/lit/ - Literature

"Postmodernism" does not exist.

>>22768156
It's yet to exist.

>>22768117
Postmodernism is a rejection of grand narratives

Cuz it was inspired by faulkner and joyce, you really can't compare literary and philosophical movements like that

>>22768354
Oh, I'm a retard, disregard that second clause

>>22768117
>I mean actually postmodern, not just "post-WW2".
This is a good point. A lot of the narrative quirks we can attribute to postmodern fiction (like fragmentation of the narrative, dislocation in time and space such as by a nonlinear chronology, unreliable narrators, and self-reflexivity or -referentiality) can sometimes be found in earlier modernist authors like Faulkner and Joyce. Postmodernism really is just the ramping up of what the modernists, surrealists, Dadaists, etc. already established. Perhaps one way to put it is now they’re no longer quite viewing these experimental choices as “new”, but as something already “settled,” as their historical forebears that they can gladly choose to continue working in the vein of and see how using these techniques can contribute to the progressive development of the narrative form. Like “the modernists already paved the way for us, now we can use what they used in our literary toolkit after we’ve seen fiction doesn’t have to adhere to the classical Flaubert-like lucidity and Aristotelian unities of time and place and easily recognizable dramatic arcs etc.”

Is Duck Amok postmodern?

>>22768407
>A lot of the narrative quirks we can attribute to postmodern fiction (like fragmentation of the narrative, dislocation in time and space such as by a nonlinear chronology, unreliable narrators, and self-reflexivity or -referentiality) can sometimes be found in earlier modernist authors like Faulkner and Joyce.
yes, that's why describing something as "postmodern fiction" makes no sense

>>22768559
No

How come the meme trilogy is so fucking dense (good thing)? Like reading just one book in the meme trilogy can bring endless enjoyment and academic inquiry, just from trying to figure out what it all means. Like Ulysses was written in 7 years, yet still has Joyce scholars learning new things in every read through. With decades long information also trying to dissect it all. How does someone write like that? Add so much nuance that a piece of literature can forever stay relevant

>>22768581
yes

>>22768654
Try to read the rest of that post I know it's hard for you

>>22768631
>How does someone write like that?
Create treasure, bury it under more treasure. Joyce and Pynchon were writing for posterity.

>>22768710
Your post sucked.

>>22768715
Someone's angry

>>22768710
the rest of your post is just rationalisation

>>22768722
I hope it isn't me.

>>22768631
The best Poetry is even deeper. Joyce admitted Yeats was better than him.

It's a pile of slop that eschews all story structure and its functionality as the thing it is.
Aka postmodern.

I am the guy who wrote this and only this so far >>22768407 but not any follow-up posts (like >>22768581 >>22768710 >>22768722, although thanks for defending me, guy).

I do broadly agree, that “postmodern literature” is often just a label for “post-WW2 European and American experimental fiction.” Phrases like “late modernism” and “high modernism” also overlap easily with postmodernism (for instance, DeLillo and Gaddis, typically called postmodernists, could be seen as “late modernists” or “high modernists” and I think they even explicitly favored these labels IIRC in personal correspondences, and Beckett’s late modernism could overlap with postmodernism, depending on how you want to read it).

However, there are some cases where postmodernism seems a better label than modernism, like for Barth’s, Borges’s, and Nabokov’s more explicitly experimental works, for instance, with the self-reflexivity, metafiction and pastiche. Stream-of-consciousness seems the more favored and most famous trope of modernist literature (Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce), but this modernist trope isn’t as strongly present in authors like Barth, Gaddis, Nabokov, or Pynchon for example, so they can be said to have a different overall literary ethos that makes it easier to bunch them as postmodern. Other defining traits: strong focus on black humor and irony, narrative and chronological non-linearity and fragmentation as I already said, which can also show up as a large complex tangle of subplots that loosely get tied together (think novels like Underworld, Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Against the Day), unreliable narrators (even more strongly so than the S.o.C. stuff of writers like Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, for which modernists it’s more of a psychological point about the unique worlds we all inhabit and not often used to as strongly call into question the fundamentals of the narrative itself as some postmodernists do), and metafiction.

Honestly it’s sort of a pseud discussion. The more important thing is: what’s the great literature that actually turns you on, and what did you get from it? Instead of what label you can slap on it.

