/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.654777]

I've come to the conclusion that "post-modern" literature is a bunch of gimmicky bullshit. Is there anything profound in it?

[Anonymous No.654786]

Can someone give me a layman's definition of post-modernism?

[Anonymous No.654785]

Gravity's Rainbow is as good as you'll get. So not really...

[Anonymous No.654791]

>>654786

Like modernism, but worse.

[Anonymous No.654800]

post-modern, is the mass attempt primarily to admit to a cultural nihilism which has become increasingly difficult to ignore, and has evolved into a self-referencing process of justification for this cultural nihilism. It was a confession of guilt, but now they are trying to take it back or rationalize it.

[Anonymous No.654801]

>>654791

Well now I want to hear YOUR definition of modernism. lol

[Anonymous No.654822]

>>654773
H ｔ T P : / / 8 8 . 8 0 . 2 1 . 1 2 / i s Ｆ ａ Ｒ Ｓ Ｕ P Ｅ r I Ｏ r T ｏ ｔ Ｈ Ｉ Ｓ ｐ i Ｅ c Ｅ O ｆ c ｒ a P 4 C Ｈ a N I ｓ ｆ O r ｕ g ｌ Ｙ l O s e R T ｒ Ｏ ｌ ｌ ｓ o ｎ L ｙ

[Anonymous No.654829]

>>654777
Yes. Read some Borges.

[Anonymous No.654905]

Post-modernism is a mass amount of dumb asses trying to fight conformity.

[Anonymous No.654934]

While we're on the subject, what in God's name is "post-irony"?

[Anonymous No.654941]

>>654934
the feeling of emptiness you get after someone tells you a bad ironic pun?

[Anonymous No.654984]

>>654934
A term used by people too jaded by post-modernism to remember what sincerity is.

[Anonymous No.654985]

>>654934

this generation's post-modernism? because post-post-modernism sounded too conformal?

[Anonymous No.654991]

>>654985 this generation
Post-irony started in the early 90's

[Anonymous No.655004]

>>654786

INCOMING TL;DR - EARNEST ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN POSTMODERNISM WITH GOOD, SIMPLE PROSE

Having recently read The Postmodern Condition, I feel halfway qualified to break it down.

First of all, there's several different kinds of "postmodernism", whether you're talking about postmodernism in art, architecture, literature, or philosophy, or other areas. Each field has its own genre, which it terms "postmodern".

Jean Francois Lyotard, french philosopher and author of "The Postmodern Condition", says this (and I'm paraphrasing a bit): "Simplifying in the extreme, I define postmodernism as an incredulity toward metanarratives."

So, what's a metanarrative? Basically, it's a "grand narrative"; any sort of overarching story which seeks to explain everything in history. This could include most religions (in the beginning, God created the universe. Then, mankind went about its business. In the end, there will be a great battle, and evil will be destroyed. The End.) History is explained. More importantly, it includes things like Marxism. (History has led to the creation of the working class, and the ruling class. The working class will necessarily, inevitably, overthrow the ruling class, and "communism" will flower forevermore across the globe according to the following scheme: x, y, z... The End.) History is explained.

[Anonymous No.655021]

>>655004
So, post-modernism is, to quote Homer Simpson, a "know-nothing know-it-all".

[Anonymous No.655018]

>my face when society's plunge into decadent irony and emptiness was predicted by a Dane in the 19th Century

[Anonymous No.655022]

>>655018
Do you have a quote or passage?

[Anonymous No.655023]

So, if you're talking about "modern" projects, like Science, capitalism, and marxism, you're often talking about a "grand theory for everything"-hell, physics is currently on the hunt for a Grand Unified Theory. What "postmodern" philosophers may do in some instances is to poke holes or to try to point out problems with such "modern theories". In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard mentions various scientific advancements where uncertainty, or further problems, are the most interesting feature, rather than certainty, or resolution (quantum mechanics, Godel's work, fractals, chaos theory, etc). He then more or less advocates such advancement for its own sake. This same tactic could be applied to aesthetics, art, etc.

Another sense of postmodernism is "eclecticism". If favoring one single style is "unity", then being able to choose from many different styles at will is "disunity". Again paraphrasing Lyotard, "one can, in one day, eat sushi, watch an opera, listen to a Bob Marley record, and eat at McDonald's." This is the JUNK postmodernism of contemporary consumerism- whatever the market will support.

