Since the end of WW II and 1960s and 1970s America

Ideally: should have better grasp on the term

But the definition differs: writer and theorist
Debate between who should be included or excluded from the club

Commonly included in the canon, other than himself, William Gass and John Hawkes, namely,
Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Saul
Bellow, Norman Mailer, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond
Queneau, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon,
Claude Mauriac, John Fowles, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino.

Anticipations of the postmodern aesthetics have been traced in the modernist writers

John Hawkes: for post modernism

Others might regard- American traditionalists- Norman Nailer, John Cheever, John Updike,
William Styner: premodernists
Secular news reports: novels about everyday middle class life

Joyce carol oates: all over the aesthetical map

Tries to make a distinction between the definition of modernist and postmodernist writers so as
to categorise them better
Postmodernist: the term has connotations of being epigonic (an inferior imitator) -> not looking
at it as a new style in storytelling (a continuation)
As if the next batch of writers cannot follow the modernists-

Hugh Kenner: that the modernists were the last of the bunch and dismisses authors like
Nabokov, Pynchon and Barth
John Gardner: goes a step further and purports that there is no distinction between modernists
and postmodernists -> if you are removing the category: no space and therefore no legitimacy
for postmodernist writers
Gerald Graff, Ihab Hassan and Robert Alter: rightly understand that it is in some ways and
extension of modernism and in some ways a reaction against it
Since postmodernism defines both: assumes that modernism is widely understood by the world
and requires no definition or must be definined once again

Robert Alter: assumes the former (that modernism is widely understood by the world) and
proceed to discuss the waning current of modernism
Professor Graff: reviews styles and conventions of modernist writing and goes on to talk about
this new mode that does not adhere to the realistic of modernist conventions

No clear definition of modernism (in dictionary), much less postmodernism

summarizes Professor Graffs checklist of the characteristics of modernist fiction and Professor
Alters differing characterizations of postmodernist fiction.

Modernism:
Above definitions: close relationship between modernism and postmodernism
The ground motive of modernism was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois
social order and its world view. Its artistic strategy was the self-conscious overturning of
the conventions of bourgeois realism by such tactics and devices as the substitution of a
mythical for a realistic method and the manipulation of conscious parallels between
contemporaneity and antiquity
; also the radical disruption of the linear flow of narrative, the frustration of conventional
expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause-and-
effect development thereof, the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to
call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action, the adoption
of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at the nave pretensions of bourgeois
rationality, the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective
discourse, and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the
objective social world of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie.

Barth adds to this: 1. artist plays an alienated role in his society or outside it,: as an anorexic
(kafka), priestly, self-exiled artist (Joyce)
2. the use of language and technique which is in total contrast to the traditional content which is
quite straightforward.
Barth takes it a step further and says that the writer has nothing to say: only a way of speaking
(no ideal message)

Main preoccupation of the modernists: preoccupation with the problematic of language and
medium of literature -> focus of modernist literature is not merely the content, the form or the
appearance of a piece of artistic or literary work will become the medium between authors and
readers.

Professor Hassan, Alter and Others: postmodern fiction is postmodernist writers write more
about writing a fiction or about the process of writing a fiction rather than objective reality and
life
Gerald Graff: anti-realist, anti- rationalist and anti- bourgeois (tenets of modernism) but does
not rally against the daily struggles of life as such

Barth remarks that he agrees with all this but finds such limited boundaries problematic
The work always needs to take primacy over contexts and categories
Changes in the modes, concerns, etc of art- might not necessarily reflect changes in society but
definitely reflects changes in cultural attitudes (both ways: either inspires or causes)

postmodernist writings could become successful through the combination of the premodernist
and modernist way of writing and not by merely rejecting them.
James Joyce and co: the artist outside the society

Aristocratic cultural spirit: unpopularity of modernist fiction outside academia and the
intelligentsia
Need a guidebook to understand what they saying: far removed from the public sphere
Barth approves the value of 19th century literature.
He suggests we should agree with the commonplace that the rigidities and other limitation of
the 19th prompted the great adversary reaction called modernist art. But it (modernist art)
belongs to the first half of the century.
In this passage we see Barths aversion of modernist art and his liking of the 19th century

However, Barth does not agree the total repudiation of the enterprise of modernism as if the
period never happened.

The ideal postmodernist writer neither repudiates nor merely imitate either his 19th and 20th
parents. Without falling into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, or either false or
real naivety, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-
modernist marvels. He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and
Irving Wallace--not to mention the lobotomized mass-media illiterature. But he should hope to
reach and delight beyond the circle of what Mann used to call Early Christians: professional
devotees of high art.

Novel is a genre whose historical roots are famously and honorably in middle-class popular
culture. The ideal postmodernist novel will rise above the quarrel between realism and
irrealism, formalism and 'contentism,' pure and committed literature, coterie and junk
literature. It may nor needs so much teaching as Joyce's or Pynchon's books. Barth's analogy--
listening to jazz.

Two examples Barth provides

A. Calvino's Cosmicomics as the example of the synthesis

.. enormously appealing space-age fable

.. the materials are as modern as the new cosmology and as ancient as folktales

.. the themes are love and loss, change and permanence, illusion and reality, including a good
deal of specially Italian reality

.. As a true postmodernist, Calvino keeps one foot always in the narrative past--characteristically
the Italian narrative past of Boccaccio, Marco Polo, or Italian fair tales--and one foot in the
Parisian structuralist present; one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality

B. Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a great novel not only in the second half of this
century, but also would be great in any century.

synthesis of straitforwardness and artifice, realism and magic and myth, political passion and
nonpolitical artistry, characterization and caricature, humor and terror, not only artistically
admirable, but also humanly wise, lovable, literally marvelous. People had almost forgotten that
new fiction could be so wonderful as well as so merely important.

Talks about how his essay was misread

Didnt mean an exhaustion of literature or language but the exhaustion of the tropes used by
modernists
Literature has a long history of existence and can never be exhausted