Hello. Today I'm going to briefly talk about postmodern literature or postmodernist literature. I have a longer lecture on it and I'll post a link to it in the description. So I'll start with a simple definition which is easily accessible on the web on Wikipedia.
and it defines postmodernism as a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s. This is the beginning paragraph.
of the description of postmodern literature on Wikipedia, and I'm gonna play with it, but keep this simple definition in mind. But the first thing that we need to understand is that postmodernism, how is it different from modernism? Now, when we use the term post, we automatically assume that it is somehow something that comes after postmodernism, but that necessarily is not the case.
Actually, in most research, postmodernism builds on the modernist tropes and plays with them and doesn't necessarily replace them. So in order to really understand postmodernism, we have to have a thorough knowledge of modernism as a literary movement itself because it plays with it. Another important distinction which comes across in one of the works by Brian McHale in his book on postmodernist fiction is that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is, according to him, that in modernism the dominant philosophical strain is epistemological and in postmodernism it's ontological.
Now what does he mean by that? Epistemology is of course the art of knowing or when the questions are about knowledge. Ontology is when the philosophical question addresses the question of existence itself.
So what he's arguing is that in a typical modernist novel It's like a detection story. There is something hidden and the questions that we are asking ourselves is, can I trust the narrator? Is he or she telling me the truth?
And you as a detective are trying to figure out the clues to find the ultimate solution. I mean, think of Epsilon Epsilon. I mean, the beginning, Quentin has been called by Miss Rosa because she wants to tell him something and we have to read the whole novel to learn, you know, what the secret is.
Whereas the ontological dominant, according to Brian McHale, is what forms part of postmodernism. And what that means is that most of the questions in postmodernist fiction are the questions of existence. Is this the only world? Are there parallel universes?
Is this the only reality? Right? These are the questions, questions of existence that foreground in our mind as we read postmodernist fiction. So overall, McHale also argues that a sister genre of modernism is the detective story, whereas the sister genre of postmodernist fiction is the science fiction novel.
Okay, now a lot of people on the web would tell you that postmodernism is an incredulity towards the grand narratives. Like, what does that literally mean? So what it means is the post-1960s, you know, The counterculture movement, materially in the world, there is a challenge to established grand narratives of religion, of the Western civilization, of naturalness, of history, of truth. And part of it is because more and more constituencies are entering the conversation, the women, the minorities, the gays and lesbians, like people from the developing world have started voicing their opinions and they're being recognized. So it is no longer possible to sustain one or two large universal ideas to hold the reality together.
And since those universals were created through these silencing acts and through these exclusions, one important attribute of postmodernity and within that postmodern literature is a challenge to any established grand narratives of truth. And that is one important peculiarity of postmodernism. Another important aspect which came across in the definition that I shared with you is intertextuality and what do we mean by it.
That there is no standalone text, right. The texts have other texts in them and sometimes the story that I'm telling can have another story within it or can incorporate another story within it but in a playful way or you can have a historical text. and rewrite it in a novel as a new kind of history. All of this, this kind of intertextuality, not allusions, but working with other texts within the body of a new text, forms part of postmodernist literature, and pastiche is a part of that.
Now, pastiche literally means something that is a mixture of different things. In postmodernist literature and art, pastiche is when an artist or a writer picks up another work, right, reworks it into something new, right, and that way you are privy to the previous work but this playful reworking of it comes across as a new work itself and that is this perpetual reproduction of earlier works in new forms, new languages, new genres, and that is an important trope in postmodernist art. but also an important trope in postmodernist literature. You could read Christa Wolf's Cassandra, which is a re-reading of Fall of Troy, a historical event, right, and the story of Achilles, but now told from the point of view of Cassandra. So that's one way of defining history in postmodernism, but also pastiche.
Metafiction is an another important part of it and that is that in the body of a novel sometimes you will come across references to things that are not part of the narrative, that are outside the narrative and the author takes you there or the narrator takes you there but that metafictional aspect is part of the novel. Now for example, Shame, not necessarily a post-modernist novel, Salman Rushdie's Shame but as you read the novel at some places you will get this disembodied thought. person voice, right? We don't know whether it's an authorial voice, which gives us factual accounts of having lived in Pakistan. And sometimes that metafiction actually plays an important part.
For example, in Shame, the part that it plays, according to my reading, is that it tells you that, okay, you're reading a work of fiction, but the reality is even worse than that. Now, whether we agree with that or not, but metafiction plays that kind of role within. a literary fictional narrative. Another important term is self-reflexivity. What do we mean by it?
It's an important trope in postmodernist literature. And what it means is that at some points in a postmodernist novel or short story, the story or the author will point to the story itself as a work of art or as something that is being told. It will point to its own crafted nature. Best example of that is the opening lines of Italo Calvino's A Fonaventura's Night of Traveler, where he starts with, you have just bought Italo Calvino's new novel.
Put your feet up, tell your roommate to turn down the music, tell him you just bought Italo Calvino's new novel A Fonaventura's Night of Traveler. Now this is the novel pointing to itself within the body of the novel itself and that aspect of postmodernism is called self-reflexivity. Another example would be the opening lines of Kurt Wernigert's Slaughterhouse-Five. I mean, it starts with, I have always wanted to write a novel about Dresden.
And as you read it, you realize that that is part of the novel itself, right? And that self-reflexivity then in a way is when a work of fiction through an authorial voice or through a narrative voice points. to its own fictionality or its own creation.
Parody. Now just like irony was considered one of the biggest aspects of modernism, parody, playful playing with history or other characters from other novels, bringing them into your own novel, or playfully inserting historical events but telling them either from a playful, from a funny, comical, or from a different point of view. is another important trope of possible postmodernist literature and you can find a lot of great examples in late modernist texts or in real postmodernist texts this aspect of parody of the parody of history but also parody of other works and so to conclude I mean this is going to be a very brief lecture Postmodernist literature emerges after 1960s, right, has a kind of incredulity towards grand narratives. It replaces all the grand narratives with particular small narratives that tell the stories of silenced constituencies. It plays with history, it paradises it, it is intertextual because sometimes it can be combined with several other texts that are contemporaneous to that text.
came before it. It relies on pastiche, reworking old tropes, reworking old stories in a new form. It is metafictional because it would add non-fictional elements within the body of fiction that would point to something outside the novel and shed light on it.
It is self-reflexive because the novel speaks about its own character, its own fictionality, and that most of the times a post-coronial work will have some element of parody in it. These are some of the major tropes that I can cover over here. I do have a longer lecture on this and I will post a link to that in the description.
But right now these are just some of my thoughts in a very short lecture on post-modernist fiction, post-modern fiction. If you have any questions please post them in the comments below and As always, thank you so much and please do subscribe. And if nothing else, I will see you next time.