/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4537076]

I'm having trouble understanding the term "post-modernism". Please explain it in the most simple way you can.

[Anonymous No.4537085]

after modernism

[Anonymous No.4537089]

>>4537076

[Anonymous No.4537091]

post-modernism is usually defined by skepticism toward modernist meta-narratives of history and progress and freedom

[Anonymous No.4537090]

It's like when you write a shitty book but it's not shitty because you meant it to be shitty.

Imagine someone puts a blank canvas up in an art gallery and you go "what the fuck it's just a blank canvas" and they reply "exactly.. 2deep4u"

That's postmodernism.

[Anonymous No.4537093]

>>4537090
>implying

[Anonymous No.4537117]

Progress is impossible, we are governed by structures and narratives whose existence we don't realize, a worldview acknowledging the multiplicity of things and ideas and the absence of governing purpose behind them

[Anonymous No.4537123]

historicism taken to its extreme

[Anonymous No.4537139]

>>4537090
terribly explained but kind of.

The blank canvas would have something to do with questioning the idea of art making and what it means to produce art.

Post-modernism tries not to make any assumptions and is critical of the white-western-rich-male way of seeing the world

[Anonymous No.4537154]

tfw you turn on the tv and images of WWII are used to sell a Jeep

Or tfw history is an abstract assemblage of cliches that don't really apply to your own existence

Or tfw you don't want to seem too cliche because the real thing has been spoiled by that Jeep commercial

[Anonymous No.4537166]

>>4537076
Art openings, techno music, Deleuze, Hallow e'en costumes, youthful slang, browsing your iphone on the street.

[Anonymous No.4537180]

Which Post-Modernism?
I'll assume you don't mean Architecture or music cause it's this board.
But do you mean literature? or Philosophy.

In literature, it's an approach where the medium and means are considered part of the overall piece. Like a painting where the frame is part of the artwork and not just a way of attaching it to the wall.
"How you're telling the story" is part of the story.
There's more to it than that, and that's really a gross oversimplification. but it's the best way I can describe it briefly.
There are a set of elements that are common, but not required.
Such as
Playing with the language,
including the author as a character, "story about someone writing a story" etc
frame within a frame kind of inception stuff
Meta stuff, where the work comments on itself or breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader,
Surrealism,
Unreliable narrators, or unreliable text, where the book straight up contradicts itself
There's often humor and sex.
But mostly, you're going to see stories that question Meta-narratives.
Questioning things that are usually taken for granted.
such as "What does progress mean?"
"What does Morality mean?"

Now the problem with Post-Modernism, is it's flooded with amateur bullshit. Because amateurs see it as permissive, and subjective. In that sort of "You can't judge how good the art is, because it's supposed to make you question your assumptions of what art is" Which is bullshit.
Think of it as coloring outside of the lines.
You'll have one artist who comes along and colors outside the lines, making a new picture that surpasses what the lines would have been able to portray.
Then you have five other artists who just scribble over the lines and hang their picture up and say "That's art. Art is whatever I say is Art"

And this is the problem. The genius work of some Modern artists, and Post-modern literary authors, doesn't mean that the amateur pretentious shit isn't amateur pretentious shit,
But on that same note, the amateur pretentious shit doesn't make the genius work not a piece of genius.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't assume that because something is postmodern, that it is either genius or shit just because it's post-modern. Post-Modern is just another movement in the end. It's like a genre. there's gold and there's pigshit.

[Anonymous No.4537187]

>>4537180
Why don't we get some post-modern lit recommendations going--the genius stuff, not the amateur pretentious shit.

I nominate John Barth--in particular Lost in the Funhouse.

[Anonymous No.4537205]

>>4537166
>Hallow e'en
Christ, get over yourself.

[Anonymous No.4537215]

>>4537187
Barthelme
Gaddis
Pynchon
DeLillo
Coover
Gass
Nabokov
Calvino
Burroughs

[Anonymous No.4537221]

>>4537205
Just coöperate.

