/lit/ - Literature

>>22640866
>How is it harder than Medieval Europe or the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries?
No era has the 'hardest' books.
>Why is there all this bitching and moaning?
Who?
>Was there not mental illness and addiction before?
These are themes not attributes of postmodernism.
>What is so special about today?
It's not that special just prevalent.

>>22640866
Every single French postmodernist signed a treatise to lower the age of consent in France (which was already at 15 years old at the time)
That's all you need to know about post modernism.

It's hard to explain postmodernism. You learn more about it watching contemporary TV shows and mediocre entertainment literature than reading objective non-fiction about it. I think the modern show Normal People gives a good summary about it. Even more so when we contrast it to a older show called Friends. Yes, in Friends, it's all about sex, but it's not all about sex, it's all about sex but it's also not all about sex, if you get what I mean. Ultimately it's all about sex put everyone at least pretends it's not all about sex, and there's no hypocrisy about it being all about sex. It's supposed to be funny that it's all about sex. In Normal People, it's all about sex, like there's not even romance in it. The whole plot revolves around this dude fucking this other chick, and there's no other plot, and everyone is a hypocrite about it. But postmodernism is much more complex than that. It can't be reduced to 'it's all about sex but people are hypocrites about it', but that's an important component of it. Analyzing the roles of each gender specifically, the man always wants sex, that's pretty much his personality in postmodernism, and the woman doesn't always want sex, and she feels like her bf/husband/fucktoy whatever limits her in her dreams of doing stuff like studying or going somewhere. And when she finally goes somewhere, what does the filthy whore do? She betrays her supporting husband and fucks some random dude because she felt like it. In postmodernism, everything is ok as long as you did it because you felt like it. But not only that, condemning someone for having done something obviously wrong the accused has to do no less than say that 'I just felt like it', and it's ok. There's no morality, this isn't all there is about pissmodernism, but it constitutes an important component. With these two dogmas, sex is maxime and everything is ok as long as you felt like it, discovering the remaining components becomes easier a task. Parents limiting the choices of their children are evil, strict teachers are evil, prejudiced people are evil, punishment is evil, talking bad is evil, thinking about stuff is boring, questioning dogmas is useless, etc. etc. I can't close my comment with a final conclusion. Discovering all the nuances, telling the postmodernoids (consciously or unconsciously) apart from the other species of twentifirstcentarians is a daily practice, and every day one is surprised by discovering this new detail and rejecting an old notion that turned out false or half false. Ultimately it's a social phenomenon out of control of the individual. The causes are more profound than a simple bad education system or something like that. In other words, it is an illness without remedy.

>>22640926
>Who?
Postmodernist literature is bleak and nihilistic.

>These are themes not attributes of postmodernism.
Yes they are.

>>22640866
>What is so special about today?
That postmodern culture is devoid of adherable identifiable meaning yet man still posses the same impulses as always but now there's nothing to anchor them to. Strip away meaning and you strip away peoples ability to convey it to each other, reducing them to a set of aesthetic choices that ultimatley remain superficial. You could probably consider medieval society a society of ultimate meaning, and then see slow decline in it as you progress that eventually nosedives towards the end of the 20th century

>>22640966
>Parents limiting the choices of their children are evil, strict teachers are evil, prejudiced people are evil, punishment is evil, talking bad is evil, thinking about stuff is boring, questioning dogmas is useless, etc. etc. I can't close my comment with a final conclusion. Discovering all the nuances, telling the postmodernoids (consciously or unconsciously) apart from the other species of twentifirstcentarians is a daily practice, and every day one is surprised by discovering this new detail and rejecting an old notion that turned out false or half false. Ultimately it's a social phenomenon out of control of the individual. The causes are more profound than a simple bad education system or something like that. In other words, it is an illness without remedy.
Women are free or unfree?

>>22641026
>medieval society
How is waiting to go to heaven meaning? There was never meaning.

