Contemporary American Literature

Course 2
2nd Year American Studies
3rd Year English minor
Spring Semester 2012
Prof.dr. Rodica Mihaila
The Postmodernist Novel
What is Postmodernism?
Modernity-Postmodernity (features)
Baudrillard)
Modernity/Postmodernity Paradigms

the postmodern condition (Lyotard, Habermas,

Modernity=
- asserts the exclusive either/or binary opposition.
- closure, unity, order, the absolute, the rational
- privileging of the general and the universal (in matters of truth, beau
ty
and goodness. - and so it could exclude and marginalize
- a monolithic, homogeneous concept of culture
Postmodernity= Defined as contesting the modern paradigm. A major shift
away from modernity s universalizing and totalizing drive, which was first fueled
in the 17th c. by Descartes foundational ambitions and his faith in reason.
-shift in the notion of subjectivity (Edward Said: because of Foucault...
man is dissolved in ...the striations of language itself, turning finally into l
ittle more than a constituted subject , a speaking pronoun, fixed indecisively i
n the eternal, ongoing rush of discourse p.195
- it questions the modern paradigm: hierarchy and system - it makes disa
ppear the conforting security - ethical, ontological, epistemologtical - that rea
son offered within the modern paradigm (liberating and empowering effect - see po
st-structuralism and deconstruction)
- postmodernity=a heterogeneous category. Despite its inclusiveness its
deconstructing of the modern paradigm comes from the awareness of the value and
significance of respecting difference and otherness - a new cultural politics of
difference - race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion,etc. Multiplicity,
diversity, heterogeneity
- asserts the value of the inclusive both/and thinking
- paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, and contingency
- valuing of the local and the particular, the provisional and the tenta
tive
instead of the universal and permanent values in whose n
ame modernity
could exclude and marginalize
Postmodernity/Postmodernism
P. in various art forms - interpreted either as a continuation of the m
ore radical aspects of Euro-American modernism (paradox, irony) or as rupture wi
th modernism s ahistorical bent or its yearning for aesthetic autonomy and closure
.
Main features: interest in issues of subjectivity and representation (ho
w we image
ourselves to ourselves)
-concern for ideology and history ( historiographic metafi
ctions )
-formal self-consciousness, parody, wordplay, etc
-acknowledgement of the impossibility and the undesirabi
lity of reaching any kind of absolute and final truth
-paradoxes: its ironic self-undermining critical stance
and its commitment to doubleness (juxtaposition and equal weighing of self-refle
xiveness and history, the inward-direction of form and the outward-direction of
politics)
-the breakdown of the divide between high and popular ar

t - resulting

heterogeneity of discourse
-emphatic self-reflexiveness - precursor in modernist fo

rmal autonomy
-abandonment of any reference to a center, a subject, a
privileged
reference, an origin - decenter
ing challenge , interogation of
human certaintie
s (Truth, beauty, goodness).
-celebrates the different and the resistant, validates m
ultiplicity,
heterogeneity, and diversity
-in a parodic culture irony reigns - the loss of the cer
tainty and stability
of the Cartesian order (the Cart
esian paradigm of modernity)
Representing the Postmodern (definition)
Impossibility to define it, given its agenda of decentering, challenging
, and subverting the guiding metanarratives of Western culture. (see the challenge
of feminist, post-colonial and African-American theory). Common denominators of
the postmodern condition in action result in certain practices
A. Postmodernism as an aesthetic practice - a term first used in the 1950s, but
accepted as a general post-1960s period label attached to cultural forms that di
splay such characteristics as : reflexivity, irony, parody, and a mixing of the
conventions of popular and high art.
-connections and disconnections on the aesthetic level among modernism,
the avant-garde, and the postmodern:
-modernism found in art a feasible and self-sustaining activity
the more self-counscious and abstract it became. The work of art was a closed en
tity whose meanings were fixed and central (required explication or decipherment
)
-the avant-garde saw in formal experimentation a way of tranform
ing the manner in which society saw itself and people behaved
-postmodernism - combined the two (bringing the insight into the
disursive nature of everything (Derrida))- it applied the model of art as a sel
f-contained discourse to social discourse as well. As a language, art cannot be c
onsidered separately from cultural languages in general. p.195 Postmodernism is d
ispersed - a collaborative aesthetic model.
the author asthe romantic creator (as authority) in mode
rnism is replaced by the demystified postmodern one - an agent in history, aswar
e of the culturally constituted status of his authorship
By the 1980s, Postmodernism extended to:
B. Postmodernism as a period concept (a mood or term for a cultural epoc - Terry
Eagleton, Jameson, Baudrillard) Linked to the cultural logic of late capitalism
(Jameson), the general condition of knowledge in an age of informational techno
logy (Lyotard), or a wholesale substitution of the simulacrum for the real (Baudrill
ard)
C. As a development in thought - a critique of the assumptions of
Enlightenment or the discourses of modernity and their foundation in notions of
universal reason. (Heiddeger and Nitzsche - against the Cartesian subject-center
ed Reason.
Postmodernism = aesthetic (Hassan) ; 1.Ontological uncertainty () , fragmentarines
s, indeterminancy, absence of the real (simulacra, simulation instead of represe
ntation)
2. heterogeneity (inclusiveness, local, particular, temporal, provisional instead
of universal, general, timeless); hybridization (genres, popular culture)
3. Subversion (anti-essentialism, de-naturalizing, disolves borders): Irony, par
adox, pastich, intertextuality, performative, ludic, carnavalesque;
4. De-centered self; subjectivity, otherness, multiplicity
5. Self-reflexivity; metafiction, narcissism
6. Open-endedness

The American Postmodernist Novel

2 waves of postmodernists: (fabulation, metafiction, self-reflexive) surfiction,
critifiction
1.
the late 50s & 60s: Barth, Pynchon, William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 59),
John Hawks, Heller, Vonnegut, William Gass, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Ko
sinski: disorder, deliberate chaos, fragmentation, discolation, (literary disrup
tions) self-reflective, absurd and arbitrary, parody, pastish
2.
the 70s: Walter Abish, Steve Katz, Gilbert Sorrentino, , Ronald Sukenick
: construction of a fictional illusion and the laying bare of that illusion= fic
tion that negates the symbolic power of language