Modernism and Postmodernism

While postmodernism seems very much like modernism in many ways, it differs from
modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to
present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, but presents that
fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss.
Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity,
coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what
other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of
fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is
meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with
nonsense.
1. Whereas Modernism places faith in the ideas, values, beliefs, culture, and norms
of the West, Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small
part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and
norms.
2. Whereas Modernism attempts to reveal profound truths of experience and life,
Postmodernism is suspicious of being "profound" because such ideas are based on
one particular Western value systems.
3. Whereas Modernism attempts to find depth and interior meaning beneath the
surface of objects and events, Postmodernism prefers to dwell on the exterior
image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings
associated with the interior of objects and events.
4. Whereas Modernism focused on central themes and a united vision in a particular
piece of literature, Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally
contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented,
discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific reality possible. Therefore, it
focuses on a vision of a contradictory, fragmented, ambiguous, indeterminate,
unfinished, "jagged" world.
5. Whereas Modern authors guide and control the readers response to their work,
the Postmodern writer creates an "open" work in which the reader must supply his
own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own (unguided)
interpretation.

A list of postmodern characteristics.

Irony, playfulness, black humor

Postmodern authors were certainly not the first to use irony and humor in their writing,
but for many postmodern authors, these became the hallmarks of their style. Postmodern
authors will often treat very serious subjectsWorld War II, the Cold War, conspiracy
theoriesfrom a position of distance and disconnect, and will choose to depict their
histories ironically and humorously.
Pastiche
Many postmodern authors combined, or pasted elements of previous genres and styles
of literature to create a new narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their
contemporaries. Thomas Pynchon, one of the most important postmodern authors, uses
elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction, songs, pop culture
references, and well-known, obscure, and fictional history.
Intertextuality
An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary
works. The intertextuality of certain works of postmodern fiction, the dependence on
literature that has been created earlier, attempts to comment on the situation in which
both literature and society found themselves in the second half of the 20th century:
living, working, and creating on the backs of those that had come before.
Metafiction
Many postmodern authors feature metafiction in their writing, which, essentially, is
writing about writing, an attempt to make the reader aware of its ficitionality, and,
sometimes, the presence of the author. Authors sometimes use this technique to allow for
flagrant shifts in narrative, impossible jumps in time, or to maintain emotional distance as
a narrator.
Historiographic metafiction
This term was created by Linda Hutcheon to refer to novels that fictionalize actual
historical events and characters: Thomas Pynchons Mason and Dixon, for example,
features a scene in which George Washington smokes pot.
Temporal distortion
Temporal distortion is a literary technique that uses a nonlinear timeline; the author may
jump forwards or backwards in time, or there may be cultural and historical references
that do not fit: Abraham Lincoln uses a telephone in Ishmael Reeds Flight to Canada.
This technique is frequently used in literature, but it has become even more common in
films.
Technoculture and hyperreality
In his essay of the same name, Frederic Jameson called postmodernism the cultural logic
of late capitalism. According to his logic, society has moved beyond capitalism into the

information age, in which we are constantly bombarded with advertisements, videos, and
product placement. Many postmodern authors reflect this in their work by inventing
products that mirror actual advertisements, or by placing their characters in situations in
which they cannot escape technology.
Paranoia
Many postmodern authors write under the assumption that modern society cannot be
explained or understood. From that point of view, any apparent connections or controlling
influences on the chaos of society would be very frightening, and this lends a sense of
paranoia to many postmodern works.
Maximalism
Villified by its critics for being in turns disorganized, sprawling, overly long, and
emotionally disconnected, maximalism exists in the tradition of long works like The
Odyssey. Authors that use this technique will sometimes defend their work as being as
long as it needs to be, depending on the subject material that is covered.
Minimalism
Minimalism is a style of writing in which the author deliberately presents characters that
are unexceptional and events that are taken from everyday life. It is not an exclusively
postmodern technique, as many writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway, wrote in a
similar style, but some critics claim that Samuel Beckett, one of the most important
postmodern authors, perfected minimalism.
Faction
Faction is very similar to historiographic metafiction, in that its subject material is based
on actual events, but writers of faction tend to blur the line between fact and fiction to the
degree that it is almost impossible to know the difference between the two, as opposed to
metafiction, which often draws attention to the fact that it is not true.
Magical realism
Arguably the most important postmodern technique, magical realism is the introduction
of fantastic or impossible elements into a narrative that is otherwise normal. Magical
realist novels may include dreams taking place during normal life, the return of
previously deceased characters, extremely complicated plots, wild shifts in time, and
myths and fairy tales becoming part of the narrative. Many critics argue that magical
realism has its roots in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garca Mrquez, two
South American writers, and some have classified it as a Latin American style.
Participation
Many postmodern authors, as a response to modernism, which frequently set its authors
apart from their readers, attempt to involve the reader as much as possible over the course
of a novel. This can take the form of asking the reader questions, including unwritten

narratives that must be constructed by the reader, or allowing the reader to make
decisions regarding the course of the narrative.

