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"It is difficult to perceive just what the gently caress is happening here." -Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, page 512. What is Postmodernist Literature? Because I'm lazy, here's Wikipedia: Postmodern literature is literature characterized by heavy reliance on techniques like fragmentation, paradox, and questionable narrators, and is often (though not exclusively) defined as a style or trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. More on Postmodernism taken from James Herrick's History and Theory of Rhetoric Postmodernism is a reaction to the intellectual values and philosophical goals of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period reason was elevated as our best hope of solving ancient human problems and creating a rational society. [...] The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had already begun to question Enlightenment assumptions, and thus provided the seeds of a new or "postmodern" system of thought. [...] Postmodern thought questions both reason and progress, and rejects what Jean-Francois Lyotard termed, in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition, "meta-narratives," those grand explanatory schemes such as Christianity or capitalism that claim to account for the entirety of human history and the human condition. Postmodernism rejected even the notion of the autonomous subject or "self" as a sociolinguistic construction. In other words, Postmodernism challenged the very foundations of Western philosophy. [...] Lyotard suggested that "to enter the postmodern era... we must overcome our Enlightenment legacy by abandoning the quest for truth." [...] It is also the case that Lyotard found language to constitute the worlds we inhabit, not fixed and eternal realities. And, the possibilities in language for creating realities were numerous. Credit goes to Smoking Crow for finally getting me off my rear end to post this thread. I was hoping someone else would do it first. They'd probably do a better job of it, too. Instead of just summing up the Wikipedia Article, I'll just let you read it yourself if you like. I'm not much for making a big OP. For one, I'm not educated enough on the subject, and secondly, postmodernism is supposed to be hard, right? Instead, let's jump straight into discussion. I really enjoyed Don DeLillo's White Noise, but I found Underworld to be much less fun to read. It had hardly any humor at all, and I finally put a bookmark in it on page 500. I came across Libra and Mao II at a cheap book sale, so I picked them up. Are they a little lighter reading? What are some less popular postmodern writers that fans of the movement should explore? blue squares fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 7, 2014 |
# ? Jun 19, 2014 20:48 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:44 |
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I never understood the definition of postmodernism and every time I think I do I encounter a book that I'm surprised is (or is not) considered postmodernistic. For example, Eco states that the Name of the Rose is postmodernistic but I don't really understand why since it has little similarities with Cat's Cradle, Catch-22, White Noise, etc. I also assume that all Magical Realism is part of postmodernism but I have no idea if this is actually the case. The wikipedia page has a lot of words but makes the distinction with other genres look extremely vague. That makes it a bit more difficult for me to recommend good books here, because I don't know if they fit in this thread. So I'll ask a question instead: which of the following great books would you consider postmodernistic? - Blindness by Jose Saramago (I consider this one, simply because I consider it magical realism) - Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon - Deathless by Catherynne M Valente - The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton - Siddhartha by Herman Hesse - Ubik by Pihilp K Dick - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell Side note: Vonnegut deserves more praise. Cat's Cradle is the best book of his to start with in my opinion.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:14 |
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While not normally called postmodern, I'm a big Raymond Carver fan and his style is postmodern. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the best books ever written. I love his sparse sentences and I actually try to write academic works in a Carver-esque manner.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:19 |
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Walh Hara posted:I never understood the definition of postmodernism and every time I think I do I encounter a book that I'm surprised is (or is not) considered postmodernistic. For example, Eco states that the Name of the Rose is postmodernistic but I don't really understand why since it has little similarities with Cat's Cradle, Catch-22, White Noise, etc. I also assume that all Magical Realism is part of postmodernism but I have no idea if this is actually the case. The wikipedia page has a lot of words but makes the distinction with other genres look extremely vague. There's a few different postmodern y movements and a lot of disagreement about what it actually is. I personally wouldn't say Name of the ROse is very postmodern, the semiotics stuff is because postmodernism is big on semiotics and there's a lot of lovely Borges stuff going on but ehhhhh.Postmodernist literature is really anything yuou want it to be
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:39 |