[Anonymous No.4537247]

>>4537187
>the genius stuff, not the amateur pretentious shit
>recommends a poor borges copycapt

[Anonymous No.4537260]

can we get a definition of post-modernism front & center in the sticky so we don't get this fucking thread every other goddamn day?

[Anonymous No.4537267]

>>4537215
great list, anon

[Anonymous No.4537271]

>>4537180
Thank you for the thorough response. I've recently heard someone describe American Psycho, the movie, as post modernist. In what way exactly is the term applicable to this movie?

[Anonymous No.4537278]

>>4537215
Best book to start with Pynchon?

[Anonymous No.4537281]

Literally nobody understands what post-modernism is. It's a movement with an absence of tangible values and an absence of any central platform.

[Anonymous No.4537284]

>>4537278
The Crying of Lot 49 or V. if you're pretty accustomed to pomo

[Anonymous No.4537285]

Well, you see, Post means after, and Modernism was a cultural movement.

Ex: when you post on the internet, you're making an after.

Does that help?

[Anonymous No.4537290]

After Modernism! What's after Modernism? Fucking nothing, dullards! "Postmodern" is a stupid word and a stupid generalization.

>psychics are technically "postmodern", but they're a crock of shit, too

[Anonymous No.4537312]

>>4537271
I'm sorry, I couldn't tell you, I haven't read American Psycho yet, but you will see several post-modern books pop up on /lit/ often.
Like Catch-22, Infinite Jest, Hamlet, House of Leaves, or Waiting for Godot.

[Anonymous No.4537388]

>>4537247
I don't know, man. Certainly Borges is a pioneer to be admired, but Barth brings something else to the table--for me, it's warmth and humanity in conflict with the pomo disintegration.

[Anonymous No.4537398]

>>4537271
probably in the sense that there is little, if any pretense to higher meaning

[Anonymous No.4537409]

>>4537398
I guess it expresses this lack of meaning through the fetishization of pop culture and ephemera, not to mention the amorality of the protagonist? It's been a long time since I've read it.

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.4537423]

Marketing of marketing for marketing to markets.

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.4537432]

>>4537271
There's no solution to his problem, no resolution to the story itself, and no discernible reason for his descent. He's just a fucking nutcase and that's all there is to it, no underlying or overarching moral or concept, you don't even know what kind of nutcase he is, delusional or psychotic.

[Anonymous No.4537436]

>>4537076
here's a sad attempt at an explanation of post-modernism which is easy to stomach and apply to different fields:

to define post-modernism, you must define modernism, which is a lot easier. modernism was simply a rejection of past theory—whether that be art, literature, architecture, fashion, what have you—in an effort to "make it new." modernists sought to create art that was not only groundbreaking, but ground creating. modernism created a lot of media and helped to broaden the definition of "art."

post-modernism was a reaction to, and in a large part, against modernism. at face value, post-modernism sounds really fucking dumb, either like people enjoying vintage shit way too much or like a pretentious name for being ahead of the times.

but modernism had one large flaw, and that was the belief that anything really /could/ be made completely candidly. post-modernist thinkers believed that everything, ultimately, was derivative and that to make something entirely original would be impossible because it would require understanding all that came before it.

basically, we went from new year's day to january 3rd.

http://www19.homepage.villanova.edu/karyn.hollis/prof_academic/Courses/2043_pop/modernism_vs_postmodernism.htm

[Anonymous No.4537446]

>>4537409
thats part of it, yeah. but it also doesnt conform to traditional narrative structures which we are accustomed to moralizing one way or the other.

if it were so, in a good triumphs over evil story, we'd see bateman punished by the end of the movie or novel. if it was a more pessimistic moralizing, as in orwell's 1984 where 'evil' triumphs over hope/redemption/freedom, we might see bateman kill the detective or something.

instead, we are left questioning whether anything even happened, and no dramatic clashing between good and evil happens at all. the violence erupts on-screen (and on the page) without explanation or differentiation from other things in bateman's life. its also empty/meaningless from the opening lines when bateman says he is simply 'not there.'

you cant read american pyscho and on finishing conclude "friendship and perseverance are great virtues" the way you can with lord of the rings. or "totalitarianism is bad" with 1984.