>>22641031
> Women are free or unfree?
They are basically the freest they have ever been, out-categorizing societies where women were freer but the whore element was more or less non-existent (all the terms for 'whore' seem to be of non-germanic source, it seems to have been imported, first by the Finnish peoples, then by the Celts).
On the other hand, women are at the lowest form of existence they have ever been. The thing is that even in societies where women are the most oppressed, their quality of life never suffers under it. In Saudi Arabia, women might very well be forbidden to walk outside without a hijab and have to go accompanied by a husband or brother, but in the house itself, they pretty much oppress their husbands except for the fact that whenever they demand them food or drink or whatever, they have to do it. Meanwhile, in modern Western society, the only power women have on men is on the matter of sex, and because Manu men have been systematically corrupted from a young age to conditionally seek the female sex itself, instead of it's other positive attributes, this apparent disadvantage of men clouds the otherwise obvious fact that most women, with the exception of the ones that resemble the strong, warlike woman of the past the most, that is, those that despise men and ignore their efforts, even from the most chad-like, with the exception of the ones who make positive use of them without being oppressive about it. All the other ones are more or less conditioned to become absolute whores forced to serve strange men for capital profit with no immediate recompense likewise, and the relationship they have to their families is not less tragic, considering that the women that give birth to them are mostly of the same condition.

>>22641058
>How is waiting to go to heaven meaning? There was never meaning.
>waiting to go to heaven
Reddit-tier understanding of medieval society. Also why communicate in the first place without meaning?

>>22641072
Erotic love could be meaning as in 19th century romanticism but Medieval society was obsessed with the suffering of Jesus. The meaning of life was to suffer; be modest in the extreme; and go to heaven. Or be a lord and go to war for Jesus which is much better but was reserved for the few. The former is not meaning.

>>22641148
Again, reddit tier, and confusing early modern sects with medieval christendom. As if the suffering of jesus was a damnation of man to the same fate, the hardships of life were not it's ultimate meaning you'd be insane to think that this is what anyone believed. The point is that medieval society lived in it's entirety with the unshakable believe in the possibility of absolution and eternal life even in the face of hardships they faced. You had a society that lived with the spiritual in a concrete way, not dissimiliar to the ancients, but in a much more concise way. Every peasent, every priest, every ruler lived with the certainity of judgement day to come, a society that in principle demanded ultimate accountability from it's members, is a society that attributes ultimate meaning to it's actions.

>Erotic love could be meaning as in 19th century romanticism
Also you seemt to confuse meaning with purpose

>>22640866
medieval europe is a long time in a big place. i would rather exist in bleak, meaningless and ugly southern california 2023 than have the plague, but assuming that you were not actively dying or getting your shit raided by one of the countless wars, life had meaning, you had a community, and you had tech support (priests) to god if there was any issue.

there was probably mental illness like autism and shit but as for depression, probably a lot less.

how do you find meaning in a world that is meaningless to our understanding? without god we are just left with our material reality, which, kind of sucks.

>>22640866
It is the period that follows modernism. Eventually when enough time has passed they give it another name. They may very well end up calling it the identity crisis period.

>>22641220
Its and it's don't mean the same thing. Learn to spell.

>>22641367
Your a faggot whose got nothing off value to sai

>>22641254
If you were a lord it was by all accounts pretty great.

>>22641441
tfw not born a medieval lord

all the fulfillment of believing 100% that god loves me and has a plan without any of the peasant nonsense

>>22640944
It's based?

>>22641559
kill yourself

>>22641364
>>22641364
> Eventually when enough time has passed they give it another name. They may very well end up calling it the identity crisis period.
“Identity crisis” isn’t too bad a term when applied to the postmodern ethos. You may well consider it as humanity having a cosmic identity crisis coming from the collapse of faith and certainly in old narratives, as well as the increasing interconnection of the world and access to and interactions between cultures formerly more distant or isolated, bringing up the challenges of pluralism, perspectivism, and relativism.

In pre-modern literature, Grand overarching meta-narratives or all-ordering, all-encompassing worldviews were more common in literature and art, of all times and places. Throughout the West, it was often Christianity (or Roman Catholicism specifically, but not always). In Chinese literature, you can find it as a blend of deep study of Confucianism and Taoism that characterizes the cultured, educated Chinese person’s worldview and experience for many centuries.

