Lodge’s comic novel “The British Museum Is Falling
Down” contains imitations of ten different novelists. He
gives reference to that particular writer in the text before he
starts imitating their style. For example in chapter 3, “Adam
Appleby”, hero of the novel, was riding his scooter and gets
stuck in the traffic on his way to the British Museum Library.
He tells us about “Mrs. Dalloway’s booming out the half
hour” ( a reference to Virginia Woolf ’s novel “Mrs.
Dalloway”). Then, we get to read a passage that comically
imitates Woolf ’s style:
 EXAMPLE#2
“It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of
metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds
prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his
nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of
the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having
no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to
the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and
fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the
limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or
Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman
saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring ‘Philip’,
‘Tony’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Prince Andrew’”
 EXAMPLE#3
Dave McClure’s poem “The Traveler” is a comical imitation
written after Edgar Alan Poe’s poem “The Raven”. Look at
McClure’s opening stanza:
Long ago upon a hilltop (let me finish then I will stop)
I espied a curious traveler where no traveler was before.
As I raised an arm in greeting all at once he took to beating
at the air like one entreating passing boats to come ashore
like a castaway repeating empty movements from the shore
or an over-eager whore.
 EXAMPLE#3
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door – Only
this, and nothing more.”
The only remarkable difference between the two poems that
we can recognize is the serious tone of the original poem
contrasts the humorous tone of the imitation.
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
I N T E RT E X T UA L I T Y

 Intertextuality is a sophisticated literary device making use of a

textual reference within some body of text, which reflects again the
text used as a reference. The acknowledgment of previous literary
works within another literary work.
 EXAMPLE#1
In his novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys gathers some
events that occurred in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The
purpose is to tell readers an alternative tale. Rhys presents
the wife of Mr. Rochester, who played the role of a
secondary character in Jane Eyre. Also, the setting of this
novel is Jamaica, not England, and the author develops the
back-story for his major character.
 EXAMPLE#2
Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest is an adaptation
of The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The author
parodies Shakespeare’s play from a post-colonial point
of view. Cesaire also changes the occupations and
races of his characters. For example, he transforms the
occupation of Prospero, who was a magician, into a
slave-owner, and also changes Ariel into a Mulatto,
though he was a spirit. Cesaire, like Rhys, makes use of
a famous work of literature, and put a spin on it in
order to express the themes of power, slavery, and
colonialism.
 EXAMPLE#3
William Golding, in his novel Lord of the Flies, takes the
story implicitly from Treasure Island, written by Robert
Louis Stevenson. However, Golding has utilized the
concept of adventures, which young boys love to do
on the isolated island they were stranded on. He,
however, changes the narrative into a cautionary tale,
rejecting the glorified stories of Stevenson concerning
exploration and swash buckling. Instead, Golding
grounds this novel in bitter realism by demonstrating
negative implications of savagery and fighting that
could take control of human hearts, because characters
have lost the idea of civilization.
 EXAMPLE#4
In the following example, Hemingway uses
intertextuality for the title of his novel. He takes the
title of a poem, Meditation XVII, written by John
Donne. The excerpt of this poem reads:
“No man is an island … and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Hemingway not only uses this excerpt for the title of
his novel, he also makes use of the idea in the novel, as
he clarifies and elaborates the abstract philosophy of
Donne by using the concept of the Spanish Civil War.
By the end, the novel expands other themes, such as
loyalty, love, and camaraderie.
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
M E TA F I C T I O N

 The act of writing about writing or making readers aware of the

fictional nature of the very fiction they're reading.
 EXAMPLE#1
In The Monster at the End of this Book, by Jon Stone
,the character of Grover reads the title of the book
himself and becomes terrified to meet the monster
that will be at the end of the book. As you turn the
pages, Grover becomes even more scared, pleading for
the reader to stop turning the pages and even trying to
build a barrier that keeps the pages nailed together.
Once the reader gets to the end of the book, Grover
figures out that the monster at the end of the book
was him!
In The Monster at the End of this Book, Grover is aware
of some of the elements of metafiction, which drives
the plot.
 EXAMPLE#2
The series Thursday Next, written by Jasper Fforde, is
about a woman who can travel into the fictional world.
In that world, stories are constructed physically like
one might construct a building, so there is quite a bit
of opportunity to make metafictional jokes. For
example, the books are typed in Times New Roman
font, but some characters speak in a different font,
Courier Bold, and to the rest of the characters, their
different font is like a foreign language; no one can
understand it.
.
 EXAMPLE#2
In The Well of Lost Plots, the third book in
theThursday Next series, a virus that causes words to
be misspelled gets loose and causes problems. In the
book, leather-bound books become feathery birds; a
patterned carpet becomes a pit full of tar; a glass
apparatus becomes grass asparagus; a horse is turned
into a house due to a misspelling error; and finally, a
carrot is turning into a parrot due to a bad misspelling.
.
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
T E M P O R A L D I S TO RT I O N

 The use of non-linear timelines and narrative techniques in a story.

