POSTMODERNISM

[Anonymous No.4762231]

what is postmodernism, /lit/? i ask this sincerely

[Anonymous No.4762232]

>>4762231
well it's certainly not sincere

[Anonymous No.4762233]

google it

[Anonymous No.4763432]

So, is postmodernism the solution?

[Anonymous No.4763436]

>>4762231
basically don't even bother trying to pin it down because if you come up with anything postmodernists will go "YEAH BUT IT'S NOT THAT"

[Anonymous No.4763439]

>>4762231
"Postmodernism" is different things for different fields, yet they really aren't that different across each field...

[Anonymous No.4763757]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0DwRAVJZ4A

[Anonymous No.4764184]

>>4762231
In fiction, it's mostly a rejection of traditional notions of the narrator. In practice, it often involves a lot of winking through the fourth wall. The joke version of it is:

Hello, welcome to my post-modern novel. I'll be your narrator, Author.

[Anonymous No.4764187]

>>4762231
What came after modernism. This might look like a joke answer but it isn't.

[Anonymous No.4764197]

>>4762231
What modernism isn't that came after it

That is all

[Anonymous No.4764264]

>>4764197
>What modernism isn't
Is that part actually true? I'm not a literature guy, but it seems to me that there are a lot of continuities between what people call modernism and postmodernism in literature. Fractured narratives, self-referential features, denial of realism...

[Anonymous No.4765972]

>>4762231

The name given to an awareness that the pendulum swings both ways.

[Anonymous No.4765981]

>>4764264
I think the distinction is more on ideological/thematic grounds

[Anonymous No.4765994]

"I'll know it when I see it".

[Anonymous No.4766004]

I'm interested in "bridge" literature and authors, like Rousseau for Enlightenment and Romanticism, or Ibsen for modernism and I'm wondering who/what would be considered a bridge from modernism to postmodernism

Maybe Nabokov?

[Anonymous No.4766043]

>>4762231
What came after modernism

[Anonymous No.4766133]

>>4762231
>>4765994

it is a when monkeys inhabit an ideal of impossibility, self reflection, and total unnaturalness which is placed on a screen that is plugged into a wall which is powered by magic shock juice which comes from the a plant that steams water by way of heat which is produced by the decay of nuclear materials which was mined from the earth in trucks that run on the sludge of decayed animals and plants whom lived 10000000 years ago. And then forget everything i just said and play COD MW2 i heard Faze has a new trickshotting video that was edited really well

[Anonymous No.4766149]

>>4766004
Ulysses

[Anonymous No.4766150]

>>4766004
Borges, perhaps.

[Anonymous No.4766174]

>>4766004
borges, gaddis, some would say joyce's later stuff

[Anonymous No.4766203]

>>4766004

Nietzsche, Beckett, Duchamp.

The other guys mentioned are towers not bridges.

Except Joyce.

>Joyce
>Postmodern

holyshityoufuckedup.jpg

[Anonymous No.4766239]

OP, I myself didn't think postmodernism actually had a definition before I moved to Russia. From what I've gathered from the Russian interpretation of the term, or at least the non-Muscovite take of the term, is that post-modernism is the successor to modernism, and modernism died sometime during the early 20th century.

The main difference between the two is that, Modernists, Russians figure, still hold on to classical notions of wanting to educate the reader, or think that philological games within the texts have meaning besides being philological games. Joyce they consider modernist, Nabokov they consider modernist, Pelevin and Burroughs are post-modern to the Russians. They use and indicator of work intent to divorce the two.

[Anonymous No.4766262]

>>4766239
>Nabokov
>modernist

[Anonymous No.4766267]

>>4766239
Modernism was a fucking blight
Postmodernism isnt even strong enough to be a blight its basically a fart

[Anonymous No.4766273]

>>4766262
They figure he put on airs since he considered himself on Pushkin's level, and had his cult of words that he tried his entire life to get the translating community to recognize. I think it has some validity.

[Anonymous No.4766284]

>>4766267
It's pretty strong in Russia, and it has produced some pretty noteworthy still living authors.

[Anonymous No.4766973]

How bout we talk about which is /lit/'s favorite postmodern book?

[Anonymous No.4766976]

>>4766267
>Modernism was a fucking blight
*modernity

[Anonymous No.4766977]

Post-modernism is the last bastion of delusional pseudo-intellectuals who secularized the fantasies of religion and removed any sort of proper methodological process to their philosophies.

