Transcript for:
Post-Modernism in Literature

[Music] good morning everyone i'm very happy to welcome you to this new nptel course entitled post-modernism in literature this course is a 20-hour course spread across eight weeks of online learning and teaching and this is now pitched at the post-graduate level though there are no prerequisites for this course it's uh quite advisable that you have a sense of familiarity with the various friends in english literary studies and also a familiarity with the ways in which genres have been developing and literary historical periods have been uh categorized in dominant canonical history and the outfit itself i think it's very important to give you an object give you a run through the major objectives of this course the first objective is to facilitate an understanding of the category of the postmodern as a historical period a cultural tendency and a dominant critical practice of the 20th century i use these terms rather advisedly and i think it's important to to to give you an introduction to these terms and what i mean by these and how i propose to go about this course in order to achieve these ends firstly we look at the postmodern period as a historical period and when i say historical period this refers to a particular kind of a period which is which has a beginning and has a kind of an ending it uh another historical uh setting in continuation with the various historical trends in various historical periods we try to present this particular phenomenon known as post-modernism in the post-war period and when i say post-war i have in mind the post-world war so in that sense a historical sense would be the period after 1945 and secondly we look at post-modernism as a cultural tendency and this is very significant because post-modernism cannot be limited in a very historical sense this is also a dominant cultural tendency a sort of a cultural trend which was evident in most of the disciplines in most of the practices of the 20th century and thirdly we look at post modernism as a dominant critical practice when i say critical practice i have in mind also the intellectual tendencies of the 20th century and also the various phenomena which came together to describe 20th century life in general in this context let me uh also add that post-modernism now is considered as a an oft-used term and also a very ambiguous term of the 20th century and this is used in diverse ways to talk about multiple things related to 20th century life in general the second objective that we have is to introduce the learners to the different philosophical and critical frameworks within which the idea of post-modernism is located though the event of post-modernism the phenomenon of post-modernism could be located in various disciplines in various sites our trust our focus as part of this course is to talk about the intellectual tendencies to trace the genealogy of the intellectual trends in the 20th century so in that sense it becomes very important to give a philosophical and critical understanding of this term and also place it within the dominant intellectual and literary critical aspects so we are proposed to do this in multiple ways and one of those ways is to trace the genealogy of the term through a a survey of major sites major literary works which have tried to define this term the major theorists of the 20th century who have offered a commentary of this term and also tried to place all of them within a single framework though post-modernism cannot be limited to a single definition we here try to form a systematic discussion based on uh the various sorts of things written about postmodernism the various intellectual framework proposed regarding post modernism in the 20th century so the third objective is to present post-modernism in the way it is reflected manifested and represented in 20th century literary sites the title of the scores if you remember is postmodernism and literature so with even when we begin with a general survey general historical understanding a general mapping of the intellectual uh trends uh related to postmodernism we would eventually narrow this down to a discussion of literary sites and when i say literary sites i have a range of things in mind it could be literally text it could be particular kinds of genres it could also be certain movements certain major artistic trends that emerged in the 20th century so in that sense we shall be looking at schools movements different aspects of assault and also particular text it is novels poetry drama uh and various commentaries and essays written and even some of the uh some of the dialogues which were very dominant some of the debates which were very dominant in the 20th century having said all of this the final objective is related to our all the themes of discussion and also uh in in certain ways adding to the general critical acumen of the learners the fourth objective in that sense is to enable the learners to critically engage with text ideas debates and paradigms and literary studies so here we move on to a different level all together by facilitating a sort of a critical training so that the students so that the learners can also know how to engage across these various sites of intellectual trends of historical periods of dominant cultural tendencies and how to relate them with particular texts and particular context how various debates have been uh framed in literary history and how various paradigms emerged at particular points of time in connection with these dominant trends tendencies and practices with these four objectives put together we move on to make sense of this entire course entitled post modernism in literature so this also brings us to this question where which are the sites where we can identify postmodernism in where do we find post modernism getting manifested uh this question is also important because when we talk about other aspects of literary studies when we talk about particular periods of the uh previous century such as romanticism or for example uh certain aspects related to realism or aspects related