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Walh Hara posted:I never understood the definition of postmodernism and every time I think I do I encounter a book that I'm surprised is (or is not) considered postmodernistic. Even Brian McHale, a scholar of postmodernism, and so someone professionally burdened with having to explain what it is, struggles with it. Here's his shot at highlighting the distinction from modernism in one of the better articles on the subject I've come across: quote:This is the distinction that I developed. Modernist fiction was preoccupied with what we know and how we know it; with the accessibility and reliability of knowledge; it explored epistemological questions. Postmodernist fiction, by contrast, explored ontological questions - questions of being rather than knowing. It asked questions like those the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins once posed: “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” The change-over from modernism to postmodernism isn’t a matter of something absolutely new entering the picture, but of a reshuffling of the deck, a shift of dominant: what was present but “backgrounded” in modernism becomes “foregrounded” in postmodernism, and vice-versa. quote:The Sound and the Fury poses special challenges for the reader; in fact, it is notoriously difficult to read. It taxes our ingenuity and interpretative resources to the utmost; we must read between the lines, fill in the gaps, link up widely dispersed details, solve puzzles, and distinguish solid clues from red herrings. The Sound and the Fury is a detective novel, in a sense, but the detective is the reader. It is a novel about the difficulty of knowing anything for sure, or anything at all; it’s an epistemological novel. (And it’s no coincidence that the detective novel, in both its “classic” and its hard-boiled form, is an exact contemporary of the highbrow modernist novel; the detective novel is modernist fiction’s disreputable twin brother.) Whether everyone else throwing the name about is operating on the same terms as McHale is another question.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:43 |
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Smoking Crow posted:While not normally called postmodern, I'm a big Raymond Carver fan and his style is postmodern. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the best books ever written. I love his sparse sentences and I actually try to write academic works in a Carver-esque manner. A lot of his minimalism was due to his editor outright cutting whole chunks out of his stories you know. Later on Carver was not as hot on the whole idea.
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 22:44 |
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Postmodern literature is pretty trill OP: check out End Zone by DeLillo, it's basically the proto-Infinite Jest. There's even a nuclear warfare game in one scene
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# ? Jun 19, 2014 23:26 |
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How about short fiction? Are there any good literary journals that are consistently publishing stories that are "Postmodern" or at least somewhat avant garde, DFW/Pynchonish type stuff? I've done some googling but didn't find anything to go on? I don't expect much response since I don't think many people read enough journals to know.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 00:39 |
The obvious answer is McSweeney's, although some of their pieces/authors can disappear a bit up their own asses. But there is a lot of great work in there, especially the earlier issues.
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# ? Jun 20, 2014 01:43 |
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OK I'm almost at the end of The Critics part of 2666 by Roberto Bolano. So far it is not really interesting me as much as I'd expected. Have any of you lot finished it and did it pick up? It seems very far up is own butt with these stupid literary snobs running around trying to track down this supposedly great German author (Archimboldi), doing a lot of navel gazing while ignoring their crippled colleague in a wheelchair. I need a really good recommendation to stick with this or its going in the book donation pile.
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# ? Jun 21, 2014 10:27 |
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I hated 2666 and the widespread acclaim it received baffles me. I googled "2666 negative review" and found a couple that really put into words what I was feeling at the time. I actually enjoyed the Critics characters, mostly, but everything after that was very dull. The writing itself was always, on a technical level, either bad or just very plain. I thought the book was a waste of time and was a first draft that Bolano died before being able to revise. I've also never read any other Bolano stuff.
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# ? Jun 21, 2014 13:39 |
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The characters are OK but the story is really bland. I think you're on the money about it being a first draft. I'll move on I think.
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# ? Jun 22, 2014 01:36 |
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I've just started on Pynchon's "V." I'm about 100 pages into it and enjoying it quite a bit, although the sudden shifts in time period and location are hard to keep track of. It feels like there are a lot of threads waiting to overlap but, having read Gravity's Rainbow I'm kind of expecting them not to. How does V. compare to that book?