[Anonymous No.4766979]

the wikipedia article explains it well

[Anonymous No.4766991]

Contemporary mannerism

>>4766977
Nah

[Anonymous No.4768982]

Final bump for dead thread

[Anonymous No.4769069]

>>4766004
Beckett

[Anonymous No.4769092]

The book Information is Beautiful by David McCandless has pretty much the most digestible summary of postmodernism, adapted from the principal essay of Mary Klages but made simpler. It's the only thing of the book that is text which is neat because postmodernism itself is all about texts.

[Anonymous No.4769116]

Intellectual movements or methods of inquiry since the 1950's which seek to move beyond those which came before.

[Anonymous No.4769137]

Mindset of general Modernism:

-faith can be places in Rationalism
-beauty follows function (i.e. if it's useful, it's beautiful)
-progress can be attained via reason, science, humanism, etc
-authors have their own unique writing voice, a result of their unique selves
-stories about "real people"

PostModern reaction:

-didn't rationalism lead to WW1, 2, H-bombs etc?
-hasn't beauty led to depressing tower blocks, mass comercial wastelands, soulelss suburbs, etc?
-are we really progressing or are things simply changing? How do we measure progress? Is life better with the threat of nucear warfare than without it?
-what is an "author" but the determined end of a human experience or a collector and organizer of second hand information? what is the "text" and what separates it from other things? Why is television not a text if Ulysses is a text?
-are these "real people" in the stories actually real, what is a real person? are these stories real because they're actually real or because the authors have read a whole bunch of stories like the one they've written?


PoMo's response:

-see now I'm writing this story, but I want to you know that I know that you know that I'm writing it, see?
-this is a really sad scene, but it's so cliched, just look at that old woman crying etc, it's so lame!
-inserting the television transcript is a response to the fact that our culture treats TV as a text, the boundaries of high and low art are abstract
-I'm not going to actually propose any viewpoint or solution in this thing, okay, I mean communism is dead, God is dead, national ideals are weird and socio-economic ideals are illusionary. So just laugh along and try and keep up, okay?

Why this isn't a viable long-term plan?

-"S-so PoMo-kun, h-how do you propose I deal with my crippling loneliness, every time I think I've found an answer there's a laugh track and I feel stupid for not detaching myself from your book more?"
-failture to "invest" in a book, because the author is only saying anything profound ironically, to highlighy some cultural hypocrisy, makes people laugh for a while but then makes them tired of constantly "getting" the joke
-society is now hyper self-aware, neurotic, lonely, cooly detached, too afraid to show emotion for fear of seeming naive ("ugh they don't get it. They aren't cool. They are so not jaded"), reflecting the novel's own sense of self-awareness, detachment, "hipness", it's posing etc is glamorized

Outcome:
-So how do we say sincere things, without the reader fearing they're going to be belittled for buying into the story, the emotions, and so on, without reverting to modernism's quixotic utopianism (general claim)?
-How do we let the reader know we get the joke, but that we are also scared and lonely and that we also desire some sincerity in an otherwise hollow series of gestures that is now our lives?


This is my take on the whole thing. If there are any girls reading this please respond holy shit I am so lonely.

[Anonymous No.4769152]

>>4769137
>This is my take on the whole thing. If there are any girls reading this please respond holy shit I am so lonely.

rofl

[Anonymous No.4769164]

>>4769137
>If there are any girls reading this please respond holy shit I am so lonely.
hi there

[Anonymous No.4769166]

>>4769164
Hello where are you from?

How do I know you're a girl?

[Anonymous No.4769173]

>that looks like some bosch type shit
>reverse image search
>eeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

paying attention in class finally pays off

[Anonymous No.4769182]

>>4769137
i-if I'm wearing a skirt it means I'm a girl right?

[Anonymous No.4769185]

[Anonymous No.4769241]

>>4769173
but it's not bosch. stop being an uncultured swine

[Anonymous No.4769876]

>>4766976

AMEN.

[Anonymous No.4770092]

So is the Vietnam War considered postmodern?

[Anonymous No.4772177]

>>4770092
Yes.

[Anonymous No.4772188]

>>4772177
What. How?

[Anonymous No.4772192]

>>4772188
Have you even read the play "Tracers"?

[Anonymous No.4772193]

There's a huge difference between the postmodern in art and the postmodern in philosophy, even though at their roots they're quite related. The following article explains it quite well: http://www.willamette.edu/~rloftus/postmod.htm

[Anonymous No.4772216]

>>4772192
No. Sorry. I feel the disillusionment felt by soldiers post-war is something that can also be found in any time. After WWII the war movies were more reflective and the NOIR movies at the time captured the anomie that permeated society. Heck the best real life example of this would be the biker gangs in California. Most of them were started by WWII vets who upon coming home couldn't readjust to everyday life. Eventually these groups would evolve into what later became the Hells Angels and other such gangs.

