Postmodern

1. Postmodern Prepared by: Mahmoud W. Mushtaha Survived by: Dr. Akram Habeeb CCL- IUG 2021

2. Outline: - • The concept of postmodern • The Paradox about the term Postmodernism • Main Philosophers in "Postmodern" • The terms that related to the Postmodern • Main Characteristics of Postmodern

3. The concept of Postmodern: - • The Postmodern movement is a literary school that has a set of terms for thinking about literary and other cultural texts, developed in the mid-to-late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism. • Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is marked both stylistically and ideologically.

4. The Paradox about the term Postmodern: - The term itself has a paradox in “Post” and “Modern” which means after contemporary? How! The paradox of the time of the postmodern points to the fact that strictly speaking, where postmodernism cannot be considered only as a periodization. The postmodern challenges our thinking about time challenges us to see the present in the past, the future in the present, the present in a kind of no-time. Postmodernism accepts to look at itself in terms of multiplicity, to describe itself as a set of coherent explanatory theories. Rather than trying to explain it in terms of a fixed philosophical position.

5. Main Philosophers: • Derrida • Jameson • Lyotard • Reisman • Foucault Postmodern literary writers have also been greatly influenced by various movements and ideas taken from post-modern philosophy.

6. The terms that related to Postmodern • Undecidability • A new enlightenment • Dissemination • Little and grand narratives • Simulation • Depthlessness • Pastiche • The unpresentable • Decentering

7. Undecidability: - • it means the impossibility of deciding between two or more competing interpretations. • it's founded on the law of non-contradiction. • Postmodernism includes all absolute values like the traditional values of God, Truth, Reason, and the Law, which become sites of questioning and rethinking. • New critics of the mid-twentieth century called the term postmodernism ambiguity or paradox in terms of undecidability.

8. The new critics and the postmodern critics:- • For the new critics, literary texts tended to the polysemic potential of language to create a unified whole in which ambiguity produced to the enriching of the text’s final unity. • For postmodern critics, undecidability radically undermines the principle of unity. They glory multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference.

9. A new enlightenment • Enlightenment is a way of characterizing Western thought or Western reasoning since the seventeenth century. • it entails the emphasis on the power of reason over superstition and nature. In addition, the belief that a combination of abstract reason and empirical science will lead to knowledge and eventually to political and social progress. • Also, the postmodern is skeptical about claims of progress in history, because of the necessary marginalization (of the apparently non-progressive)

10. Irrationalism is only another form of rationalism because it is dependent on its definition on its opposite, where the definition of irrationality is the opposite of rationality. • The postmodern or what Jacques Derrida calls “A new enlightenment” concerned to explore or search the value and importance of ways of thinking that cannot be reduced to an opposition between the rational and the irrational.

11. Dissemination: - • Postmodern resistance to totalizing forces such as rationalism or irrationalism means that its characteristic form is fragmentary. • Fragmentation has been associated with the Romantic era like Shelley’s "Ozymandias" and the modern era like T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" • fragmentation is not unique to the postmodern but the postmodern requires a new kind of critique of the very idea of fragment and totality. • Questioning the concept of originality, it has taken a new kind of emphasis on citation and intertextuality, pastiche, and parody. • Originality is now seen as a kind of ideological fetish, but it has had a special aesthetic value since the eighteenth century.

12. The difference between the notion of fragmentation in postmodernism and those in romanticism and modernism:- - For postmodern: it does not depend on the possibility of an original “unity” that has been lost. - For romantics and modernists: it depends on fragmentation in terms of the loss of original wholeness. About postmodern thinking in fragmentation is in terms of dissemination, it involves a sense of scattering. Postmodern fragmentation is without origins, it is dissemination without any assurance of a center or destination.

13. Little and grand narratives: - • Lyotard created what is called "grand narratives" and "little narratives." • "Grand narratives "such as Christianity, Marxism, the Enlightenment to provide a framework for everything. • Lyotard debate that the contemporary ‘worldview’, by contrast, is characterized by "little narratives." Contemporary Western discourse is characteristically unstable, dispersed – not a worldview at all. • "Little narratives" present local explanations of individual events but it doesn't claim to explain everything, and are fragmentary, and non-teleological. • Lyotard argues that, in the West, grand narratives have all but lost their efficacy, that their legitimacy and their powers of legitimation have been dispersed.

14. Depthlessness: - Jameson provides a useful account of four depth models that, as he said, have dominated the West in the twentieth century:- 1-Marxism 2-Psychoanalysis 3-Existentialism 4-Semiotics With the postmodern, all of these surface-depth models are shaken up.

15. Pastiche: - • Pastiche is ‘blank’ parody in which there is no single model followed, no single impulse such as ridicule and no sense of a distance from any norm. “Jameson’s definition” • Jameson distinguishes between parody and pastiche, where both depend on imitation of earlier texts or objects. • The postmodern doesn't accept the notion of ‘normal’ language. • Postmodern architecture: it borrows elements from various earlier periods of architecture and puts them in eclectic juxtaposition. • “radical eclecticism” • Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture. • Hybridization: it is radical intertextuality mixing forms, genres, conventions, media, dissolve boundaries between high and low art, between the serious and the ludic.

16. The unpresentable: - • The postmodern contests the modes of its own representation, of representation itself. • Postmodernism is unpresentable or in some of its other formulations, the sublime (Lyotard), the abject (Kristeva), the unnamable (Beckett). • The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself: that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.

17. Decentering:- • The postmodern challenges the “logo-centric” and challenges “the ethnocentric.” • (the authority of one ethnic ‘identity’ or culture”) • For Ihab Hassan remarks, the postmodern may be summarized by a list of words “deconstruction, decentring, dissemination, dispersal, displacement, difference, discontinuity, demystification, delegitimation, disappearance”

18. Main Characteristic of Post- modernism:- • Ambiguity • Rejection of the ultimate faith on science • Truth is a matter of perspective • Anti-positivist • Globalization and multiculturalism

19. Thank you Prepared by: Mahmoud W. Mushtaha Survived by: Dr. Akram Habeeb CCL- IUG 2021