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# ? Jun 22, 2014 03:09 |
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mdemone posted:The obvious answer is McSweeney's, although some of their pieces/authors can disappear a bit up their own asses. But there is a lot of great work in there, especially the earlier issues. I understand this is a serious literature thread, but mcsweeney's is wonderful for this, if nothing else. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/black-shoe-diary-the-daily-musings-of-shuruku-umezawa-junior-salesman-ninja
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# ? Jun 22, 2014 03:35 |
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blue squares posted:How about short fiction? I would say that Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollman qualifies to some extent, and it's very good. Also, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Jun 22, 2014 |
# ? Jun 22, 2014 16:15 |
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builds character posted:I understand this is a serious literature thread, but mcsweeney's is wonderful for this, if nothing else. Very serious postmodernism thread with no tangents allowed
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# ? Jun 22, 2014 16:22 |
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I came across an absolutely hilarious story in N+1, a quarterly journal. It's called Two Scenes, by Nell Zink. Here's a free preview: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/fiction-drama/two-scenes/ The full can only be seen in the mag, but your local bookstore may carry it. A great read for anyone who likes metafiction and humor. Also making an appearance as a character is Jonathan Franzen. I'm also a day or two from finishing Gravity's Rainbow and will be posting my thoughts when I do. blue squares fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jun 23, 2014 |
# ? Jun 23, 2014 00:44 |
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blue squares posted:I really enjoyed Don DeLillo's White Noise, but I found Underworld to be much less fun to read. It had hardly any humor at all, and I finally put a bookmark in it on page 500. I came across Libra and Mao II at a cheap book sale, so I picked them up. Are they a little lighter reading? I wouldn't say Libra was any lighter than White Noise. It's really, really enjoyable, though, and wasn't really at all what I expected. The pseudo-historicalness of it was pretty great and it would probably benefit you to have more than a passing knowledge of the events and players in the JFK assassination and aftermath.
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# ? Jun 26, 2014 17:08 |
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CestMoi posted:Very serious postmodernism thread with no tangents allowed That's good, because I am very serious about ninjas.
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# ? Jun 27, 2014 12:42 |
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I've been reading through Gaddis this year and am enjoying him quite a bit. His are not the easiest of books to get into, no dialogue is attributed, time skips aren't advertised, telephone conversations are one-sided. Gaddis intended this to force a collaboration with the reader, so that the personality of the characters is drawn out and created through the reading and eventual greater understanding of them. It took a bit to get used to at first, but isn't really a problem for me now. The main challenge now is simply seeing and understanding the references and allusions crammed into the books, but I suppose that's what re-reads are for. Art and the corrupting influence of the various facets of society is the major theme running through all of the novels. In each book you'll find art or an artist devolving, distorted, corrupted within the swathe of characters and virtually non-stop dialogue. JR is my favorite, but Carpenters Gothic is probably the easiest to get into. It's the shortest and has a more limited cast of characters. And since we're talking about Delillo, Gaddis preferred Libra to White Noise... William Gaddis posted:Dear Don DeLillo.
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# ? Jun 27, 2014 13:19 |
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Rereading Gravity's Rainbow with that companion guide to catch all those sweet refs I didn't get the first time.
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# ? Jun 28, 2014 01:05 |
Butt Frosted Cake posted:Rereading Gravity's Rainbow with that companion guide to catch all those sweet refs I didn't get the first time. Weisenburger? Oh man, you're in for a treat. It'll blow your drat mind how carefully TRP constructed the plot and timeline. Let us know how it goes...
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# ? Jun 28, 2014 01:27 |
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Fellwenner posted:JR is my favorite, but Carpenters Gothic is probably the easiest to get into. It's the shortest and has a more limited cast of characters. There's a few letters where he genuinely laments that CG never reached "the man in the airport." This being a book where a woman never leaves her house and there's a major sub-plot about missing geological reports.
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# ? Jun 30, 2014 12:01 |
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Smoking Crow posted:While not normally called postmodern, I'm a big Raymond Carver fan and his style is postmodern. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the best books ever written. I love his sparse sentences and I actually try to write academic works in a Carver-esque manner. FWIW "Carver-esque" really means "Lish-esque". Carver's original drafts are very different from what his editor turned them into, here's a good article on it: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/24/071224fa_fact?currentPage=all .
