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Post-modern Literature Lecture 26 History of English Literature COMSATS Virtual Campus Islamabad. What is postmodernism?.
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Post-modern LiteratureLecture 26History of English LiteratureCOMSATS Virtual Campus Islamabad
What is postmodernism? • Firstly, postmodernism was a movement in architecture that rejected the modernist, passion for the new. Modernism is here understood in art and architecture as the project of rejecting tradition in favour of going "where no man has gone before" or better: to create forms for no other purpose than novelty.
Modernism was an exploration of possibilities and a perpetual search for uniqueness and its cognate--individuality. Modernism's valorization of the new was rejected by architectural postmodernism in the 50's and 60's for conservative reasons.
They wanted to maintain elements of modern utility while returning to the reassuring classical forms of the past. The result of this was an ironic brick-a-brack or collage approach to construction that combines several traditional styles into one structure. As collage, meaning is found in combinations of already created patterns.
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality.
In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality.
For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person.
In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Postmodernism is "post" because it denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind.
The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."
1. Premodernism: • Original meaning is possessed by authority (for example, the Catholic Church). The individual is dominated by tradition.
2. Modernism: • The enlightenment-humanist rejection of tradition and authority in favour of reason and natural science. This is founded upon the assumption of the autonomous individual as the sole source of meaning and truth--the Cartesian cogito. Progress and novelty are valorized within a linear conception of history--a history of a "real" world that becomes increasingly real or objectified. One could view this as a Protestant mode of consciousness.
3. postmodernism: • A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other.
Questions we shall discuss: • What is literature? • What is the value of a literary work? • What is a text? What is a translated text? • What is an author? What is a translator? • How influential are concepts like otherness, poststructuralism, postcolonial studies for the practice of translation?
Literary Theory has tried to answer the question:“What is Literature?”In postmodern world, literature is just another text.
For Roland Barthes:A Text is self-conscious and productive.The Text is an activity of production that is endless.
Barthes makes the difference between: • An ‘answering work’ (modernism) • A ‘questioning text’ (postmodernism): • a text that never stops producing itself as textuality; • a text that never ceases to be a question; • that is inexhaustibly questioning and questionable; • Isn’t it the definiton of a translated Text?
Modernism • Characterized by a loss of faith. • Human sensibility has been destroyed by industrialized mass culture. • Multiple points of view. • Discontinous narrative • Fragmentary structure • Absence of authorial centre. • Experiments with textual means (work) • The most famous of these is “Stream-of-consciousness”. • From ‘meaning-to-say’ to ‘meaning-as- play’
Postmodernism • Everything is a ‘text’ as differentiated from a ‘work’. • Denying special value to literary texts. • Nothing is central. • Texts are assemblages of ‘surface’. • Meaning-as-play. • Literary Studies should be seen as the pragmatics of writing. • Such an object is closer to a text. • A text that allows pragmatics to be understood as ethics.
For Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition): • Postmodernism is: • rule producing • as opposed to rule imitating. • Postmodern theory is always: • postmodern literary theory • even when it is about • architecture • television... • as it privileges the auto-poesic text over all others
For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy: • Postmodernism in Literature means “That something new”, which is: • the literary absolute or • the absolute of literature, that is • poiesy • production • process • inspiration
The Death of HistoryThe Death of CriticismThe Death of Theory
The Death of History • For language to have meaning, culture has to have value and history have to matter: • But, history is a lie by which culture disguises the fact of its naturally savage interests and practices in the name of human progress and welfare. • Then it cannot be possible to have faith in the power of language to convey plain truth.
The absence of history as a metanarrative gives rise to: • The dehistorization of contexts • The reconception of: • literary texts • knowledges • signs • The production of something new (romanticism).
The Death of Criticism • Texts are more than writing due to the multimedia possibilities. • ‘Literature’ then, cannot be regarded as a stable structure. • Any literary text cannot be exhausted by any act of reading or interpretation. • Literature has no essence.
The Death of Theory • To apprehend the aesthetic value of literature • theory is an obstacle if it pretends to be prescriptive: • it obstructs the passage to a ‘love’ or a ‘feeling for the aesthetic.
For Foucault • Theoryisan art • Politicsisan art • Ethicsisan art (a practice of Concept Creation) • Pragmaticsisanethics • theyrequireskillson “howtoproceed”; • theyrequirecertainjudgment as opposedtodetermininglaws; • dispersion as opposedtosynthesis; • fromthe ‘what’ tothe ‘how’.
What is an ethical decision in translation? • It is an aesthetic and/or textual practice • It is both ‘appreciation’ and ‘obligation’ • If through translation we can show how it is possible to appreciate the cultural values of literature we are thus engaged in a social practice. • Such an ethics is based on the knowledge that every system is dysfunctional.
What is then a text? A textisanassemblage, notan essence, that relates theory and pragmaticsestablishingrelationswithhistory, politics and society?
What is then a translated text? A translatedtextisanassemblage, notan essence, that relates theory of translation and pragmatics of translation, establishingrelationswiththehistorical, political and sociologicalcontext of thetext, and establishingrelationswiththehistory of translation, thepolitics of translation and thesociologicalcontext of translation?