[Anonymous No.4538452]

stop

[Anonymous No.4538461]

>muh metanarrative

[Anonymous No.4538477]

>>4538452
HAMMERTIME

[Anonymous No.4538493]

>Postmodernism is basically just an extension of modernism; modernist literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness always existed (the soliloquys in Greek plays, Shakespeare's plays, the writing of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu), but was never properly "realized" so to speak, because writers felt like they either had to be playwrights, or realists, or romanticists or whatever. Modernists thought this restricted the full experience of life. Ulysses has been called the most important modernist text because of how it basically puts all of these techniques together in the aim of representing human life as fully as possible: there's realism, there's romanticism, stream-of-consciousness, parts are written as a play, as a newspaper, as everything.

>Similarly, postmodernist literature is just the literature becoming even more self-conscious. In a sense, this has always existed. It's like Thersites's speech in the Iliad, the entirety of Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote. Postmodernism is basically this self-consciousness (which at its most extends into metafiction) along with the rejection that any art can actually represent life.

[Anonymous No.4538502]

Go ask Massimo, he knows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAgT2dNkRFw

[Anonymous No.4538508]

>>4538502
What's the last word he says?

"And what they were against was ...

[Anonymous No.4538515]

>>4538508
He said Helvetica.
I lel'd.

[Anonymous No.4538517]

>>4538515
God fucking damn it.

[Anonymous No.4538543]

Please, read this before you vapid faggots keep promulgating your erroneous understanding of postmodernism: (1) Fredrick Jameson: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

to facilitate your understanding of Jameson:

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/jamesonpostmodernity.html

and/or

(2) Lyotard: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/lyotard.htm

[Anonymous No.4538566]

>>4538543
>Please, read this before you vapid faggots keep promulgating your erroneous understanding of postmodernism:
>impying Jameson isn't brought up on the board often.
>2014
"I have stale links, I know what I'll do! I'll call everybody a faggot! Aren't I being helpful!"

[Anonymous No.4538575]

>>4538566
>not understanding Jameson
He's not brought up, you cunt.

[Anonymous No.4538594]

>>4538575
No, you're the cunt, you came stepping into the thread posting something like it was new when I've seen it on this board before, so you got called out on it.
Post-modernism is a recurring thread theme around here. Don't be so fucking surprised.
I don't expect humility, this is 4chan after all, but your post stank of "I think I'm god's gift to this discussion" and I'm going to /thread."

Your attitude that "you're the only one lurking the thread who understands Post-modernism" is cute, it really is. But an inaccurate assumption all the same."

[Anonymous No.4538614]

>>4538594
>you came stepping into the thread posting something like it was new

Not new, actually, since these links are quite old, however still auspicious to understanding postmodernism.

>I've seen it on this board before
Lol, so what? What is your point? Just because they are mentioned before and your faggot self noticed them does not preclude others from posting those links, especially when ingenues like you fail comprehend postmodernism, e.g. look at this fucking thread.

>Post-modernism is a recurring thread theme around here.

No, shit. It is brought up five times a day, but 90% of the time it's an egregious misunderstanding.

> but your post stank of "I think I'm god's gift to this discussion" and I'm going to /thread."

Your proposition is contingent upon false assumptions, m8.

>Your attitude that "you're the only one lurking the thread who understands Post-modernism"

Not once did I claim that I [understand] postmodernism. To reiterate for someone with a deplorable reading comprehension: "promulgating your erroneous understanding". Now, let's examine this. Someone with an inchoate understanding of postmodernism, i.e. you, can clearly see that what is being posted is an inaccurate representation of postmodern theory. Thus, one should actually read up on the literature prior to bloviating like a fool, i.e. you.