[Anonymous No.4772223]

>>4770092
In some respects. The conduct of national governments always seems pretty firmly stuck in the Enlightenment, though.

[Anonymous No.4772236]

>>4769137
This is a good post.

[Anonymous No.4772239]

>>4766203
What's so thoroughly not postmodern about Joyce? Would be an interesting example to help explain modernism vs. postmodernism.

[Anonymous No.4772286]

>>4772236
Seconded. I am actually pleased I scrolled /lit/ today.

[Anonymous No.4772623]

>>4772216
It was clear who the "bad guys" were in WWII
Vietnam was rife with anti-war protests and the soldiers were not celebrated in the same way as they were with WWII

[Anonymous No.4772642]

>>4772216
>>4772623
I agree with the impulse to dismiss the current as new, but if it comes down to the social organizations resulting from the fall out, there is little better illustration of post-moderism than the shift from Hell's Angels to Black Panthers.

[Anonymous No.4772665]

>>4772642
What about writers like Tim O'brien that came out of the Vietnam War? Is their writing considered postmodern?

[Anonymous No.4772686]

Well, if you watch video games reviews, modernism is like Game Grumps;postmodernism is like Fitzthistlewits

[Anonymous No.4772714]

>>4772665
I would consider The Things They Carried to be influenced by the social forces of post-modernism, but it is not a postmodernist book. He was writing in the tradition of combat veteran narratives, and is clearly not the least bit interested in the kind of gymnastic floor routines the of the literatutus /lit/ maintains a love hate with, Pynchon, Wallace, et. al. He is closer to We Were Soldiers Once And Young, and even First Blood, Morrell also residing in the keep-them-on-this-planet camp. I can see where Things Carried reaches back to Steven Crane (and Hemingway during the war in Spain).

I think "postmodernist" accusation hurled at O'Brien, "challenges the reader's comfort" etc, reveal more about the naivete of the critic, and their complete inexperience of jeopardy, than anything about Things Carried's literary program.

The most postmodern Vietnam narrative is the film Apocalypse Now.

[Anonymous No.4772729]

>>4772714
How is "The Things They Carried" not postmodern? Granted, his language is clear and concise instead of being weird for the sake of being weird like many postmodern texts, but the narrative is certainly self-critical. Or am I missing your point and "The Things They Carried" is a postmodern work?

[Anonymous No.4772760]

>>4772729
Well, here we are on the squishy bean bag chair of defining postmodernism. I'll try this, then yield to the lapidary: When a Pynchon or a Heller or even Vonnegut are fictionalizing their fourth wall hijinks, the gesture they are using is best described as a wink. It is a smug know it all's gesture that we are in this thing above it all together. I read no such academy smirk in Things Carried. The doubt there is about posterity and legacy and is anchored to this planet, to these people. I don't consider the text of Perfect Storm to be postmodern, either, but perhaps it is possible I simply reject the label for things I like, which isn't that oh so cute, itself. wink.

[Anonymous No.4772761]

>>4766991
yeap

[Anonymous No.4772786]

>>4772760
Why do you think O'Brien referenced himself in the text? The narrator's name was Tim O'Brien.

[Anonymous No.4772823]

>>4772786
When I read the first five in Esquire, before they were compended, the device seemed to me more like what Lee Abbott describes as the "two 'I's" than like a "Hello, I'm Author and I'll be your narrator." There is an "I" who tells a first person POV, but they are telling about an "I" who was a very different character back when all this was happening. "If I had known eating that bagel would lead to what happened next, I would have had egg salad." Two "I"s but not in first POV. There is nothing especially postmodern about that, and isn't it a thing in military service to use your rank when addressing superiors? "The private does not know, sir." "Tim O'Brien's first general order is to..." It is still two "I"s, as I remember it. That's what I want it to be.

[Anonymous No.4772854]

>>4772786
>>4772823
"You can tell the first person story that’s about a discrete sequence of events, but you can bring to that events that lie outside the story. As I always say, in theory there are two first persons in a story. There is the one who experiences it, and there is the one who tells about it. The one who tells about it is privy to all the events before the first word is written. Naturally, the second “I” brings a different understanding to what’s happening in the dramatic present than the “I” who experiences it. And sometimes great hay can be made between the tension of what I once was and what I am now. The importance of that is what “I am now” can bring to shine on what “I once was then.”" - Lee Abbott

[Anonymous No.4772870]

>>4766133
isn't that how you'd react?
how would you prefer it?