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 11:01 |
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feraltennisprodigy posted:OP: check out End Zone by DeLillo, it's basically the proto-Infinite Jest. There's even a nuclear warfare game in one scene End Zone is my favorite DeLillo novel but I don't think it's THAT similar to IJ beyond them both having hyper literate young people (characters in DeLillo novels tend to all more or less talk like Don DeLillo) and a nuclear war game, and the games aren't even really that similar. DFW did freak out and apologize to DeLillo for ripping him off in a letter, but I think that was just him be overly nervous about one of his big heros thinking he'd plagerized him. The two books deal with really different themes. IJ has the war game, but it's not really about war. End Zone is. Walh Hara posted:Side note: Vonnegut deserves more praise. I feel like Kurt Vonnegut is about as close to universially well liked as an author can get. He's great but I think everyone knows that. But maybe I just only hang out with the sorts of people who would read Vonnegut. MourningView fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jul 2, 2014 |
# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:46 |
Not liking Vonnegut will immediately put someone into the "untrustworthy and probably dangerous" zone for me, even though he is far from my favorite author and I rarely re-read him. You get the sense he was about as good and decent a man as it is possible to be -- although admittedly I know little about his personal life (please don't ruin him for me if you know better).
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 18:01 |
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MourningView posted:
Here in Europe nobody knows who Vonnegut is, it's extremely annoying. Even people that often read literature.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 18:56 |
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mdemone posted:Not liking Vonnegut will immediately put someone into the "untrustworthy and probably dangerous" zone for me Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? He may have been a decent man or whatever but I don't see how not being into his writing makes anyone untrustworthy or dangerous.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 18:59 |
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Since these postmodern novel threads always see a few shout-outs for Gravity's Rainbow, I'd like to go ahead and recommend another Pynchon novel. Mason and Dixon is a fantastic novel very strongly in the vein of Pynchon's other work, a historical fiction with heavy elements of absurdity. Its writing can be a little daunting, but I have always felt that more than any of his other works, the characters are strong, and there is a powerful emotional core at the heart of the whole thing. The friendship that develops between the two main characters affected me very much by the end. Also, there is an automated duck or something that flies around and is annoying, I remember it being funny.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:21 |
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fliptophead posted:OK I'm almost at the end of The Critics part of 2666 by Roberto Bolano. So far it is not really interesting me as much as I'd expected. Have any of you lot finished it and did it pick up? It seems very far up is own butt with these stupid literary snobs running around trying to track down this supposedly great German author (Archimboldi), doing a lot of navel gazing while ignoring their crippled colleague in a wheelchair. I need a really good recommendation to stick with this or its going in the book donation pile. It becomes a completely different book in each of the different parts. The most difficult part is definitely still ahead though... Butthen you cry at the end (didn't actually cry of course - we are after all in the postmodern age, but it's very moving) Antwan3K fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jul 3, 2014 |
# ? Jul 3, 2014 21:31 |
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Antwan3K posted:It becomes a completely different book in each of the different parts. The most difficult part is definitely still ahead though... Butthen you cry at the end (didn't actually cry of course - we are after all in the postmodern age, but it's very moving) I'll see how I go - any clues as to why it's more difficult later on? Michael Chabon is an author who I find very accessible and has written some great stuff (The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) but I don't see his work being discussed here too often. He tends to write a lot on Jewish identity, with one of the plots in Kavalier and Clay involving a Golem being smuggled out of Europe. Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place in an alternate history where the Jewish people are settled in Alaska instead of Israel and it's a mishmash of detective and speculative fiction. I guess seeing as it's difficult to classify as one particular genre it could be considered Postmodern!
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 00:15 |
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I finished Gravity's Rainbow last week and meant to post a retrospective, but the forums crash threw me off. Wow. What a loving book. Infinite Jest is still my favorite novel because it is more relateable and the characters are much stronger, but never in my life have I read something like Gravity's Rainbow: so chock full of style, bursting from every sentence like a rocket. I don't even know what to say here that would do it justice other than that it is the most unique (excluding gimmick books, albeit still with some merit, such as House of Leaves or S.) novel I've ever come across. I strongly recommend it to anyone, but with the oft-repeated caveat that you have to simply accept that you will not come close to understanding all of it, or perhaps even most of it. The last 100 pages completely baffled me, but I was enamored with Pynchon's style that I kept going and loved it. I wanted to post a more in-depth examination to stimulate discussion of the book, but frankly, I don't think I'm qualified even for that. I know that I will return to the book soon and go through it with Weisenburger's companion, as my university has a copy in the library. I took a break from heavy reading with Donna Tartt's The Secret History (not a postmodern book), but I'm starting in on Mason & Dixon tonight. I can't wait to see what I'm in for.
