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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 its earlier form, with the idea of subconscience-mind-talk, a continuous conscience stream of narrative, thios in an unconformist style of literature, with authors such as Angela Carter being renowned for it. 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 . 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 which garnered new importance during the war. During this time, computers became Integrated Within Postmodern Fiction often referred to as Cyberpunk {Link without Title} . 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. 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 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. CYBERPUNK , EXCREMENT LITERATURE AND OTHER LATER WORKS AND SUB-GENRES More recently, the term "postmodern literature" has been applied to such works as ''. 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. POSTMODERN AUTHORS AND CRITICS For a listing of postmodern authors, see List Of Postmodern Authors . For a listing of postmodern critics, see List Of Postmodern Critics . EXTERNAL LINKS |
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