Postmodernism

1945-Present

Learning Objectives

• To identify the major authors and literary contributors of the postmodern period.

• To recognize the major literary characteristics of the period.

• To understand how the politics of a time period can influence its literature.

• To identify major vocabulary needed to analyze the literature of the period.

A Timeline of Major Influential Events

• Nazi concentration camps, American Japanese internment camps.

• August 6, 1945 - Atomic explosion over Hiroshima, Japan The conclusion of World War II

• The Korean War • The Cold War of the 1950s • McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities

Committee • The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 • The assassination of President Kennedy, Nov. 1962 • Identity Movements of the 1960s: Feminism, Civil

Rights/Black Power• The assassinations, in 1968, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and

Robert F. Kennedy

A Timeline of Major Influential Events

• The Vietnam War • The killing of four students by the National

Guard at Kent State in 1970 • The resignation of President Nixon in 1974 • The AIDS epidemic• Identity Movements: Gay, Lesbian, Queer

movements, Postcolonial movements and minority literature.

• 9/11 – some say the end of the Postmodern period.

The Beginnings of Women’s Lib and the Civil Rights Movement

• Women who had found jobs and careers in military production and factor jobs were replaced when the men came home from war. They found the return to domestic life frustrating after a time.

• African Americans who had fought for their country also found it difficult to return to a country which considered them second class citizens.

Literature of the Postmodern Period

• The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties were mirrored in the literature of these decades, in which writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social involvement, government and corporate power, individual and minority rights, drug use, and technological advances like television and consumer air travel that lent themselves to a global perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and space.

Characteristics

• Metafiction – fiction about fiction• Pastiche – pasting together of things, images,

genres, etc.• Black humor – humor that deals with serious

issues to create discomfort.• Paranoia• Intertextuality – interacting with older texts• Technoculture and hyperreality

Principles of Postmodernism

• Disregard all basis of hierarchy, order, structure etc

• Born of disillusionment bred by the horrors of World War II

• Rejection of elite or high class culture• A sense of bleak comedy not found in

modernist literature.

Sub-Movements within Postmodernism

• Theatre of the Absurd• Magical Realism• Cyberpunk/Steampunk• Beat Poetry• Confessional Poetry

Theatre of the Absurd• Plays of absurdist fiction, written by

a number of playwrights from the late 1940s to the 1960s, as well as the theatre which has evolved from their work.

• It expressed the belief that, in a godless universe, human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down.

• Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.

• Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter

Magical Realism• An aesthetic style or genre of fiction in

which magical elements blend to create a realistic atmosphere that accesses a deeper understanding of reality.

• The story explains these magical elements as normal occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of thought.

• Fantastical elements, plentitude, hybridity, collective consciousness, political critique.

• Franz Kafka is considered its founder. Others include Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie.

Cyberpunk• It features advanced science, such as information

technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.

• Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth.

• The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things").

• Notable authors include: William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon

• A subgenre, Steampunk, contains similar characteristics, but is typically set in a neo-Victorian age.

The Beat Poets

• The “original” beat poet, Jack Kerouac coined the term and ascribed to it a wide range of meanings

• Began in New York as an underground counterculture youth movement

• Small but influential group of poets including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs

The Beat Poets: A New Wave• A rejection of mainstream traditional

“American Values”• Focused interest in Eastern Spirituality and

often involved experimentation with drugs and sexuality.

• Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature and were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.

• The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

• In the 1960s the Beat Movement merged with and helped fuel the Hippie counterculture.

The Confessional Poets• Confessional poetry is the poetry

of the personal or "I” which emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

• Dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry: private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships.

• Often written in an autobiographical manner.

• Major poets include: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman

Critical Voices

• Jacques Lacan• Michel Foucault• Jean Baudrillard• Roland Barthes• Jacques Derrida• Mikhail Bakhtin

• Academically trained in philosophy, used substantially the works of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Каrl Маrх, Martin Heidegger, and G.W.F. Hegel

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Ethnicity and Postmodernism• African American:

- Toni Morrison- Toni Cade Bambara- Alice Walker

- Yusef Komunyakaa• Native American:

- Louis Erdrich- Sherman Alexie

- Leslie Marmon Silko

• Hispanic:- Sandra Cisneros- Julia Alvarez- Rudolfo Anaya

• Asian American:- Amy Tan- Maxine Hong Kingston

Postmodern Literature: Influential works

• Catch 22 – Joseph Heller• Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut• Lost in the Funhouse – John Barth• The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien• White Noise – Don DeLillo• Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

Where Are We Going?

• Perhaps the most telling emblem of this contemporary acceptance of new perspectives into conceptions of American experience is the Internet. Online, new hypertext realities need only be imagined to exist virtually, all users may join online communities, and writing exists in open-ended and interactive relationships with its readers.

Terms to Know

• Intertextuality• Beat Generation• Confessional Poets• Postcolonial• Deconstruction• Magical Realism• Cyberpunk• Absurdist Theatre• Pastiche