>>22768844
I like that it's clear you haven't read Gravity's Rainbow and have nothing to actually contribute to the thread. Take it somewhere else, please.

I propose that we categorise works of fiction by what they contain, not when they were written or what artistic movements its creator was part of.

>>22768929
Postmodernist fiction is categoriZed by what its novels and short stories contain. The way a Western contains certain elements, the way Sci-Fi contains certain elements.

>>22768918
I have, just don’t necessarily remember all of it much and have too clear of an image of it in my head. There were parts that were exciting and great on a first read, like Pokler’s story with his daughter Leni, the Byron the Bulb story, and mant parts in general where Pynchon’s style is just magnificent (I liked the parts about Slothrop’s American ancestors, for instance).

Might post more about what makes the book postmodern but I’d rather eat first.

>>22768937
Incorrect, because then you could have postmodernist fiction written by non-postmodernists.

>>22768969
>just don’t necessarily remember all of it much and have too clear of an image of it in my head
>Byron the Bulb
Ok thanks, this thread really isn't for you. Take it somewhere else, please.

>>22768989
Shut the fuck up you dogshit low-effort poster baboon. I’ll post whatever the fuck I want.

>>22768999
Anyone familiar with the book sees right through your parroted nonsense. Bye!

>>22769005

>>22769010
Hey
>>22768969
>>22768844
>>22768407
Failed to pass as someone who has read Gravity's Rainbow, and failed to pass as an intellectual. It's pretty entertaining.

>>22768117
The extreme fragmentation of the narrative with so many subplots and characters it approaches centerlessness/plotlessness (although Slothrop and the quest for the Schwarzgerat could be the closest to a main character and central plot point). The fusion of different genres that also fuses high with low culture (historical fiction, spy fiction, political thriller, science fiction, magical realism, philosophical fiction, and surrealism, fusing references from everything and everyone like Wagner, Goethe, Emily Dickinson, Borges, Greek myths, etc. to pop culture and cinema references, from arcane discussions of rocket science, chemistry, Behaviorism, Poisson distributions, and the Calvinist religion, to the occult/mysticism like the Kabbalah, the Tarot, and Masonry, discussions of conspiracy theories, occult or paranormal phenomena like ESP and portrayals of BDSM/erotica — basically, a huge range of topics that ranges from “high” to “low” culture). The narrator becoming increasingly self-referential or breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader at times, especially in the final section. There’s also elements of unreliable narration through the free-indirect discourse that follows Slothrop’s disintegrating psyche, calling into question key aspects of the story and of the ending.

> why is it a postmodern masterpiece?
I liked CL49 and M&D better.

>>22769019
Figlio di puttana, sai che tu sei un pezzo di merda?
You think you're cool, right?
I tell you this, one of three Americans is dying out of cancer, you know?
Asshole, and you're gonna be one of those
I didn't have the courage to kick your ass directly
Don't have enough courage for that, I could, you know?
You know you're gonna have another accident?
You know I'm involved with black magic?
Fuck you, die, bastard
You think you're so cool? Asshole
And if I ever see your fucking face around in Europe or Italy
Well I'll, that time I'm gonna kick your ass
Fuck you, fucking Americans, Yankee
You're gonna die outta cancer, I promise
Deep pain, no one did what you did to me
You wanna know something? Fuck you
I want your balls smashed, eat shit, bastard
Pezzo di merda, figlio di puttana
Hope somebody in your family dies soon
Crepa, pezzo di merda, e vai a sucare cazzi su un aereo

>>22769108
I maintain Mason & Dixon is his best while Gravity's Rainbow is his most "important".

>>22769122
Why is it important? And why in scare quotes? You disagree?

>>22769108
Some questions:
>narrator becoming increasingly self-referential
Where does this happen?

> breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader at times
This happens only once as far as I know. The lines are: You will want cause and effect. All right.

>elements of unreliable narration
Can you elaborate on this? I can think of an interesting case, but not sure if it's the same as what you're thinking.

Appreciate effortposting.

>>22768937
That's not correct at all.

>>22769364
Oh? Go ahead, explain.

>>22769305
There's one point toward the end of the book where a narrator breaks into the current narrator's narration and the current narrator questions who said the previous narration from the outside narrator.

The narrators are all separate characters themselves. Some are aware of others, while others are unaware, concerned only with their own narration of the world's happenings.