Now fuck off, cunt.

[Anonymous No.4538634]

>>4538594
>>4538614
Both of you are morons.

[Anonymous No.4538638]

>>4538634
Fair enough.

[Anonymous No.4538658]

>>4538614
Your shitposting impresses noone.
Your defense of your shit post impresses noone.
I appreciate that you tried to post relevant links.
But you came grandstanding.
and your grandstanding was fucking called out.

Now you're just shitposting about shitposting.
Pretending that you weren't being a cunt when you were being a cunt, and pretending that you're faggotry was anything other than the same.


So, If you'd like.
You can continue to waste your time trying to defend and salvage your original post.
Or you can engage in meaningful discussion.

But whichever you choose, I can assure you, I will not be baited into responding again.
I put a strict limit on the amount of food I allow myself to give to trolls.
And there is no value, to be gained from trying to "convince you that you were wrong."

I'll leave you to compose whatever spiteful retort you have back-building. May it give you some satisfaction in the writing, because it won't be read.

[Anonymous No.4538660]

>>4538658

[Anonymous No.4538661]

>>4538658
>>4538660
This discussion is SO postmodern.

[Anonymous No.4538663]

>>4537278
49 or Bleeding Edge.

[Anonymous No.4538672]

Post-modernism proceeds modernism and precedes metamodernism

-Shia LaBeouf

[Anonymous No.4538675]

>>4538672
“It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” -- Shia LaBeouf

[Anonymous No.4538685]

>>4538675
I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives

-Shia LaBeouf

[Anonymous No.4538691]

>>4537446
Also, Bateman, even in the movie, is an unreliable narrator. In case you guys didn't pick up on this, he didn't actually kill any of those people. Aside from the obvious clue, where he goes to Paul Allen's apartment and finds out that Paul never lived there; there is one scene where Patrick is dragging the "corpse of Paul Allen" through the lobby of his apartment building and while Patrick is alone in the shot, a trail of blood can be seen coming out of the sack but, once his sharing the shot with the doorman, there is no blood coming from the sack and the trail, even where there was blood, is no longer visible

[Anonymous No.4538702]

>>4537076

What is post-modernism?
His the wrong question to be asking
A flee from dialectical progress towards spirit
The fragmenting of self
In an infinite regress of hierarchical
Self-contradiction and categorical narrative
Postmodernism is
Orange cats bleed cunt cunt cunt tnuc tnuc
Suck my tits, child, suck them
There is no system, consume my feces
Moko Choko lako Tako
Odern?
Dicks dicks dicks dicks dicks
Eat my shit
Revel in the emanating sound of nothingness
Niggers
In
Some
Manchester
?-+[]{=;'()&^*%$&#^$@^#&$@#%@*%#

Fin

[Anonymous No.4538708]

>>4538691
But he did kill all those people. The reason that the lady selling the apartment curtly dismissed him was because she was aware of what Bateman had done and cleaned up the mess herself so that the apartment she is selling won't lose value. This is integral to the premise of the plot; Everyone is a self absorbed yuppie who only cares about themselves, and their profits.

[Anonymous No.4538714]

>>4538691
>>4538708

you're both half-right, let's make this a hegelian dialectic and say I will synthesize the antithesis and the thesis: he killed some of the people, but not all. He was an unreliable narrator who didn't end up killing Paul, but killed the prostitute. Fair?

[Anonymous No.4538734]

>>4538714
To me, the scene where Bateman goes to Paul's apartment after he had murdered him, only to find out that the place is being sold off showed that he did, indeed kill him. It was mostly the attitude and tone of voice of the lady who had told him to leave. She had clearly realized that it was Bateman who had done the killing, judging by his inquisitive but at the same time shocked facial expression and awkward mannerisms, and wanted him out of the apartment to prevent any trouble that he might cause.

[Anonymous No.4538737]

>>4537117
so is post-modernsim just traditionalism for SJW?