In the West, for the past centuries, Christianity’s grip loosened, particularly with the Enlightenment, and this is where you even get religious satirists and skeptics like Voltaire and Diderot, yet even in this case the overarching grand meta-narrative is simply Enlightenment philosophy itself (the faith in science, industry, and technology, a progressive worldview, civil liberties, and that humanity may be currently “unenlightened” but can be increasingly “enlightened” by the spread of these things). So even with the weakening of the grip of Christianity as a grand meta-narrative on Western culture, we don’t instantly slide into postmodernism — other grand meta-narratives simply take its place, including in art and literature, like the Enlightenment ethos, then Romanticism as a reaction to what it viewed as Enlightenment’s sterile over-reliance on intellect, science, and technological progress (leading to what Blake called “dark Satanic mills”), now replacing it with a reliance on emotion, intuition, and sensuous art as a replacement, and, in America, literary and philsophical schools like Transcendentalism, which weren’t quite Christian in an orthodox sense, but replaced it with a sort of pan(en)theist nature-worship, a glorification of rugged American qualities of individualism and self-reliance, and even some inspiration by relatively recently translated texts (on a historical scale) like the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads Emerson and Thoreau made praiseful reference to, plus some of this Romanticist influence.

>>22641826
So what was this long, rambling, yet still incredibly condensed historical overview the prelude to? With the 20th-century, modernism comes about as a father to postmodernism, and sometimes even having its obvious components within itself, but not always as consistently (just like you can find proto-postmodern tropes in older literature like Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, and Hamlet, with the self-referentiality, metafiction, and sometimes proto-existentialist worldview). The modernist ethos was, broadly, “Make it new!” (Ezra Pound’s slogan). You can see the overturning of old poetic forms in modernist classics like Eliot’s Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos, along with the cultural and religious syncretism at times (Eliot’s Sanskrit mantras like “Shantih Shantih Shantih” in his Waste Land and references to the Upanishads blended with lots of references to Western classical literature and culture, Pound similarly so with the heavy allusions to the Western canon, from the Greeks to Troubadour poetry, but with Chinese culture and even Chinese characters besides thrown in). You can see it’s overturning the old conventions of the poem being either clearly a lyric, an ode, an elegy, a (romantic, typically) sonnet, a narrative or epic poem, instead turning into some cut-up, fragmented expressionist endeavor that may sometimes have aspects of these but is doing something altogether besides that.

Yet, the overriding faith of modernism is essentially that: this is now a truer, better form of poetry (or novel, as in Ulysses, the summit of literary modernism, or other forms of modernist art), it is the best and even only way to truly express modern life, it more accurately captures life as well as critiques of the modern world. Joyce’s Ulysses is rather different, more experimental, and more fractured than the classical lucidity of novels like, say, Flaubert’s, or the realists’ novels in general, but the belief is that this paradoxically is now an even better summation of the world and of life: through experimenting with the form of the novel (or poem, or other forms of art), life has been even more accurately captured in all its complexity and detail.

Where postmodernism moves beyond this is, largely, that even the belief that there is a world to represent, or a better way to represent it, is shafted. The specters of pluralism, perspectivism, and relativism have put this into heavy question, with a particular influence from the deconstruction of past worldviews literary and philosophical (with heavy roots in Nietzsche, this strain moving on to inspire Heidegger, and thereupon to the largely French deconstructionists and post-structuralists). There is not even an objective “world” to represent — that itself has been called into doubt. All there is is the clashing of perspectives.

>>22641830
Yet, paradoxically, the postmodern contention is also that we need to take this into account in making literature and art, and in our thinking, as, even if the world ultimately can’t be “represented” as an objective entity, to ignore this is to lapse into a pre-postmodern worldview which will be outdated, corny, old-fashioned and failing to capture enough of the nuances and experiences of modern life, hence dead upon arrival.

A good and not-too-difficult book to read on postmodernism in not just literature but 20th-century art, politics, philosophy, culture, daily life, literary criticism, even theology, religion, and mysticism is Walter Truett Anderson’s “Reality Isn’t What it Used to Be.” It’s not dense theory, but more like an entertaining piece of cultural criticism and sociology.