to pastoral poetry if you take a more uh of a precise term so we can say that there are particular texts there are particular sites where these sorts of movements these draw these ideas and these dominant tendencies could be seen more prominently but however when we come to an understanding of post-modernism we find that this is spread across a range of things so those are familiar with a general idea of how the contemporary has been defined in the last few decades we would also know that post modernism is perhaps the most used term to talk about most of the practices within our 20th century uh literature culture art you name anything and anything about postmod anything about the 20th century perhaps will fit into this framework related to postmodernism so in that sense we can identify the the aspects of postmodernism in architecture and many are also to opinion that just like the modernist period even during the post-modernist period architecture is a site where these changes were seen uh in a more immediate fashion in a more concrete way and this is also evident in the way history has been written the history has been rewritten and also positioned in in during the various periods of the 20th century post-modernism could also be traced through the various discussions within the discipline of philosophy and philosophical engagements with this term postmodernism with the idea of post-modernism is also something that we would begin to look at this of course uh in in in in rather uh detail and there's also a postmodernism in general art this could include various kinds of arts including painting sculpturing and uh it could also include multiple forms of even digital and non-digital uh art in the 20th century as well and we find this uh the ideas of postmodernism also changing the ways in which social and political theory has been framed in the 20th century and more importantly and especially for a very popular and common understanding of post-modernism it's important to look at the ways in which postmodernism gets reflected in the many forms of cultural production especially this is very very evident in 20th century cinema and also in the different kinds of pop music rock music and various genres of music available are today and there is also a way in which post modernism could be seen as something which generally philosophically aesthetic and ideological uh questions are asked about because uh this is not merely about a certain manifestations it's also about how uh this idea the idea of postmodernism enables us to ask particular questions about the 20th century art about 20th century culture and placing them within philosophical aesthetic and ideological realms and uh coming to the the particular turf that we are addressing as part of this course we also have a various aspects of literary theory and criticism being influenced by the aspects of and we also have literature in general which could again mean a wide variety of genres sub genres and different forms and different kinds of writings available from all parts of the world and here we also need to make one particular distinction when we talk about literature in ah so far when we had been talking about uh the history of literature we are focusing mostly on literature written in english but in the postmodern period we realized that it's about literatures written not just in english but also in various other languages in translations from different parts of the world from different cultures there are also this visibility being given to different forms without privileging one over the other so overall perhaps it would just suffice to say that postmodernism provides as with a new organizing principle in thought action and reflection and this is also connected to many changing factors in modern society so this is very important because when we talk about most of the other realms or most of the other related aspects of literacy studies we do not find them always connecting well with the the the real life the real modern uh contemporary life but in the case of post modernism here is a term we have which could be used for intellectual discourse and also to talk about certain very mundane aspects of day-to-day contemporary life and also as part of this course it also becomes very very important to identify the sort of terms that we are using and the meanings designated to it if you notice in the course we have used the term force modernism and not pose modernity so we do have a very conscious distinction in mind between postmodernism and whose modernity the general agreement is that we can identify a shift from post-modernity to pose post-modernism in the sense that there's a shift from the general frame of reference post-modernity being more general in nature we find a shift from the general frame of reference to a more to more limited aesthetic realms so as part of this course what we are looking at is a set of limited aesthetic realms we are not talking about post-modernity in general we are not talking about life in general culture in general but we are limiting our discourse we are limiting our discussion to certain aesthetic realms which could be mapped and covered within the gamut of a course and it's also important to then uh spend a little time talking about what was modernity is post modernity is a term used to refer to the general post-modern culture in the 20th century and this could be a ah this could be used as a general frame to talk about the changing scheme of things not just in art culture and such very profound things but also about lifestyle in general it could mean a range of things when we say the lifestyle has become most modern it could mean that it is changed radically from the modernist times it could also mean that it's more contemporary in nature that it defies all conventions and that it is very difficult to classify it it has also been increasingly used as a term to talk about things when they do not really fit within any particular definition or any particular category and post modernity as we have mentioned this is nowadays used mostly to