[Anonymous No.4772874]

>>4772786
>>4772823
>>4772854
So, and I am closing on this topic, I would rather make an argument that Things They Carried invents a POV we might call "First Person Omniscient" which is not all that different in mechanic from Henry James' 3rd Person Limited Central Consciouness innovation, neither of which need be sullied with the pejorative of "post-modern" just because of the chronological moment in which the pieces happen to have been written and published.

[Anonymous No.4772912]

>>4762231
"Okay, so absurdism is done, how can we be novel after that?" - the post modernist

[Anonymous No.4773023]

>>4772874
>>4772854
>>4772823
Then what were you talking about when you said it was influenced by the social forces of postmodernism?

[Anonymous No.4773100]

>>4773023
Doubt. Self-consciouness. Reflexivity. These are not the same thing as winking and tumbling for tenure-track judges. Consider the difference between the war fighting axioms of Curtis LeMay, versus those of General Westmoreland:

"Bomb them back to the Stone age."

"Win their hearts and minds."

One of these is modern. One of them is influenced by postmodernism.

[Anonymous No.4773285]

>>4773100
So Things Carried is postmodern in the sense that the characters are self-conscious and not because the author references himself(albeit a past version of himself) throughout the text?

[Anonymous No.4773316]

>>4764264
I'd say postmodernism is simultaneously a rejection of and expansion on modernism, at least in literature. Whereas modernism was the fragmentation of the author, postmodernism is the fragmentation of the text, too; compare "ulysses" to "gravity's rainbow."

[Anonymous No.4773325]

Ever 17 is the only good work of postmodernism. It's one big buildup to the ultimate fourth wall breakage. Even the repetitive and boring parts are necessary for that final payoff.

[Anonymous No.4773434]

>>4772623
> It was clear who the "bad guys" were in WWII
> mfw wtc
how very naif of you, you should read a little Machiavelli (protip: he was the bad guy, amirite?)
For example, who is the bad guy today between Russia and EU?

[Anonymous No.4773445]

>>4772623
>It was clear who the "bad guys" were in WWII
Yes, the fascists and capitalists.

[Anonymous No.4773450]

>>4773434
>>4773445
I put it in quotes because that is the general public opinion and not necessarily what I agree with

[Anonymous No.4773468]

>>4772642
What do Hell's Angels have to do with Black Panthers?

[Anonymous No.4773472]

>>4762231
fsda

[Anonymous No.4773502]

>>4773468
One is a social organization that came out of World War Two, the other came out of the Vietnam era.

[Anonymous No.4773525]

Can anyone explain to me how postmodern thinking relates to epistemology? In discussing postmodern ideas are they always a result of divergence of modern understanding?

[Anonymous No.4773848]

>>4769137
Has anyone else here read E Unibus Pluram?

A-anyone?

[Anonymous No.4773947]

>>4762231
Post War, people saw the world for what it really was.

[Anonymous No.4774030]

>>4772286

Same

[Anonymous No.4774045]

>>4765994
This is the only real answer

[Anonymous No.4775973]

I'm the guy who wrote the long-ass post in this thread

Bear in mind it's nowhere near as simple as I made it out to be, that's just the basics of PoMo in relation to literature, there's much more to say but I've just fapped and lack the energy to do so. Plz send gf.

[Anonymous No.4775979]

>>4766004

ynguili

[Anonymous No.4776001]

>lazy author randomly connects different aspects of culture (sacred with profane, technical with sexual, time travel with history, dream with reality, protagonist becomes aware of meta-meta-meta-narrative, ancient epic with contemporary tragedy, political with personal, popculture with serious culture)
>reader apophenia sets in, everybody interpretes it differently
>number of interpretations serve as metric for quality
>contemporary rockstar-hiphop-athlete-omnisexual-philosopher writes foreword to $author's Pléiade edition
>$author institutes are dedicated to his oeuvre

[Anonymous No.4776261]

>>4766004

Beckett

[Anonymous No.4776278]

>>4766977
There is no such thing as post-modernism in philosophy. It's a way of talking about the current state of culture and the arts, not a school of thought.

[Anonymous No.4776283]

Speaking of post-modernism, should I start Infinite Jest?

[Anonymous No.4776291]

postmodernism
pəʊstˈmɒdəˌnJz(ə)m/
noun
noun: postmodernism; noun: post-modernism
1.
a late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories.

[Anonymous No.4776321]

>>4776283
No.

[Anonymous No.4776324]

>>4776283
Another anon tricked into reading that piece of garbage

[Anonymous No.4776356]

>>4776324
I'm a pleb and I admit it. I need to start reading again and was told to read Infinite Jest. Is this some kind of /lit/ meme like ITAOTS is for /mu/?

