Central themes :Industrialization- urban jungle- alienation of

the individual . totalitarian systems (dystopias)Psychological control of the human mind .SchizophreniaVirtual realityFantastic elements in a real worldID vs. social background Surveillance

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Devices:Pastiche (collage)IntertextShort-circuit gameIrony/black humorFragmentationMaxi/mini –malismdeconstruction

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New kind of literature:Magical realismTechno-gothic

HypertextLunaticCyberpunk

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Modernism/Postmodernism• Continued the fundamental

philosophical assumptions of modernism• Continued its tendency toward

historical discontinuity• Continued its preoccupation with

alienation• Continued to focus on a social

individualism

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Modernism/postmodernism• Modernism relied on existentialism -а

philosophy that claims that the individual must make decisions concerning right and wrong, or the self without access to universal truths

• Postmodernism’s tendency to use solipsism, a philosophical perspective that holds that one саn only truly know oneself and that all other experiences are potentially false since they are filtered through the senses

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Modernism/postmodernism• The tendency of the modernists

- to construct intricate forms - to interweave symbols elaborately - to create works of art that, although opposed to some established present order, create within themselves an ordered universe

• All that has given up in postmodern literature

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Philosophy of Postmodernism• Denial of order

• Presentation of highly fragmented

universes in the created world of art

• Presentation of critical theories that

are а form of phenomenology

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PhenomenologyA highly subjective contemporary

philosophy which argues that the meaning

of an object is a concept separate from its

existence.

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Postmodernist Critics• Jacques Lacan• The members of the Frankfurt School• Michel Foucault• Ihab Hassan• Jacques Derrida• Academically trained in philosophy, used

substantially the works of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Каrl Маrх, Martin Heidegger, оr G.W.F. Hegel

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Postmodernism as a NameUsed in architecture in the 1960s by

Frederic JamesonIn literature began to be used instead of

less satisfactory labels such as "black humor" or "fabulism“.Ihab Hassan in his essay “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” emphasize some critics who used this word in different contexts:

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Postmodernism - etymology• 1. Charles Olson (1950 -1960)• 2.Harry Levin 1959 , to denote the high

modern culture declining.• 3. Bernard Smith , 1945 used this term with

the meaning of the socialist realism used in picture.

• Charles Jencks used the word “postmodernism” in his works with the meaning which we have today.

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Postmodernist WritersWilliam GoldingThomas PynchonJohn FowlesSolman RushdieGeorge Orwell John Ashberry Paul AusterMircea Cartarescu

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Postmodernism-It has no a rigid definition because if would

happen to have , for sure a postmodern critic would make a deconstruction for it.

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