Post-Modernism:
The often disputed term postmodernism is applied to the
literature and art produced after World War II, when the disastrous effects on
Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of
Nazi Totalitarianism and European Fascism, the mass exterminations and horror
of WWII, the threat of total destruction by the atom bomb, the devastation of
the natural environment, the space age, and the ominous threats of
overpopulation and starvation. The term
generally applies to a cultural condition prevailing in advanced,
industrialized capitalist western societies since the 1960s, characterized by a
superabundance of disconnected images and styles, most noticeably in
television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, postmodernism is said to be a
culture or aesthetic sense of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, and
promiscuous and random superficiality, in which the traditional values of
depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and structure are evacuated or
dissolved in a colorful chaos of signals.
Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, carried to an extreme,
of the counter-traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts
to break away from modernist forms that had become conventional and familiar by
the latter half of the twentieth century.
A familiar undertaking in postmodernist writings is to subvert the
foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the
meaninglessness of existence and the underlying abyss or void (or nothingness)
on which our supposed security is precariously suspended. In recent developments in linguistic and
literary theory, there is an effort to subvert the foundations of language itself,
so as to demonstrate that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates into a play of
indeterminacies. In the most basic (and
crude) terms, a postmodern writer or artist does not attempt to wrest meaning
from the world through the traditional methods of myth, symbol, and artistic
complexity but instead embraces the meaningless confusion and absurdity of
contemporary existence with either indifference or flippant enthusiasm. Often postmodern writers write about writing
itself (metafiction, or fiction about fiction), in which a narrator reflects
critically on the lack of coherence in his or her own writing. Postmodernism as a term is generally not
applied to poetry or drama but more often to fiction and art. Some writers often discussed as postmodern
are Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass, Angela Carter,
Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, and William Golding.