Similarly, in architecture, postmodernism can be seen as "junk" architecture. "Las Vegas is postmodern", because its architecture is eclectic, and is giving people what they want. Whether you think steel box skyscrapers are aesthetically pleasing or not, many of the modern architects of the early part of the 20th century at least had some thoroughgoing "modern principle" to their work, however misguided. "Every building should be this way because..."

[Anonymous No.655027]

>>655021
>a "know-nothing know-it-all".
That would make post-modernism Socrates.

Take that as you will.

[Anonymous No.655031]

>>655023

That makes sense. The rise of meta-fiction by writer's like Barth.

Does Post-Modernists have anything profound to say. Who knows -- it's hard to gauge anything while you're still in it.

(I don't believe the post-post modernism theory...)

[Anonymous No.655039]

Post-modern is just a misguided extension of modernism. It's the same fucking movement.

[Anonymous No.655040]

>>655027
Well Socrates was pretty well-ahead of his time you could say

[Anonymous No.655046]

To quote the Simpsons

>> what's with the eye Moe?
>> oh, it's po-mo.
>> po-mo?
>> post-modernism.
>> post-modernism?
>> weird for the sake of weird.
>> oh.

[Anonymous No.655050]

So novels that talk about today's society being shit, with everyone focusing on the material possesions and being brainwashed by todays media, being more socially "fucked up" then ever but not coming to terms with it, with the previous generation just making money off of everything that is gonna lead the world (US in this case) to eventually crumble since everyone cares about instant gratification, are post modernism? or what?

[Anonymous No.655053]

>>655022
Not at hand, but if you're interested you could read The Present Age and The Concept of Irony

[Anonymous No.655066]

>>654777
Post-Modernism is nothing but sarcasm and cynicism. I guess that's profound, if you like that kind of thing.

[Anonymous No.655077]

Because the idea is vague, "postmodern" can pretty much be appended at will to anything taking place after the 1960's. This of course is exacerbated by the dense, potentially meaningless prose that postmodern thinkers use. The punchline: Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, later admitted that he cribbed a bunch of science articles and made stuff up. (once again, I am paraphrasing. look up the actual quote for yourself.) "The Sokal affair" was a highly effective IRL troll where this dude wrote a nonsense essay and got it published as "postmodern" in order to show up postmodernism as bullshit. (google it). There are joke "postmodern essay" generators on the internet which use all the right words and namedrops in the right way to fit into the new canon, signifying nothing.

Let's put it this way. Postmodern is nothing more than a word to describe "what happened in the latter part of the 20th century", as opposed to "what happened in the 19th and early 20th century".

[Anonymous No.655085]

>>655066
>Post-Modernism is nothing but sarcasm and cynicism.

[Anonymous No.655088]

meh i got burned out on last night's pomo discussion. Kierkegaard buttfucking philosophy and whatnot. don't think i can contribute anything better than that at this point.

[Anonymous No.655104]

>>655085
>implying anyone cares about post modernism

[Anonymous No.655109]

>>655104
Oops wrong pic, as if anyone gives a damn.

[Anonymous No.655106]

>>655022
>A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst but a dialectical deceit, privatissime, it supplies a secret interpretation -- that it does not exist.

[Anonymous No.655120]

I've come to the conclusion that the OP is in no way filled to the brim and teeth with hardened catshit, and shall save the responses found in this thread for future reference and usage in discussions regarding certain 'works'.

Have a good day, my fellow /lit/erates.

[Anonymous No.655157]

Postermodernism is a is a way of categorizing art and thought. It doesn't have necessary and sufficient conditions or a Platonic form we can get at by talking about it. We conclude that two things are of a kind (when that kind is postermodernism) by noticing similar features of the two things in the same way we conclude that two people are of the same family by noticing family resemblences. Some of the features people categorize as being postmodern are nihilism, relativism, and a hostility towards linear narratives.

[Anonymous No.655162]

Lyotard defined "postmodernism" as "modernism with a guilty conscience."

In other words, modernism is reacting to the burden of the past---why write an epic when Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, whomever has already beat you to it?---by "making it new", in Ezra Pound's phrase.

But then when you see where Ezra Pound's own enthusiasms led him, you can see why writers whose careers begin AFTER the high-water-mark of modernism (circa 1922, if I had to make a guess) are a little more cagey about how they couch their attempts at great literature. Either because they don't want to be wrong in the judgment of history, or they simply don't want to end up in a cage in Pisa and then an asylum in Washington DC like Ezra Pound did.

