/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.9974121]

Can someone tell me how to identify "modern" and "postmodern" literature?

In particular, what constitutes the differences between a modern and postmodern novel?

What makes Joyce and Faulkner modern while Pynchon and DeLillo postmodern?

[Anonymous No.9974163]

I've heard that postmodernism is a dragon who ate my dad, and that if I kill it I can save my dad and also get gold and save the princess.

Something something dominance hierarchy

[Anonymous No.9974212]

>>9974121
easiest answer: split it around 1945-1950.

less easy answer: a lot of what post modernism does is done by modernist authors but to a greater extent and with more freedom.

so instead of having one unreliable narrator, a novel might have several unreliable narrators or have the novel apparently exonerate the unreliable narrator as merely an incredible narrator.

instead of systems using bureaucracy in Kafkaesque ways, individualists use bureaucracy against systems in Kafkaesque ways (Catch 22 is a good example of this and use of irony being used more broadly than by fate)

while modernism in literature attacks the problems of modern progress more than modernism in other disciplines in some ways, it means that postmodernism in literature often attacks what it sought to shelter back into. joyce and faulkner's use of the mythic and stream of consciousness to replace the modern progress meme in postmodernism becomes flann o'brien's finn mac cool who is senile enough to repeat long stretches of half remembered half confabulated traditional irish storytelling.

another good way of telling is how many times they mention atoms. (don't be fooled by joyce's use of quark, it was named in 1963 after the physicist who discovered them read finnegans wake)