If you want to put it in terms of occultists, modern figures like Blavatsky, Crowley, Gurdjieff, maybe Evola are modernists par excellence — they are definitely synthesizing and syncretizing many different religious and occult teachings, as well as modernizing them, in a way which wouldn’t be recognized as the original forms of those traditions and even sometimes as a revolt against what they see as the ossified forms of them, but their belief is that thereby they are reaching a higher, truer depiction of supramundane reality and higher truths that wouldn’t be as accessible otherwise and is the greater form of it for modern times. Whereas Rajneesh is the postmodern guru par excellence, a postmodern Hindu guru (or even a postmodern Zen master, postmodern Sufi), reveling in his paradoxical nature, contradictions in his and others’ teachings, deconstructing his own status as guru as well as all religious teachings, noting there is not “one grand objective religion” but rather different teachings and practices suiting different disciples in different contexts.

You can also find some notes of proto-postmodernism in some of the old Buddhist teachings, Indian skeptical/relativist schools of philosophy, some of the Greek Sophists and Presocratics (Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things”), and in some Taoist writings like Chuang Tzu’s. Philip K. Dick is also a pretty entertaining and easy-to-read author who very well encapsulates the ethos of postmodernism. He deliberately set out to create a “perspectivist” form of literature in many of his works, as he said in some interview of his once, where the narrative often hops from one character’s mindset to another to another and back and forth in circles in free-indirect discourse (a Rashomon effect), these mindsets and worldviews often being vastly different, and with the addition that he’s ultimately in deep skepticism of what the underlying world that all these characters are observing and participating really “is,” if there is an objective world at all or if it’s simply the creation of its co-participants.

>>22641863
>Yet, paradoxically, the postmodern contention is also that we need to take this into account in making literature and art, and in our thinking, as, even if the world ultimately can’t be “represented” as an objective entity, to ignore this is to lapse into a pre-postmodern worldview which will be outdated, corny, old-fashioned and failing to capture enough of the nuances and experiences of modern life, hence dead upon arrival.
Good posts, but this part in particular always had me detest postmodernist, the point of saying "there's no meaning, no objective truth, believe me!" is insane. It stretches what is bound to be literary/artistic tool of analysis into a pseudophilosophy that exists largley as a detached aesthetic that in turn reduces everything it mingels with to the very same thing. Being a genuine post-modernist is facing the absurd and getting on your knees to suck its dick because you only interact with things to satisfiy your impuls of being a fag

>>22641826
>>22641830
>>22641863
>>22643676
Where postmodernism stops is where true science begins. The primordial instincts take over and we return to the Roman Emperor's court where everything was allowed.

>he thinks we live in "postmodernism"

>>22643812
The chicken doesn't understand it's a chicken and that the farmer is a farmer. That's the problem with autists like yourself.

>>22643676
>>22643676
That’s a fair point (the first 75% of the post, at least), and there’s much to criticize in the postmodern sensibility and worldview, but I also think it’s not always just a case of artists and writers deliberately sitting down and woodenly going: “Now I am going to be a POSTMODERNIST. How can I make my book postmodern?” (although there are certainly some who think and create art like that, and the result can either be garbage or still surprisingly good, depending on the artist’s talent). But no, most of the time it’s more like a cultural sensibility that inevitably seeps into our mindset, hence influencing culture and art. It may be a worldview that has a latent contradiction in it (the ages-old objection of, “If everything is relative to different observers and cultures, isn’t this itself being claimed as an objective truth?”), but literature and philosophy based on Greek mythology and Christianity for much of the West’s history could arguably be said to be based on latent contradictions, too, but while still producing great works.

My posts were more about the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism. These are important to postmodern literature but not necessarily consciously and deliberately so, or centrally so — the literary tropes it favors like metafiction, self-referentiality, intertextuality, unreliable narrators, often favoring a pluralistic as opposed to a monistic approach (moving away one central plot or one central narrator or character), pastiche, non-linearity (cutting up the classical unities of time and space in literature/spatiotemporal distortion), and the like, are usually more important to and noteworthy in postmodern literature.