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 02:43 |
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blue squares posted:How about short fiction? Are there any good literary journals that are consistently publishing stories that are "Postmodern" or at least somewhat avant garde, DFW/Pynchonish type stuff? I've done some googling but didn't find anything to go on? I don't expect much response since I don't think many people read enough journals to know. The American Reader published postmodern stuff pretty consistently. Stuff like this: http://theamericanreader.com/the-goldilocks-variations/
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 03:47 |
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Fellwenner posted:I've been reading through Gaddis this year and am enjoying him quite a bit. His are not the easiest of books to get into, no dialogue is attributed, time skips aren't advertised, telephone conversations are one-sided. Gaddis intended this to force a collaboration with the reader, so that the personality of the characters is drawn out and created through the reading and eventual greater understanding of them. It took a bit to get used to at first, but isn't really a problem for me now. The main challenge now is simply seeing and understanding the references and allusions crammed into the books, but I suppose that's what re-reads are for. Gaddis is great. My preference is for funny books and his books are very, very funny. You didn't mention A Frolic of His Own, but that's my favorite one.
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 03:52 |
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dogcrash truther posted:The American Reader published postmodern stuff pretty consistently. Stuff like this: http://theamericanreader.com/the-goldilocks-variations/ I don't mean to be naive, but surely this is parody? And while I don't want to inhibit the conversation with examples of post-modernism, I feel compelled to ask where something like Portnoy's Complaint fits as far as genre?
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 04:45 |
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dogcrash truther posted:Gaddis is great. My preference is for funny books and his books are very, very funny. You didn't mention A Frolic of His Own, but that's my favorite one. I haven't read it yet. That one's up next!
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 04:47 |
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What/'s good by Barthelme?
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# ? Jul 4, 2014 23:19 |
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fliptophead posted:I'll see how I go - any clues as to why it's more difficult later on? More difficult to keep reading because of extremely repetitive violence. It will become clear quite quickly when you start reading the part ('The Part about the Crimes'). It is quite clever to me how he manages to weave a story and develops characters inside of an elaborate - quite structured, mostly one murder per paragraph - detailing of murders in a town, but still you feel really weird when reading about serial killings so much that it just becomes noise. I still tried to read every girl's murder as an individual tragedy but it became a real chore. Antwan3K fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Jul 4, 2014 |
# ? Jul 4, 2014 23:39 |
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CestMoi posted:What/'s good by Barthelme? The stories give a good demonstration of what he was about, though buy any volume and you're almost guaranteed to be sick of that before you're through. I enjoyed The Dead Father which is definitely more concerted, and the various discursions seem more like an artistic effect rather than an attempt to filibuster through to the end of another piece to sell. dogcrash truther posted:Gaddis is great. My preference is for funny books and his books are very, very funny. You didn't mention A Frolic of His Own, but that's my favorite one. Possibly my fave too, though I've yet to reread JR. It's the one that Franzen picked on in that loving awful New Yorker article where he renounces all this, which just goes to show quite how bad he is. It's also one of the books that I want to recommend to the folks asking for unreliable narrators as what's actually going on in the story is concealed from you. My understanding of why his bogus law-suit is rewarded is copied from an essay in Hints and Guesses, a book of Gaddis criticism which also spoils such mysteries as why did she die at the end of Carpenter's Gothic Fly McCool posted:I feel compelled to ask where something like Portnoy's Complaint fits as far as genre? Jewish.
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# ? Jul 5, 2014 00:26 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:44 |
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Mr. Squishy posted:Possibly my fave too, though I've yet to reread JR. It's the one that Franzen picked on in that loving awful New Yorker article where he renounces all this, which just goes to show quite how bad he is. It's also one of the books that I want to recommend to the folks asking for unreliable narrators as what's actually going on in the story is concealed from you. My understanding of why his bogus law-suit is rewarded is copied from an essay in Hints and Guesses, a book of Gaddis criticism which also spoils such mysteries as why did she die at the end of Carpenter's Gothic. So you're reading background material by/about Gaddis, anything else you'd recommend? I've got to read Frolic and Agape first, but Hints and Guesses looks interesting.
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# ? Jul 5, 2014 01:53 |