So if you take a typically postmodern work like "Pale Fire" or "Lolita" or "The Crying of Lot 49" you realize that to a large degree it is about building in your own self-conscious interpretive framework. "Lot 49" and "Pale Fire" take as their central subject matter paranoia: the search for meaning where none may exist. While "Lolita" merely uses the device of a bland, dunderheaded preface by "John Ray, Jr." (JR-JR, a mirror name like Humbert Humbert) written in the fashionable Freudian patois of the 50s, because Nabokov thought Freudianism was horseshit, but also noted that you could publish any kind of smut you liked if it had a preface by a psychiatrist declaring this document to be of redeeming social value etc etc.

[Anonymous No.655210]

I have wondered about this too, I get the layman/wikipedia stuff about postmodernism, and I've read a bit of scholarly stuff on it, but I do have to wonder if some of it isn't jumping the gun to a degree.

I mean, I do buy all of the fracturing of meta-narratives idea. I get that. But what I really want to know is, what are the ramifications - long term. I mean, yeah, hyper-reality and things like that are cool buzz words for people to throw around, are there are hints of people distancing themselves through social networking sites that paradoxically connect and isolate us, and we do have pornography which can project an image of sex that is "sexier" than actual sex sometimes. But I also think that these ideas are not really replacing the old ways of existing in the world so much as co-existing with it.

So my question is this: Is this a repudiation of postmodernism, or a verification of it?

[Anonymous No.655214]

Read Paul Auster.

[Anonymous No.655236]

>>655162

So did you read the Pisan Cantos as well? I wasn't a fan, I must admit.

Though it was pretty impressive that he could keep all that stuff in his mind with just a Chinese pocket dictionary to throw in the oddly placed ideogram.

[Anonymous No.655246]

Here's some po-mo mixed with a little gen x

"What I've Learned" / Jonathan Goldstein / Wiretap

... I'm the kind of guy who fears that he has not yet learned a thing about himself whatsoever, because this seems to be the worst of all human sins. Not knowing thyself.

A couple of months ago, I was travelling by train to the U.S. and a park ranger gave a speech to a group of passengers in the dining car about a battle that was waged along the route we were travelling. At a certain point, as we all looked out the train windows, the ranger explained that the Americans did not win the War of 1812, that the British had. A woman then said that she was taught by her grade 10 history teacher that, in fact, the Americans did win.

"Ma'am," the park ranger explained with a laugh, "Anyone who knows anything about these matters knows that Britain won that one. That teacher you had was just plain ignorant."

I admired the ranger's certitude, and the woman's certitude, and even the woman's teacher's certitude. I admire certitude. Mostly because I feel compelled to punctuate every statement I make with the words, "but what do I know?"

I predict that when I am old, after all my decades of experience, I will still not have learned a thing. On my death bed in my final days, I will not be one of those people described in eulogies as courageous or inspiring. I fear that instead I might be referred to as foolhardy or dense. As my children and grandchildren circle my bed, expecting some profound dying statement, some culmination of all my worldly learning, I will look at them with eyes as empty of wisdom as the day I was born, but what do I know?

[Anonymous No.655289]

>>655162
So PoMo is garbage masquerading as high art?

[Anonymous No.655314]

>>655210
There's nothing new about any of that. Porn has always been around, as has impersonal correspondence.

[Anonymous No.655354]

>>655210
There's a little baby being expelled with the bathwater, but here's a characteristically postmodern way to answer your question:

What narrative would you like to employ in answering that question? You're assuming what you're already comfortable in discarding in regards to fracturing of metanarratives in supposing that postmodernism is the kind of thing you can reify and discover the laws of. Postmodernism doesn't have a normative agenda and it's impossible for us to narrate "its" influence in a way such that it can be agreed that it's been successfully disentangled from the other kinds of arbitrary ways in which we categorize and narrate phenomena.

[Anonymous No.655361]

>>655289
sometimes

[Anonymous No.655375]

>>655289

No, it's not garbage masquerading as high art. I loved "The Crying of Lot 49" when I read it in high school. But then I re-read it recently. Since then I've read a lot more Pynchon, and also know that in the Preface to "Slow Learner" he implies that he doesn't think the book is very good himself.

If you've read the book you know it's about a secret post-office called The Trystero which may or may not exist, but if it does, it was set up to oppose the postal monopoly granted to the House of Thurn und Taxis...

Well, I happened to notice re-reading it that, at one point, somebody shows an emblem of a dead badger, feet in the air, and notes that "Taxis" in Italian is "Tasso" which means badger....