[Anonymous No.4776374]

>>4776356
Its author has his own 4chan banner. As a saint. Meme? Perhaps. Lightning rod, more like it.

[Anonymous No.4776379]

>>4776356
Yes.

Read Pynchon instead.

[Anonymous No.4776381]

>>4776356
Infinite Jest is like marriage. It is an agreement to be bound in living death, pain, debt, and despair, and everyone who has already done it can't wait to tell everyone who has not how great it is. Because misery loves company.

[Anonymous No.4776384]

some authors are just genius
DFW was a natural event
infa 100%

[Anonymous No.4776400]

>>4776381
i read it in a week on summer vacation when i was 15 and thought it was 'okay'

[Anonymous No.4776436]

>>4776400
What's it about?

[Anonymous No.4776469]

>>4776436
there are multiple storylines
the ones I remember the best are Hal, the tennis prodigy, Don Gately the reformed Dilaudid addict, the two French people sitting on a cliff and Hals brother Oran(or something like that). there were a bunch of other segments about random stuff like the miscarriaged fetus hobo woman, and the man who couldnt quit weed, it as all very non-linear

what i saw as broadly connecting all of it was the theme of addiction as response to alienation in the modern world

[Anonymous No.4778287]

>>4766977
all those big words but you still aint saying anything

[Anonymous No.4778312]

It's a disease.

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

[Anonymous No.4778339]

postmodernism has having infinite access to any pornography, video games you could desire and about as much political freedom and ability to decide how your democracy is run as a serf under the tsars, where duchamps attack on museum culture and commercial culture with the ready made itself is commodified and converted into the acme and ne plus ultra of art, the demystification of art itself, the reduction of everything to nakedness and slavery. late capitalism.

[Anonymous No.4778464]

>>4766004

absolutely nabokov

pale fire

[Anonymous No.4778468]

>>4773848

yeah but it's a quarter century old

[Anonymous No.4781119]

>>4762231
a category for awful stories nobody likes except edgy 15 year olds that defies being easily situated into any other category.
seriously try to read gravity's rainbow. Go ahead. Do it. I dare you.

[Anonymous No.4781284]

>>4762233
>visit google
ftfy

[Anonymous No.4781303]

a certain culture that is a concomitant part of late capitalism (a post-industrial, globalized society, cue baudrillard, etc.)

[Anonymous No.4781446]

>>4778312
he's talkin about fonts, not literature, ya dingus

[Anonymous No.4782149]

>>4762231
if you ask a normal person, "what is a cat?"
he will say its a furry 4 legged mammal with teeth and claws.

if you ask a postmodernist, "what is a cat?'
he will say a cat is not a dog.

basically postmodernism is not movement, because a movement needs to have an overall ideology or theme or goal, or whatever. post modernism is just people doing shit that isnt modernism and therefore it isnt a movement and is stupid

pic unrelated, a fish: a tangible, definable thing. unlike postmodernism

[Anonymous No.4782162]

>>4782149
> he will say a cat is not a dog.

a non-dog.

[Anonymous No.4784590]

>>4782149
Laugh out loud(in my mind).

[Anonymous No.4784737]

>>4784590
The perverse urge to bump this thread every time it approaches the final page position is, itself, an illustration of the essential pointless narcissism of post-modernism.

[Anonymous No.4786369]

>>4769173
Welp, not Bosch, but from the Renaissance.

[Anonymous No.4786373]

>>4762231
It's the easy way out. It works.

[Anonymous No.4786374]

>>4782149
This is right. Post-modernism is more a set of symptoms not shared by what we consider modern than a real cultural movement.

[Anonymous No.4786401]

I would define it in writing as the usage of literary techniques that may or may not be intended to jolt the reader out of the narrative making them realize they're own reality in conjunction with the book thereby incorporating it. Authors employ it for numerous reasons, but one of the most frequent being to involve the reader and his reality with the book on a meta-level for reasons such as enhancing a theme (the implicit trickery and need for suspension of disbelief in fiction, say) or to exacerbate the dissonance a book is trying to foment (e.g. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski).

Sometimes it is an end unto itself. Self-references, cryptograms, all manner of 4th wall fuckery, and disregarding of standard literary conventions just because it is playful and (though perhaps not anymore) novel.

Think of a postmodern novel as the book version of that painting of a tobacco pipe that says at the bottom, "This is not a pipe."

[Anonymous No.4786410]

Has Postmodernism ended?

[Anonymous No.4786463]

>>4786410
Not really. But it's already lost that innovative aspect and is already something you can recognize instead of just a somwhow spontaneous reaction to tradition.