refer to the general development of the 20th century regardless of a particular uh idea regardless of a particular discipline or regardless of one particular scheme of things it's a it's a general reference which we shall be avoiding throughout this course we shall be focusing more on this term force modernism so when we talk about post modernism what comes to our mind is a set of theories frameworks and these are all important because they make they help us to make sense of the postmodern age so one of the objectives of this course is also perhaps to make sense of this term known as pose modernism through a discussion of a series of texts being made available to us and when we talk about postmodernism again we also talk about uh uh certain certainly three schools maybe we cannot talk about a single literary movement or a logical linear progression of ideas and on the presentation of text but nevertheless we are talking about schools of thought we are talking about critical paradigms and we are also talking about development in development in the culture and art and mostly the the kind of developments which could be identified in particular texts particular movements and literary tendencies and these significantly are not too general these are things which could be narrowed down to particular aspects as genres as a dominant practices as a popular culture so we have moved from post-paternity to post-modernism we have moved from the general towards more limited particular understandings and limited discourses and limited uh frameworks and when i say limited this is not in the negative sense at all this is also to make sense of the term make sense of this academic uh pursuit within the gamut of uh of a particular course so when we talk about post modernism and when we say that this is an intellectual framework that we are talking about that this is a an academic discourse and uh and a series of uh uh similar trajectories that we are dealing with we are also made aware of the fact that postmodernism is a continuation of the more radical aspects of your american modernism and uh instantly this was the same sort of modernism which was prevalent in the british isles as well and ah here the term continuation deserves a little more attention because even as part of literary history even as part of literary critical studies uh one of the things that english literacy studies focuses on is the aspect of continuity the aspect of tradition as elliot would put it which has been inherently built into all kinds of literary productions so even when we approach post-modernism it's very important for us to see the continuity within which it's also located so maybe this is also a continuation of the radical aspects of modernism and for example we can talk about reflexivity and irony which were part of the modernist friends as well but on the other hand maybe this is not just continuity maybe there is also a sense of rapture which you know which emerges maybe there's a sense of rupture that emerges with postmodernism and maybe for example there is uh there are dominant tendencies related to the modernist a historical event or the yearning for autonomy and closure so this could be either a continuation from the modernist period or it could be a rupture from some of the aspects related to modernism and uh coming to the question of what exactly constitutes postmodernism which are the sites which would most uh perfectly uh present the aspect of post modernism perhaps we have no ah single easy answer whether it's aspects of the the architecture the illusory kind of architecture whether it's a kind of a digital painting popularized by andy warhol whether those are the particular kinds of readings of literary texts or postmodern art or kinds of poetry exemplified in the beat generation or the general sense of architecture itself we do not know what sort of uh site represents the i represent the idea of postmodernism in the most perfect form in the 20th century and i i'm not even sure whether we would attempt to answer these questions as part of this course because the the intention is not to find an answer for the perf answer uh for which are the perfect sites of postmodernism but what are the ways in which postmodernism gets reflected gets manifest and then 20th century disciplines and different art forms here i also take you through a brief journey through a certain sites certain attacks certain figures in certain movements identified as predominantly postmodernist certain iconic moments if i may put it that way within this post-modern uh trajectory so the first thing that would come to our mind is perhaps our mazel dosham's uh idea of conceptual art the sort of installations that he had in mind the way in which during the modernist period master dushan lived during the modernist period in history so we are also talking about the ways in which marcel duchamp transforms certain very ordinary things into art may be the most shocking and the most controversial installation that he had as part of his conceptual art exhibition in the early 20th century as uh this exemplary work now known as the fountain what duchamp did was as most of you know during the modernist period he shocked the entire art world by placing an inverted urinal as part of an art exhibition and he also had named it r r m u t t and this happened in 1917. and he also had done a very cheap reworking of the of a postcard image of mona lisa by uh by giving her an additional declaration of a mustache and also giving a uh a title l h o o q which reportedly is also a vulgaris expression talking about the sexuality of molaliza and uh many uh keeping these details aside many are of the opinion in the contemporary that muscle do sham perhaps was responsible for opening the road to the postmodern predicament so whether it's a predicament or a sort of a thing to be celebrated in the contemporary it's a question that we'll come back to discuss at a later point but now i hope you're getting or you're also getting a sense of what postmodernist art is what not to expect as postmodern art how