Seems kind of lame to be honest, and why is Pale Fire considered post modernsit it doesn't really seem to have anything to do with that.

[Anonymous No.4538740]

>>4538734
except bateman's lawyer tells him he just had dinner with paul at the end and bateman realizes after speaking with the detective that he was in atlantis with several others at the time of the alleged murder

[Anonymous No.4538742]

What is the distinction then, between post-modernism and Absurdism, when looking at technique and not just the history of the movements?

[Anonymous No.4538745]

>>4538740
This.

[Anonymous No.4538748]

>>4537076
A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism will serve you well.

[Anonymous No.4538757]

>>4538740
As I recall, the point of that was that Paul & all his cohort are so facelessly interchangeable that others don't even know who they're talking about.

[Anonymous No.4538759]

>>4538737
> Pale Fire
> postmodern

I don't think it is, generally. Here, check this http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0244.html and this http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0258.html

[Anonymous No.4538767]

>>4538757
this seems to be stretching things a bit much. so youre arguing that the detective too didn't know who he was talking about? He was a complete outside of the yuppie culture. And besides, I think the notebook at the end was more of a comment on how Bateman's "experiences" were merely fantasy that occupied his mind - since the book was filled with violent drawings and such

[Anonymous No.4538768]

>>4538759
I think he meant the Nabokov piece written in the footnotes of the poem.

[Anonymous No.4538770]

>>4537089
this is pretty much as good as you're going to get in terms of concise explanations, although it neglects the social implications

[Anonymous No.4538774]

>>4537076
We don't like modernism. Now lets write a book.

[Anonymous No.4538776]

PoMo is best understood by the theory of hyperrealism

[Anonymous No.4538778]

>>4538770
pleb

[Anonymous No.4538781]

>>4537281
Wow great argument fagtron, you sure convinced me with those hot opinions.

[Anonymous No.4538783]

>>4538767
Well, that's fine--it's absolutely implausible, but I don't think it's meant to be plausible. This isn't a murder mystery, after all. The strangeness you're describing is meant to cause you to doubt that Bateman might have killed anyone, but not to simply give you a "surprise it was all a dream lol" ending. The disorientation has to be a part of the point.

[Anonymous No.4538785]

>>4538776
For the stupid:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

[Anonymous No.4538789]

>>4537123
it's just teenagerism. trying to question the existing traditions and priories about art. just trying to rebel and start something new. but basically an excuse for mediocrity

[Anonymous No.4538797]

>>4538776
>>4538785
That hardly covers anything besides baudrillard who really isn't that important. At least it makes clear the idea that we are living in postmodernity, that the influences and consequences of pomo are in the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in. In some cases people are just trying to make sense of what's developed, in other cases they intend to develop their own response. The other key thing that people have trouble grasping is that just like within the modern period, there were many different modernist responses, in architecture, in literature, in painting and in theory, it's the same here, if you're looking for a single postmodernism, you probably either want the postmodern period of time (after ww2) or the theory, in which case look for philosophers prominent in the 70s & 80s.

[Anonymous No.4538828]

>>4538757
Exactly. This is supported by the random occurrences in the film of people mixing up each other names. Not to mention the fact that Paul Allen thought Bateman was Marcus.

>>4538767
>He was a complete outside of the yuppie culture.
You think? How about when Bateman tells him where he lives and he is impressed as it is probably an expensive area inhabited by yuppies. Also take into account his familiarity with the restaurant that Bateman says he is planning on going to lunch with. The detective is also part of this culture.

Anyway, both the director and author have said that the film should be ambiguous so both of the interpretations are correct.

[Anonymous No.4538843]

>>4538797
>baudrillard who really isn't that important.

It's pretty dishonest to pretend that there's a hierarchy of "importance", but his ideas are referenced fairly often. Anyone who is familiar with postmodernism in academia has read him.

[Anonymous No.4538929]

http://www.willamette.edu/~rloftus/postmod.htm