POSTMODERNISM, definition, general features fully solved rated A+ 2023/2024

POSTMODERNISM, definition, general featuresPostmodernism: the term - correct answer - like 'modernism' or 'realism', 'postmodernism' can be used a) as a period term, and b) as a term designating a certain trend in literature and other media a) period from the 1960s to around 2000, or, as some say, to the present (i.e. not quite immediately following modernism, since the 1940s and l 950s showed a 'reaction against modernist experimentation' in poetry and fiction; cf. Rabinovitz 1967); the French experimental novel of the 1950s (nouveau roman) may also be regarded as postmodernist b) a trend in literature (cf. Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound [1968]) and beyond, characterized, e.g., by an ironic recycling of past epochs, genres and works and their conventions, and an experimental use of the medium at hand; pm experimentalism is akin to modernism as an innovative trend Characteristic features of Postmodernist fiction - correct answer - pms fiction: fiction characterized by experimental deviations from traditional realistic fiction-writing, extensively using, e.g., intertextuality, metafiction/metareference in various forms; based on a sceptical epistemology (esp. concerning language; representation; originality; identity; stable, holistic meaning; truth) Postmodernist fiction a. Social context - correct answer also modernist was elite's affair, Joyce's Ulysses just for the fun of it. fiction written often by academic writers for an elite of academic readers, though there are attempts at a re-population of pm fiction (cf. Fiedler 1969). Written by prof of literature wrote for students of other profs. Died in 2008. Postmodernist fiction b. Aesthetic context - correct answer - background: mass culture that offers more or less realistic and illusionistic ·possible worlds' especially in film - partly in reaction to this development: anti-realism/anti-traditionalism and radicalization of modernist experimentalism Postmodernist fiction c. Aesthetic basis - correct answer - belief in the exhaustion (Barth 1967) or 'death' of all traditional literature and literary categories or genres (cf. Sukenick, "The Death of the novel") - literature not as a 'work' of art with a given meaning, which is to be reconstructed by the reader, but as an open 'text', whose multiple meanings are to be constructed by the reader (Barthes 1971) - anti-mimetic aesthetics: art not as a mirror but as an arbitrary construction of reality _ -> emphasis on metareference/metafiction instead of hetero-reference Postmodernist fiction d. Philosophical basis - correct answer - epistemology: radicalization of the modernist scepticism (which was informed by a pervading subjectivism) due to the pm 'linguistic determinism': the belief that all 'reality'/perception of reality is prestructured or even created by language and structured like a text -> 'pan-textuality' (hence the importance of the philosophy of language and of semiotics); language as a new transcendental agency after the 'death of metaphysics' - radical loss of belief in 'logocentrism' (Derrida), in all systems of meaning ('master discourses' [Lyotard 1979) and in all concepts of order (e.g. logical hierarchies, binary oppositions such as the opposition of fact vs. fiction, male vs. female)-> pm as an anti-Enlightenment position/practice - belief in the pan-fictionalily and pan-intertextnality of our experience of reality - decentering of the subject (becomes a mere 'chambre d'echos' [Barthes 1975]); if applied to the author: 'death of the author' (Barthes) - deconstruction: based on the theoreme of the endless deferral of meaning in language; meaning is here conceived of as difference operating in an open system: the meaning of one questionable signifier is approached by looking for a (metaphorical) substitute or 'supplement', which in turn is questionable, and so on; > 'the gliding of signifieds under the signifiers' (Lacan); hence the impossibility of writing a logically coherent text with a unified meaning; deconstruction as a critical interpretive activity of hunting for the hidden contradictions of a text (and especially of its metaphors as the chief symptoms of the deferral of meaning) and of laying bare these contradictions: interpretive '(re)construction' the logical structure and assumptions of a text+ their subsequent 'destruction' 'deconstruction' (Derrida) The story level of postmodernist fiction - correct answer - devaluation of the story level and deconstruction of traditional storytelling through: *banality and uneventfulness, lack of closure/open endings or overcomplication and ironic symmetries of the plot (e.g. multiple 'mises en abyme'); *improbable fantasy elements; ambiguities or illogical contradictions (e.g. due to metalepsis and multiple endings) * open determination of the story, not by the events of an alleged reality beyond the text, but rather by other, 'artificial' elements (e.g. by the text/language itself; by other texts/intertextuality) * ironically simulating traditional stories/story elements and undermining them, laying them bare as mere pre-texts for the sake of critical meta fiction * dereferentializafion