Postmodern literature

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The literature which arose as a series of styles and ideas in the post-World War II period which reacted against the perceived norms of modernist literature has been termed postmodern literature. It can also be described as a literature that keeps on going, from the World War II till the present literature. The style of narrative breaks from modernism, in it's earlier form, with the idea of subconscience-mind-talk, a continous conscience stream of narrative, thios in an unconformist style of literature, with authors such as Angela Carter being renowned for it.

1 Background: modernism and comparisons with postmodernism
2 Shift to postmodernism
3 Gender
4 Cyberpunk, Excrement Literature and other later works and sub-genres
5 Postmodern authors and critics
6 External links

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Background: modernism and comparisons with postmodernism

Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism, in which a story was told from an objective or omniscient point of view. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the stream of consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction, reflective of the works of Swedish dramatist August Strindberg and the Italian author Luigi Pirandello.

Unlike postmodern literature, however, modernist literature saw fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis or a Freudian internal conflict. In postmodern literature this crisis is avoided. The tortured, isolated anti-heroes of, say, Knut Hamsun or Samuel Beckett, and the nightmare world of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, make way in postmodern writing for the self-consciously deconstructed and self-reflexive narrators of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Sorokin, John Fowles, John Barth, or Julian Barnes.

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Shift to postmodernism

As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. The 1941 death of Irish novelist James Joyce, one of modernism's last and biggest giants, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start.

Another common divide is the end of the second world war, which saw a critical assessment of human rights in the wake of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Holocaust, and Japanese American internment. It also coincides with the beginning of the Cold War, the American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) and the beginning of movements which worked towards: (a) the end of Colonialism, (b) the Partition of India, (c) the 1947 UN Partition Plan, and (d) the development of Postcolonial literature [1]. Finally, it reflects the influence of the computer which garnered new importance during the war. During this time, computers became integrated within postmodern fiction often referred to as Cyberpunk [2].

Literature of this era does not set itself against modern literature as much as it develops and extends the style, making it self-conscious and ironic. In such literature, one finds a shift in the role of the "inner narrative of the self," from the self at war with itself to the self as arbiter, pointing to the phenomenological roots of postmodern thought. Authors such as David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow satirise the paranoid system-building of the kind associated, by postmodernists, with Enlightenment modernity.

Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to that which it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson-Rubin hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. Many modernist critics attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of value as a narrative—and therefore empty of value as a novel.

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Gender

The postmodern novel was also part of a larger social project: integration and ending discrimination against women. From the perspective of postmodern writers such as Adrienne Rich, the life experiences of women had been systematically suppressed, either by men who did not understand them, or by women who engaged in self-censorship. The hard version of this critique was that this suppression came from the use of rape and incest as tools for the subjugation of women, and their suppression in literature was designed, in an Orwellian sense, to create an absence of language and meta-narrative to shape a response to these realities. The softer version of this critique takes a more modernist shape: that sexism and racism are holdovers from another, less enlightened age and need to be stamped out by exposure and the creation of normative art.

This social project has also been the root of a great deal of controversy. Proponents see it as part of the progressive removal of barriers to social participation in power and art. Opponents deride it as political correctness, where narrowminded, one-sided moralizing takes the place of literary merit. This debate reflects larger political conflicts—not only over what is to be done, but how it is to be accomplished.

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Cyberpunk, Excrement Literature and other later works and sub-genres

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More recently, the term "postmodern literature" has been applied to such works as Neuromancer, William Gibson's cyberpunk first novel, and its various sequels or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Another recent example is Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, a novel-turned-film about a clever but violent nihilist exploring the hazy frontiers of self-destruction and self-exploration. This also serves as a critique of the cold, soulless consumer society in which he lives. Other sub-genres which developed in conjunction with this area include Electronic literature and Hypertext fiction. Excrement Literature, which began as a Russian, most authors tended to be both male and female at the same time, literary movement in the 1990's, also became an American genre with the publication of Toilet: The Novel. Although the term Excrement Literature is wide embracing, it has been linked to Neo-Existentialism, which combines elements of Post-Modern and Existential thought, using the modern symbol of the bathroom and everything contained therein as an expression of modern life and the dying consciousness to break free from it.