postmodern art deliberately defies all kinds of conventions and how there's a way in which the ordinary the mundane and the otherwise non-arty elements and the non-arty objects are immediately transformed into very worthy art installations or very pricey pictures and also in architecture where this is the most evident we find a very direct transformation from the modernist victim less is more towards robert venturi's claim that less is a war during the postmodern times we also find a very irreverent rejection of many of the modernist friends which were seen as uh dictums so in post modern architecture it said that you know we can also find a ah coming together the classical elements and the modernist elements to celebrate our ornamentation to celebrate a decoration which was seen as a completely obnoxious thing during the modernist times because they were advocates of the modernist architects where advocates of a minimalist sense in all kinds of their execution so in the 1970s we find within the space of architecture most of these architects moving away from the functional doctrines of modernism towards a more decorative towards a more pronounced towards a more loud form of protections and in continuation with uh this it's also important to recollect how there's a transition from le corbusiers toward an architecture towards robert venturi's complexity and contradiction in architecture and while this work was published in the 1920s we find complexity and contradiction of architecture getting published in 1966 and we find this transition becoming very important very seminal and also underlying a transition in most of the other aspects related to 20th century art and architecture as well so for robert venturi i speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience including the experience which is inherent in art i like elements which are hybrid rather than pure compromising rather than clean accommodating rather than excluding i am for messy vitality over obvious unity and architecture of complexity and contradiction must employ but embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion so look at these very interesting terms hybrid compromising accommodating messy vitality complexity contradiction difficult inclusion those were not terms which were invoked during the modernist period in fact the modernist almost feared all these things which they they thought were almost nearing them in the 20th century they were also reacting against the various aspects of the 20th century they were also reacting against the aspects of war the the the mortality of the 20th century various political and economic phenomena but at the same time we find the modernist struggling to bring in a certain sense of unity which is completely rejected in a very irreverent fashion by architects such as robert venturi and this also becomes a certain uh kind of a post-modernist uh trend itself um moving out of the sphere of architecture to various other disciplines and various other art forms and and also into a general uh lifestyle of 20th century itself and uh continuing with robert eventually for a few more minutes we also find that they came up with together robert venturi dennis scott brown who also happens to be his wife and stephen eisenhower in 1972 they published another important iconoclastic work learning from las vegas and here they also made a very uh significant distinction between ducks and decorated jets and ducks where according to them very very modernist and uh that was the sort of spaces in which architectural system of space and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form yeah so if you remember the modernists were more concerned about the symbolic form not just in architecture but also in various forms of writings and in decorated sheds which are more reformed 20th century phenomenon more of a postmodern phenomenon robert venturi argues where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program and all the windows applied independently so ornament was seen as an obnoxious thing as something to be rejected during the modernist period and this idea of the decorated sheds become more celebrated in the post-modern period and not just in the space of architecture i reiterate but also across various forms of writing as various forms of culture and even the general lifestyle and keeping in tune with this sort of rejection with the sort of irreverence and the unconventional techniques used in art and architecture when we come to the space of literature we find that this similar kind of an attitude is reflected so here uh we i briefly introduced to you a a very significant work published in 1969 by kurt vonnegut it was titled slaughter house 5 or children's crusade a duty dance with debt so here we have a protagonist billy pilgrim and this work is also a celebration of non-linear events and it also deliberately employs an unreliable narrator but here i want to introduce you another significant aspect about this work uh let's read the read this out together there are almost no characters in the story and almost no dramatic confrontations because most of the people in our in it are so sick and so much the listless places of enormous forces one of the main effects of war after all is that people are discouraged from being characters so here we have a novel which does not pretend to be oblivious to the fact that it is a novel so here is a complete rejection of the ideas of the willing suspension of disbelief which literature so celebrated in the romantic and even during the victorian period so here we find a complete rejection of whatever we had understood as part of literature a complete rejection of the the ideas of storytelling that we had and here we have an author addressing the readers and telling us that there are no characters in the story and that the characters are so sick and they are discouraged from being characters a sense of an agency is being given to the characters and there is no omniscient omnipotent reliable narrator who is controlling these characters over here there's only one the samples