>>22769385
Do you believe literature is a genre?

>>22769108
Get a term for works that feature that stuff that isn't tied to literary/artistic movements!

>>22769410
No.

>>22769407
Post quotes or it didn't happen

>>22768989
What the fuck is your problem

>>22769431
No time for posers.

>>22769108
Nah it has a pretty straightforward plot

>>22769428
Well, the narrators are separate characters. I can't really quote that. I'll see if I can find the moment with interrupted narration though.

>>22769441
Yeah that'd be good. Unless you mean The Uncle Charles principle, which is rampant. I mean that's just whatever character is in focus, their thoughts infect the narration.

>>22769422
Much in the way literature is indifferent to the contents of the book, concerned only with the quality, so to are movements indifferent to the contents, focusing on the delivery of contents rather than the contents itself. It's a class of a class.

A sci-fi book may be of quality enough to be considered literature and, depending on its method of delivery, may or may not be categorized within one movement or another. Phprd

>>22769473
You have communicated nothing except that literature is a different class than genre. What components of a story makes it class: postmodern?

>>22769487
Correct. There are different classes of the class itself. The ditinguishing line, like most everything in life, especially in literature, is that of the color grey.

Again, it is the method of delivery that defines, with however much room for debate, the class of the class of literature assigned to whatever genre.

>>22769487
Once again I am asking: What components of a story makes it class postmodern?

>>22769507
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature

>>22769518
I know, I read it before making the post. I want to know what YOU think. If you defer to wikipedia, I don't want to talk to you... you're fucking retarded and I hope your genes self annihilate.

>>22768117
Up until the postmodernist narrative structure was largely constructed around plot and theme, postmodernists started building around other literary devices which made plot and theme more fluid things which could be altered in the same way character is altered by something happening in the plot; plot and theme become more like character and they can grow and adapt as the novel progresses in the same way a character can grow and adapt in response to a plot event. Theme ceased being something which the author presented and became something which the author analyzed in the same way authors had traditionally analyzed character.

This is not something which just happened when the postmodernist arrived on the scene, it had been slowing evolving for a good long while, postmodernism is just when enough authors started taking it to its limits and it became normalized. The movement itself only lasted a decade or two but the idea became a standard tool of the author and author became expected to provide more nuance and ambiguity. So we now have idea as character as a standard and most every novel has an idea or two which grows and evolves through the novel in the same way characters do.

That should answer your question regarding why GR is postmodern? It is a masterpiece because it was the first postmodern novel to really find mainstream success. Personally i would say it was the turning point for literature and pointed the way towards what would come, the more restrained use of the tools of postmodern literature.

>>22769561
>which could be altered in the same way character is altered by something happening in the plot; plot and theme become more like character and they can grow and adapt as the novel progresses in the same way a character can grow and adapt in response to a plot event.
Ouch, sorry for that one. I suck at editing on a screen.

>>22769561
This in no way addresses how Gravity's Rainbow is postmodern. What a strange post.

>>22768117

Unstable sense of reality/ ontologically focused - Vonnegut - yes, Kerouac - no.

General love of pop culture - Vonnegut - yes, Kerouac - no.

General love of science/ is sci-fi - Vonnegut - yes, Kerouac - no.

Protagonist passive in their own tale of epic loserdom - Vonnegut - yes, Kerouac - no.

>>22769580
Retard version; GR moves plot and theme to the level of character and builds its narrative structure around the analysis of that theme instead of the theme itself. Reading is really not your thing.

>>22769602
I'm passive in my own tale of loserdom. Am I postmodern, dad?

>>22769616
>GR moves plot and theme to the level of character
No, it doesn't. It has a coherent plot, believe it or not. I'd happily discuss it but you're pretending rn. It'd feel like I'd be giving you things to bullshit other people about. One theme is detecting larger control mechanisms, obviously. Can you tell me how that moves to the level of character? I'm honestly curious and seriously hammering back my hostility.

>>22769602
Interesting post.

>>22768711
Can you delve deeper into this?

>>22769701
Beneath the beautiful and mocking prose, is picrel, just in the first 2 pages.