I also think the impulse of deconstructing the old is a praiseworthy and valid enterprise, when done intelligently and meaningfully — it’s a necessary step in the development of space-age human culture, and being freed from some of bounds of classical thought and art really has created some wonderful literature that wouldn’t’ve been possible otherwise. The modern intellectual, artistic, and spiritual constipation of humanity, though, I think comes from how difficult the next step is — to RECONSTRUCT something valid after DECONSTRUCTING everything, to make something meaningful out of the detritus and contingencies of our culture. Both parts seem necessary.

>>22643822
>The chicken doesn't understand it's a chicken and that the farmer is a farmer. ->That's the problem with autists like yourself.
This guy gets it. We’re all postmodernists, whether we like it or not.

>>22644204
I do not see "intentional" postmodern (as in embracing it by choice or circumstance) art divorcing itself from the "asthetic cage" it necessarily inhabits, at best, it's a living gimmick, great "postmodernist" pieces spring from the confrontation with it, not through it's embrace. You speak of intention and cultural sensibilities, but regardless of source and intention, to embrace it is not just about accepting contradiction, it's to deny the possibility of contradicition itself, it's to deny the ability to engage such concepts on a real basis, which to me is vapid asthetic play pretend that abandons technique and ingenuity for the glorification of detachment and egocentrism. A "movement" that denies meaning is necessarily held together by asthetic attraction. Hence: Sucking off the void = falling back to base egocentric impulses in lieu of genuine confrontation. That is what I mean by "genuine postmodernist", becasue we all are after all postmodernist by circumstance, but confronting one's condition is not the same as embracing it, DFW didn't write about how cool ironic detachment is.

>>22644204
>>22644667
Too add on this, once you analyse a system of thought from the outside you necessarily step on faultlines that stand in contradiction with the principels of the system itself, but with postmodernism you fall into the trap that it really demands the premise that below all is the void if you're willing to step out of your presumptions and deconstruct it. So you come up with terms like contradiction, or paradox, or intersectionality, when all of that is missing the point of what deconstruction is, namely the dissultion of structure, but once that is taken to the postmodern absolute it becomes dissolution of thought itself. You end up relying on language to analyse something that denies the validity of the way you use said language in the first place. So you analyse it as you would any other philosophy or theology, but it's not comparable to anything else, it defies analysis as it defies knowledge and meaning itself

>>22640866
infinite jest has been gathering dust on my shelf for quite some time. i read like a few pages maybe more maybe less. all i remember is he was sitting in a room with a college board or something. i think he said he intentionally picked his outfit and put his hands a certain way?
anyways, should i actually read it?

>>22641863
I think philip k dick will be the ethos of what it comes after post-modernism.
post-modernism still have reverence for the "Make it new!" slogan. thats how i always see it. I dont think post-modernism is an acceptance of paradoxical nature and contradiction, they are only playing in the kindergarden with it. what i mean is that post-modernism is the ethos of modernism using the own modernism as something to deconstruc and "make it now", nothing more, nothing less. but still is not that completely philip k dick ultra-subjective world. we are near but not there yet.

>>22640866
>try picrel audiobook so i can multitask
>get to the part where they are court rotation exercises
>now all i wanna do is atom smashing

postmodernism is antif-oundationalism politically. aka there is no ground for an organizing principle (country, religion- they are all compromised or illegitimated or evil) and the individual is the most important thing. in a literary sense is is a certain style (not experimental or progressive, that would be modernism). philosophically it is kind of like doubting any discipline can explain the world perfectly, but acknowledge they let us understand the world in certain ways at the same time.

>>22644667
>DFW
He didn't make it. He never tried to find a solution; if anything he acted as a gatekeeper to the way out.

>>22644715
>intersectionality
Wants to integrate the outsiders into the system. It's not bad in itself, but it's human, and marginalized groups are deeply wounded and insecure, so they mostly fail to integrate. There is nothing left to integrate to.

>>22645400
The system creates divided subjects and pegs them against each other. There is no whole to integrate to.