that i'm presenting before you and we we would be certainly having a lot of discussions about these interesting texts and in the in the coming uh weeks another important text another another sample text that i want to introduce to you as part of how postmodernism manifests in 20th century is a very impressive uh work by italia calvino if on a winter's night a traveler so this uh title itself is very unconventional it's a very challenging title and if you notice this is not even on title case the entire title is on an uh it's written out in a sentence case and even in the original work it is present in the same way we have a title of a novel in sentence case totally defined the conventions of how novels or even texts could be named this work published in 1979 by talo calvino an italian writer it's a perfect example of postmodern meta fiction and these are some of the terms that we shall be coming back to talk about in detail and this work if on a winter's night of travel is about a reader trying to read a book called if on a winter's night or traveler so it's about a story within a story a story very conscious of the fact that it is a story and conventionally all stories are written either in the first person narrative or in the third person narrative these are some of what this is perhaps one of the earliest lessons that we are taught about stories and about storytelling but here we have calvino completely challenging even the fundamental aspect of storytelling by narrating a story in the second person narrative so how does it work then so here is the beginning paragraph from calvino's novel if honor winter's night of traveller you are about to begin reading italia calvino's new novel if one of internet of traveller relax concentrate dispel every other thought let the world around your feet best to close the door the tv is always on in the next room tell the others right away no i don't want to watch tv raise your voice they won't hear you otherwise i'm reading i don't want to be disturbed maybe they haven't heard you with all that racket speak louder yeah i'm beginning to read it calvino's new novel or if you prefer don't say anything just hope they leave you alone so who is the character here right at the outset we get to know that this is a very direct reference to the reader so the reader is the protagonist reader is the main character of this novel so how much more interesting can it this get so calvino is totally challenging the ways in which the story is supposed to be told he's challenging the reader he's challenging the text he's challenging the very fact that the story is not about something else the story is not about somebody else the story is about you about the or about the reader so these are some of the things that we shall be taking a look at as part of this course we shall be looking at how these various aspects have been theorists and why on earth somebody had to use such a technique to talk about something happening in the 20th century there have also been multiple ways in which many have attempted to theorize post-modernism to define post-modernism in fact one of the important works that we shall also be looking at later in detail is a work named postmodern condition published in 1979 by leotard and in this work he gives a definition of post-modernism which has also been generally accepted as one of the significant uh commentaries about the idea of post-modernism the object of this study is a condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies i have decided to use the term postmodern to describe that condition the word is in current use on the american continent it designates the state of our culture following the transformations which have altered the game rules of for science literature and the arts simplifying to the extreme i define postmodern as incredibility toward meta narratives so we've seen we've taken a look at a series of things where post modernism is manifested and we also have uh seen how some of them have attempted to define postmodernism so this course is about a journey through these various sites where post modernism has uh got reflected has manifested and also how various aspects of postmodernism is are practically used and also about these sort of texts such as leotards uh texts and uh and a number of others who have attempted to give commentaries to give descriptions to item definitions about the postmodern age so coming to the end of our discussion today i also wind up this with this caveat that post modernism is not an organized movement with leaders and central figures throughout our discussion we would see a complete absence of one particular figure emerging on one particular site being privileged as being postmodernist uh uh the postmodernist element and post-modernism is also a site which deliberately addresses definitions and classification so though we would be making a number of attempts to define a number of atoms to talk about the term and frame this in various aspects we would see that postmodernism would continue to defy all of these atoms and would uh not lend itself to a single sort of definition or a single framework for classification and throughout these discussions we would also see that there is very little agreement on the precise nature the characteristics and the manifestations of post-modernism we would only have a a general a trend being visible a general uh sort of a genealogy on on being unraveled otherwise it would be a rather difficult exercise to pin it down to particular elements to particular characteristics nevertheless throughout this course through a journey of particular texts particular tendencies and dominant trends and the characteristics we should also be trying to map the terrain called post-modernism so in the next few lectures we shall be talking about post-modernism in literature in greater detail and uh delving into uh deeper into the text deeper into the various phenomena and also critically analyzing the text and domains available to us thank you for listening and i look forward to seeing you in the next class [Music] you