>>22769647
Moving plot and theme to the character level does rnot make them incoherent. Why would it? A character study is structured around the character(s) instead of plot or theme but still generally has a coherent plot and theme.
>Can you tell me how that moves to the level of character?
Your assumption that you understand and I don't make that impossible to answer short of a lengthy essay trying to cover all bases.
>I'm honestly curious and seriously hammering back my hostility.
Maybe you are but you just flatly stated that I am pretending and not worthy of your time. You really have to offer something beyond kneejerk reaction and vague allusions to your own greatness if you want me to put any effort into a response.

>>22769814
>he can't answer
>not even a little

>>22769826
I plainly stated what is needed to answer and that is a rather simple requirement to meet that takes almost no effort. So why did you not step up to the challenge? Just a troll?

>>22769843
Pathetic cope.
>just a troll
You're caught out. Bye!

>>22769868
So why would moving plot and theme to the character level render them incoherent?

>>22769732
I finally get it now. Wish me luck writing. I'll be trying my best to have 25% of Joyce's talent

>>22769283
Because it's his most well-known work and generally considered his best amongst the rascals I've met who have read his books. I loved Gravity's Rainbow a ton but there was more of an emotional element for me while reading Mason & Dixon.

>>22769518
Wikipedia is violently awful when describing anything that isn't a singular specific thing.

>>22771732
Wrong. It's wrong and or poorly written on every topic I've read where I already know about said thing. Not sure wtf is going on with that site.

>>22771785
it goes from bad to worse when it starts discussing concepts though

>>22768407
>A lot of the narrative quirks we can attribute to postmodern fiction (like fragmentation of the narrative, dislocation in time and space such as by a nonlinear chronology, unreliable narrators, and self-reflexivity or -referentiality)
This sounds exactly like the "effect" of using the internet by an individual and Masses of people would suffer.

>>22771943
And to make it worse is it's crawling with "revision bots" and hall monitors ready to remove your updated comma placement or correction to whatever bullshit.

>>22772354
I interviewed a Wikipedia editor guy one time and he was one of the worst people I've had to deal with.

>>22772375
Why on earth would you need to do that

>>22772411
It was for a bullshit class in college. I sure did take a lot of garbage classes to get that piece of paper.

>>22772439
I think I know you irl

>>22772613
Name the college, friendo.

>>22769108
huh
Like formating the book as a "animistic" Audio-Visual Content as a "inner monologue" of the author to the Reader.

Wacky shit.

>>22768407
more proof postmodernity is just an extension of modernity

>>22772682
>>22772682
Well, yeah, that’s probably why “modernism” is in the phrase itself (postMODERNISM). It’s not entirely on a different pattern from it, but an extension of it, a continuation of or elaboration of it, yet with enough unique and distinctive traits it had its own label created (for example, often favoring metafiction and self-referentiality more). Gay example: like how “post-punk” clearly isn’t something entirely different from punk, but will have similarities to it.

>>22772692
doesn't seem to be the common understanding of what postmodern means
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
>Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse[1][2] characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; [...] Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism,[8][9][10] and has been observed across many disciplines.[11][12]
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism
>Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, as well as a description of the period that followed modernism's dominance in cultural theory and practice in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century.
https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-postmodernism-20791
>The “post” in postmodern suggests “after”. Postmodernism is best understood as a questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in progress and innovation. Modernism insists on a clear divide between art and popular culture.
https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/postmodernism
>Postmodernism refers to a reaction against modernism.

>>22772753
A reaction is also intimately bound up with what it’s reacting against. I think modernism generally had the ethos that in “making it new” they were achieving a greater, truer depiction of reality, and postmodernism is typically more skeptical about this, but, in reacting to modernism, it’s still intimately bound up with many of its innovations. What would Gass write like without forebears like Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, for example?

However, this is still a good point in response to people arguing “they’re the same thing.” They can overlap but they’re broadly different enough the different labels seem worth it.

>>22769602
>ontologically
A word primarily misused by midwits, such as yourself, who have not a single book of philosophy

>>22772872
I like that you're wrong here and therefore are misusing it. I'd call you a midwit, but then you'd be right about something, which is unlikely.

>>22772981
Damn this cope is actually sad

>>22773028
You're not talking to who you think you're talking to lmao you really are a tard

Modernism and postmodernism—as isms in literature—are mostly an angloamerican construction.

>>22773081
So?

>>22773052
>I-i-i-i’m-m n-n-n-not the pe-pe-person you th-th-think I am

>>22773115
Keep going retard.

>>22768551
Sure