Postmodernism (A Quick View)

Postmodernism is often used as a period term by those who recover history. Foucault’s notion of history as ‘a plurality of discourse’ and Lyotard’s concept of ‘language games’ assert postmodernism as a periodising one. Terry Eagleton criticizes postmodernism from Marxist stand point. For Jameson, the definitive, signifying practice of postmodernism is based on ‘pastiche’ (pastiche means the imitation of one style by another but unlike parody it does not contain irony or satire), which bears an echo of Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’.

 

Besides pastiche, the key markers of postmodernism for Jameson are a depthlessness that situates meaning on the surfaces of the texts, a weakened sense of historical time, a conflation of high and mass culture, a commodifation of art and a self-referentiality that makes each detail of the present into a symptom of all of postmodernity.

 

“We must regard postmodernism firstly as a mood or style of thought which privileges aesthetic modes over those of logic or reason; secondly as an aesthetic practice with an accompanying body of commentary upon it; and thirdly as a concept designating a cultural epoch which has facilitated the rise to prominence of such theoretical and aesthetic styles and which may or may not constitute a break with previous structures of modernity (Patricia Waugh)

 

Postmodernity can be studied broadly in two ways in relation to culture and in relation to literary criticism. Culturally postmodernism encompasses art and architecture, film and television, dance and music – it heralds a new stage in human history where electronic media has overshadowed print medium.

 

In literature:

The pleasure principle of postmodernism has inevitably led to an endless mixing of genres and media and modes of aesthetic thinking and conceptual art. For example: Film and literature, avant-garde and mass culture, the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the ludicrous, interior monologue and magic realism are often lumped together into a form which reflects the instinct for ‘vita nouva’ (new life) (Vita Nova is a text by Dante published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse)

Postmodernism has been studied along with poststructuralism. Postmodernism in literary criticism is closer to deconstruction and cultural criticism. It shares with deconstruction the undecidability of text, and goes along with cultural criticism which erases the boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. What postmodernist theatre, fiction and poetry have in common the view that literary language has its own reality; not a means of representing reality. The boundary between fiction and non-fiction is blurred. Postmodernism has altered our idea of literature, art and culture by breaking down the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ ; ‘good’ and ‘bad’; with reference to study of these and done away with literary boundaries.

 

Ihab Hassan, in his book, Paracriticisms (1975) equates postmodernism with anti-eliticism and anti-authoritarianism. Linda Hutcheon in her book, A Poetics of Postmodernism views postmodernist fiction as “historigraphic metafiction” bringing history close to fiction.

 

Postmodernism moves away from traditions through experimentation with new literary devices, forms and style. As a discourse, postmodernism is a cultural phenomenon. No wonder, Patricia Waugh calls ‘the cyborg (A cyborg (/ˈsaɪbɔːrɡ/), a contraction of "cybernetic organism", is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline) is another image of the postmodern sublime”. But like any other ‘Movement’ it remained centre stage for a period and then yielded place to postcolonialism.