Some Attributes of Postmodernist Literature

"Postmodernism" is a broad range of

Responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises

and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between "high" culture and
commonly lived life.
Responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the
geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater
diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism.
Acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which,
under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are are commodified and
fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been
replaced by simulation and spectacle.
Resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather
than as a weave.
Reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence
as rhetorical constructs.

There are "postmodernisms" even more than there were "modernisms," and not all
postmodernism partakes of all of the following attributes:

A reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which
are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory
cohesion of experience; the result may be:
o a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations
none of which can claim any authority,
o parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including
genre and literary form,
o the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
o the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized
elements of society.
(The "problem" with grand narratives is that they bring all of experience
under one explanatory and one implicitly or explicitly regulative order,
and hence are potentially (some would say, inevitably) totalitarian and
repressive; the problem of trying to live without them is that without their
explanatory frame there is no way in which acts can be validated (once
one tries, one uncovers a hidden grand narrative) other than through the
validation of pleasure or pain, some would say beauty or ugliness. It

comes down to what one believes: is living without grand narratives an act
of courage and freedom in the face of inevitable doubt and instability, or
merely an opening of oneself to the worst forces of the libido and an
abandonment of necessary principles?)

A sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing to

guarantee or to underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life just is.
We no longer look for a pattern. We live between the 1's and the 0's, in the
interstices of meaning; we live on the bleak terrain of an endless uncreated
happenstance universe. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not.
Postmodernism goes different directions here.
The writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first instance
aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature
of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the
other.
A reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form -- of the dominance in
modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a
'special world' for art, cut off from the variety and everydayness of life (a negative
judgment on this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply aestheticizes everything,
see the next point)
An attempt to integrate art and life -- the inclusion of popular forms, popular
culture, everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival', of joyous, antiauthoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes sense in this
context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern work
The notion of carnival, above, is taken to the limit in the idea of transgression, the
idea that to live and think beyond the structures of capitalist ideology and of
totalizing concepts one must deliberately violate what appear to be standards of
sense and decency but are (if the truth were known) methods of social and
imaginative control. A more benign conception than transgression is the concept
of the paralogical: a revelation of the non-rational immediacy of life (considered
thus to be implicitly revolutionary, liberating); as with ideas such as carnival and
transgression, the paralogical gives access to the energy of the world, and allows
us to experience outside of the strictures of the grand narratives which form our
usual sense of our reality.
The use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical shifts, in order to undercut any
legitimization of reality, subject, ontological ground
A refusal of seriousness or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness -achieved through such things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the
turning upside-down of everything, and through the use of parody, play, black
humour and wit; this refusal and these methods of undercutting seriousness are
associated as well with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative
coherence are challenged, undone. The 'problem' with seriousness is that is has no
room for the disruptions necessary to expose the oppressions and repressions of
master narratives, in fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to reinforce them
and hence the ideologies they support; to attack seriousness does not mean, in this
context, to abandon conviction or good intentions.

A crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction, between

literary genres, between high and low culture
A sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric -- of language and cultural
constructs and images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity
A move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified 'subject' and the
associated grounding of the authority of experience in the sovereign subject and
its processes of perception and reflection (see next point)
A fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or
flatness -- the self, or subject, is no longer a "psychological" reality but henceforth
a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the kinds of language
used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in different
situations
The dramatization to a world in which there are no depths, in which there is
nothing 'under' appearances
A greater emphasis on the body, on the human as incarnate, as physical beings in
a physical world. This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the
ideology of the Enlightenment. This emphasis on the physicality of our being
leads in several directions, including
o an emphasis on chance and contingency as fundamental conditions of our
being and
o a positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism as guide to truth, hence
ultimately as the ground for ethics.
A rethinking of modernism's break with history. There are (at least) two directions
in which this rethinking may go:
o a greater awareness of history as a narrative, that is, a human construct;
history is accessible to us, but only as text -- its documents are texts, its
institutions are social texts. This does not mean that history did not
happen; it means that what we know as history is known to us only
through what is configured for our understandings by language, by
narratives with their own shaping forces, by figures of speech.
o an insistence of the incarnate and the contingent, human life as located,
specific, grounded in the body and in circumstance.