Postmodernism

1. Postmodernism

2. What is Postmodernism? • Postmodernism is a term that encompasses a wide-range of developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art, literature, and culture. • Originally a reaction to modernism, referring to the lack of artistic, intellectual, or cultural thought or organized principle. • Started around 1940s, exact date is unknown. • Peaked around the 1960s and 1970s with the release of Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five

3. Postmodern Literature • What is it? - Used to describe the different aspects of post WW2 literature (modernist literature). - There is not a clear and defined definition of postmodernism because of the little agreement of the concepts and characteristics and ideas within postmodernism.

4. Postmodernist Literature • Postmodernist Literature contains a broad range of concepts and ideas that include: - responses to modernism and its ideas - responses to technological advances - greater diversity of cultures that leads to cultural pluralism. (small groups within a larger society maintain their culture identity). - reconceptualizations of society and history

5. Postmodern Literature • There are a few similarities to modernist literature. • Like modernist literature, both are usually told from an objective or omniscient point of view. • Both literatures explore the external reality to examine the inner states of consciousness of the characters • Both employ fragmentation in narrative and character construction

6. Postmodern Literature: Common Themes • Irony, playfulness, black humor - Example: The Crying Lot of 49, Pynchon uses childish wordplay while discussing serious subjects. An example of his wordplay can be found in the names of his characters: Mike Fallopian, Stanley Koteks, Mucho Maas, and Dr. Hilarius.

7. Postmodern Literature:Common Themes • Patiche - Authors often combine multiple elements in the postmodern genre. Example: Pynchon includes elements from science fiction, pop culture references, and detective fiction to create fictional cultures and concepts.

8. Postmodern Literature:Common Themes • Metafiction - Writing about writing, often used to undermine the authority of the author and to advance stories in unique ways. Example: In Italo Calvino’s novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the first chapter is about the writing process of the novel.

9. Postmodern Literature:Common Themes • Paranoia -The belief that there is something out of the ordinary, while everything remains the same. Example: In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, a character becomes violent when he imagines everyone else as a robot and he is the only human.

10. 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

11. Joseph Heller Born May 1, 1923 in Brooklyn, New York Known for his post World War satires and playwrights Catch 22 most well-known of his works Other works include: Something Happened, Good as Gold, and Closing Time. Also wrote plays: We Bombed in New Haven, Catch 22, Clevinger’s Trail Postmodern Authors

12. Thomas Pynchon Born May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York. Known for his fictional writing over many different subjects that include: science, mathematics, and history Known for his early works: V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Also wrote essays concerning diverse topics such as missile security and Watts Riots ( a large scale riot that lasted six days in the Watt’s neighborhood of LA). Postmodern Authors

13. Kurt Vonnegut Born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana Known for using Patiche in his works. Blends satire, black comedy, and science fiction to create novels, such as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. As a former soldier and prisoner of war, many of his experiences influenced his later works. Postmodern Authors

14. Tim O’Brien Born October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota - His career began with the release of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship me. Wrote mainly about his experiences in the Vietnam War O’Brien uses fiction and reality and blends them into his own genre. He labels his works fiction, however, he uses his situations he experienced in his works. Most famous work: The Things They Carried Postmodern Authors

15. John Barth • known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work. • began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively.

16. The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth's next novel, is an 800-page satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland. It is what is what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes).

17. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy, of comparable size, is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. In the course of the novel Giles carries out all the tasks prescribed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth kept a list of the tasks taped to his wall while he was writing the book.

18. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse and the novella collection Chimera, the latter for which Barth received the National Book Award, are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. In LETTERS Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.

19. Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967), that was widely considered to be a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1980) wrote a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", to clarify the point.

20. Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.