Postmodernism Literature

By Lechi Eke

1. What is it?
2. When did it start and end?
3. Who started it?
4. What is it all about?
5. Who are the writers?

1. What is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism is a socio-cultural and literary movement which started in the 1950s and reached its peak in the 1970s, and has not really ended as it has appeared since then in the works of different authors from when it emerged and even until now, in the 21^st century.

Some works that had been named as precursors to postmodernism are – Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes (This book was treated on this column as the book second to the Bible in being widely read, although the readership of the Bible gapped it by far); Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) by Laurence Sterne; and, On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac.

However, Postmodernism was most prominent in the 1960s and ‘70s, surfacing in the American Literature of the 21^st century writings of Dave Eggers’ post ironic book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) 

2. When did Postmodernism start?

It started spontaneously in the 1960s, referring to political issues, in the writings of such authors as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. Often, it challenges authorities and is regarded as experimental Literature. 

So because it emerged in the 1960s in the context of political tendencies, and because other forms of postmodernism began to surface, it is now divided into three parts:

1. Historical period which ran from the 1960s to the present,
2. Theoretical Postmodernism which includes the works of such philosophers as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, etc.
3. Cultural Postmodernism and this include virtual arts, Literature, film, architecture, etc.  

Postmodernism shares many of the Literature of Modernism. It embodies a shift in perspective from modernism referring to a social cultural and literary theory. It recovers the preoccupation with the external and the construction of worlds. Postmodernism used pastiche, black humour, and parody in order to contest traditional literary conventions.

Many believe that it is a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. It is characterized by fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour and authorial self-reference.

The above features you must have seen peeking in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators (some speaking in foreign languages)! Etc.

Although it was spotted firstly in the 1950s (meaning this was when it was noticed by the cognoscente) and early 1960s, but in the 1970s it became a dominant feature in arts, literature and architecture. It uses metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues, etc.

Postmodernists believe amongst other things that there is no such thing as Human Nature, that human behaviour and psychology are socially determined or constructed, that language does not refer to reality outside itself, that there’s no certain knowledge and no general theory of the natural or social world that can be valid or true (all are illegitimate “metanarratives”).

Metafiction is fiction which takes fictional writing and its conventions as its subject. These writers believe that reason and logic are not universally valid, but suspect instruments of established power, that there’s no objective reality or truth, no scientific or historical truth.

Some famous Postmodernism philosophers are: Michel Foucault, Pierre-Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, etc.    

Postmodernists are often polyglots who think themselves products of more than one region. They are technologically literate and they express themselves via mass media. They are highly innovative in their works and traditional at the same time, especially as seen in the works of some 1960s authors like John Fowles and Laurence Durrell. Then, the latter authors produce works highly experimental in the sense that they are breathtaking as in Martin Amis’ Chemical (Scottish) Generation of the fin-de-siecle (characteristics of 19^th century literary and artistic climate of sophistication, world weariness or jejune and fashionable despair. Fin-de-siecle also means end of a century – which is the meaning above).

So the works of the Postmodernists are characterized by pop culture, sardonic fiction, avant garde and cosmopolitan, all these are encompassed in Black humour.

In 1990, Novelist David Foster, in an essay, drew an analogy between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television citing self-reference and an ironic juxtaposition of “what’s seen and what’s heard.” According to him, this indicates the hold of pop culture in Postmodernism Literature.

Novelist and Theorist Umberto Eco describes postmodernism as a kind of double-coding and as a “trans-historical phenomenon” in his ‘Reflections’ on The Name of the Rose.

Continues next week…