 EXAMPLE#1
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall
make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there
will be no words in which to express it. Every concept
that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly
one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its
subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”
“[…] Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range
of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of
course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing
thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline,
reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need
even for that.”
.
 EXAMPLE#1
“[…] In fact there will be no thought, as we
understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking –
not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
In the above excerpt taken from 1984, George Orwell
has used distortion of several facts as a manipulative
device. He expresses that this is an important part of
human thought, as it either limits or structures the
ideas of individuals. Orwell has rather focused on
political language to distort the story’s concepts and
events by naming them differently than their names in
our reality..
 EXAMPLE#2
Shrek is contradictory to traditional fairy tales, because
the author did not use a pretty princess and pompous
prince as his leading characters. Rather, he uses an
Ogre as a hero, and a less-than-attractive woman as the
damsel in distress. This is a completely reverse
situation, with the author using distorted characters,
creating humor as well as an odd storyline.
Distortion satire can be seen in a number of reversal
of situations
 EXAMPLE#2
1. Fiona beats robin-hood, who tries to save her from the
ogre. This shows distorts the situation, showing Fiona to
be a damsel in distress, who ends up rescuing herself.
2. The ogre takes the place of a prince, as he goes on a quest
to save the princess with a secret.
3. Donkey lives with the ogre, taking him as a friend – which
is absurd, because ogres are gruesome.
4. Donkey falls in love with a dragon that is likely to eat him.
This is a reversal that is unbelievable for the readers – that
donkey and dragon could live together peacefully.
5. Finally, the distortion satire is complete when Fiona
herself turns into an ogre at sundown.
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
MAXIMALISM/MINIMALISM?

 In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an

esthetic of excess and redundancy. The philosophy can be
summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto
"less is more".
 EXAMPLE#1
I am sitting over coffee and cigarette's at my friend Rita's and
I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her. -from Carver's Fat (short story)

If it's odd that Mario Incandenza's first halfway-coherent film cartridge --

a 48-minute job shot three summers back in the carfeully decorated
janitor-closet of Subdorm B with his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-
treadle -- if it's odd that Mario's first finished entertainment consists of a
film of a puppet show -- like a kids' puppet show -- then it probably
seem ever odder that the film's proven to be way more popular with the
E.T.A.'s adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically
underinformed children it had first been made for.
-from Wallace's Infinite Jest (novel)
 EXAMPLE#1
Most of the differences will probably leap out at you immediately, but let's
compare and contrast a few points:
Sentence length.
Paragraph length. In this section, Carver's paragraphs are only a few words long.
The Wallace paragraph (that's just the first sentence of it) ends up taking most of
a page.
Descriptive language. Carver tells us "coffee and cigarettes." If Wallace wrote
his own version of the first story, he would likely tell us which brand and flavor,
and possibly the historical origins of the coffee and cigarettes in question.
Vocabulary. "I am telling her about it" vs. "...woefully historically underinformed
children..." And it's not just the length of the words, it's the combinations: if
Carver wrote his own version of the second story, there is no way he would put
two adverbs and an adjective in front of the word "children."
Punctuation. You'll tend to see a lot more semi-colons; em dashes -- ellipses ...
and (parentheticals) in maximalist prose.
EXAMPLE#2
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
FA C T I O N

 The mixing of actual historical events with fictional events without

clearly defining what is factual and what is fictional..
 EXAMPLE#1
Capote's In Cold Blood

Truman Capote was one of the first authors who was recognized for
nonfiction novel writing. Capote read the story of the Clutter murders
in a newspaper and was immediately intrigued. He used the events
surrounding the crime as a basis for In Cold Blood. He spent years
tracking the story and spent considerable time with the people
involved. He watched hours of film footage, listened to recordings,
and read transcripts and notes. He once claimed that everything
within the book would be true, word for word. Although this is
impossible, the majority of information is accurate and extremely
detailed. Capote was able to interview the murderers, Richard
Hickock and Perry Smith.
 EXAMPLE#1
Capote's In Cold Blood

This meant that he was able to establish their characters, making the
details within the book extremely accurate. The way in which the
book is written objectively means that Capote has little influence
over the granular facts of the case. The creative choices he can
make are those of tone and tenor. He can modulate the readers'
sympathy toward the subjects, the killers.
Capote argued that the non-fiction novel should be devoid of first-
person narration and, ideally, free of any mention of the novelist.
 T E C H N I QU E S : E X A M P L E
MAGICAL REALISM

 The introduction of impossible or unrealistic events into a

narrative that is otherwise realistic. The genre of magical realism is
defined as a literary genre in which fantastical things are treated not
just as possible, but also as realistic
 EXAMPLE#1

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was an incredibly popular author from Colombia.

He wrote the famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is an example
of magical realism. In the novel, which takes place over many generations,
fantastical things are always happening. For example, a woman experiences her
own personal Rapture, being sucked up to Heaven; another woman is visited
by Death and told that she will die when she finishes the shawl she is working
on; and finally, a baby is devoured by ants. These events, although miraculous,
are treated as matter-of-fact, like they could (and do) happen every day