| 2333.001 Schedule | 2333.002 Schedule | Guide To Writing | 2333.001 Presentation | 2333.002 Presentation | Self-Assessment Form | LINKS | Home |
postmodernism
A term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II. Postmodernism is distinguished from modernism, which generally refers to the revolution in art and literature that occurred during the period 1910-1930, particularly following the disillusioning experience of World War I. The postmodern era, with its potential for mass destruction and its shocking history of genocide, has evoked a continuing disillusionment similar to that widely experienced during the Modern Period.
Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications. Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the "When-it-all-changed,"[.] (Jameson ix)
Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror. (Jameson 5)
An outline of Frederic Jameson on Postmodernism
postmodernist writing
- reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaninglessness of human existence
- frequently stresses that humans desperately (and ultimately unsuccessfully) cling to illusions of security to conceal and forget the void on which their lives are perched
- experiment in historical discontinuity
- time is fluid
- metafiction
- some reject modernist patterns of allusion, symbol and myth
- may combine aspects of diverse genres (categorical crisis)
- revolts against elitist "high art" having made a concerted effort to appeal to popular culture: acceptable and even common media for postmodern artistic expression
- cartoons
- music
- John Cage (1912-1992)
- Composers
- Punk
- New Wave
- Rap/Hip Hop
- "pop art"
- Andy Warhol (1930-1987)
- Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)
- Robert Rauschenberg (1925-)
- television
- Video
- Graphic Design
literary developments
- Theatre of The absurd
- Martin Esslen coined the term in his statement "The theatre of the absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought."
- Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
- Jean Genet (1910-1986)
- Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994)
- antinovel
- Concrete Poetry
- political poetry that challenging the assumptions of contemporary society
- Black Arts Movement
postmodernist critical schools
- deconstruction: whose practitioners explore the undecidability of texts
- Cultural Criticism: which erases the boundary between "high" and "low" culture
- Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"
- Post-Humanism theory
The foremost theorist of postmodernism is Francois Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition) (1979).
| 2333.001 Schedule | 2333.002 Schedule | Guide To Writing | 2333.001 Presentation | 2333.002 Presentation | Self-Assessment Form | LINKS | Home |