[Anonymous No.655378]

Then I realized that, wait, but the word for "Turn" (if not Thurn which literally means Tower) in Latin / Italian could be given as "Torquato". In other words, a dead badger is Torquato Tasso. Who was a Renaissance poet who famously went insane.

Now the whole point of the book is that Oedipa doesn't know if she's insane or she's really finding these connections everywhere that prove something. But suddenly I notice something that no professional critic of Pynchon (to my knowledge) has pointed out. Thurn and Taxis could very well just be Torquato Tasso...in other words, the highly-wrought and learned artist who descends into madness.

When I realized that nobody who gets tenure for talking about Pynchon had noticed or pointed this out, I thought: dear god, am I going mad?

Then I thought, oh, well, maybe Pynchon was writing it like Nabokov wrote Pale Fire, as a sort of riddle book. In other words: you're supposed to be able to work out from Pale Fire where the crown jewels are hidden (in Kobaltana) but I know that Nabokov said this is the answer to an interviewer, but I'll be damned if I can work out the riddle, and I've read Pale Fire 4 or 5 times.

Whereas Pynchon declines to give interviews.

Anyway, if you don't like games, you probably won't like postmodernism.

Sincerely,
Tommy Pynchon

[Anonymous No.655388]

>>655375
>>655378

Joyce did this shit decades earlier and he basically started modernism.

[Anonymous No.655390]

http://www.freecod.net/?i=42618

[Anonymous No.655403]

>>655388
I'm sure Joyce also wanted to fuck up the canon of literature

[Anonymous No.655463]

Its hard to understand postmodernism after it ran its course, since many of its core tenants have already been entrenched into mainstream society (now that popular movies are very willing to be self referential shows, we are no longer shocked at a work being self referential). I've always understood modernism and postmodernism as two distinct periods: A period where western society realized that meaning may not be essential or inherent, and a period when society no longer cared if there was any meaning at all. A work that questioned the validity of literature may play with the idea of referring to itself as a novel but a postmodern work would have no qualms slapping its reader with self-referential information.

The reason this is hard for us to understand is because after postmodernism society realized the vacuum created by circular vapidness (not to say postmodernism was a "vapid" art. I literally mean it in the sense that there was nothing) was destructive, society began to lunge for ANYTHING that may have the hint of meaning. The rise of conservatism in Britain and the United States, the growing environmental movement, Randian ideals of wealth, the rise of Evangelical ministries, racial identity, and increased consumer consumption all pointed to a society that yearned for ANY meaning whatsoever.

Simply put, we've been born in a society that seeks to find meaning again. We're conditioned to find THE truth, and any work that seeks to deny the existence of any truth seems to us childish and without thought.

[Anonymous No.655483]

>>655463
I like this, and agree except that I don't feel that postmodernism has ran its course. Simply because the ''meaning'' which people search for has reached meta-status. it's become self aware (evangelicals as a voting block, environmentalism as marketing ploy, etc.)

[Anonymous No.655491]

>>654777
I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE

[Anonymous No.655497]

>>654774
g Ｏ Ｔ O ｈ T t ｐ : / / 8 8 . 8 0 . 2 1 . 1 2 / Ｆ Ｏ ｒ m o Ｒ ｅ ｉ n F ｏ ｒ Ｍ Ａ Ｔ I O n o n Ｔ H I Ｓ s u B Ｊ e C Ｔ

[Anonymous No.655507]

>>654985


on that note, I have a question. are emo kids post ironic?

[Anonymous No.655520]

>>655004

hey, good definition.

[Anonymous No.655536]

>>655463
Deriving meaning through experiencing solidarity with a social group isn't distinctively postmodern.

[Anonymous No.655544]

>>655088
wait what? Kierkegaard? post modernism? iz confuzed.

[Anonymous No.655582]

>>655483
I feel that such entrenchment is simply the powers that be adopting the general public mood in order to be elected/acquire more capital. Yes, I am aware that it makes it somewhat insincere. Of course, The Gubmint/WALL STREET never really were concerned with sincerity to begin with.

[Anonymous No.655597]

>>655536
You're right, its not. Its distinctively NOT post-modern. Notice how all these movements have entirely, for the lack of a better term, wacky and shaky tenants. Its like everyone during the 70s and 80s went completely batshit insane and declared the first thing they thought of as the one true truth. (God, Race, Money, DA URF)