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Post Modernism is an umbrella term used to cover a lot of aspects of 20th century culture and philosophy/theory. In a cultural sense it's basically everywhere: every commercial ironically scoring some campy enactment of a humdrum event with a piece of Serious Classical Music only to break the fourth wall and come clean with you at the end - hey, we both know this is a commercial, you're smart enough to figure that out, you're in on the joke, and so are we, so buy our product lol this whole thing is so crass right? - is a reminder that this style has found its way into almost everything at this point. But focusing strictly on literature it could be referred to as modern experimental fiction for the sake of clarity. Generally speaking it's literature that is obsessed with its own form, style, limitations, mimesis, epistemology, and self-awareness. It acknowledges its synthetic nature in order to draw the reader's attention to the act of reading and how one is understanding the information on the page rather than to any particular story or character. Vonnegut and PK Dick have come up a bit in this thread and, while they're not not under the purview of this topic, they're also not strong examples. Vonnegut was largely a conventional sci-fi satirist who used some pomo trappings for humorous or amusing effects, and has more in common with Swift or Twain than he does with Gaddis or Pynchon. PKD wrote about what might be called post modern societies - corporate states, virtual worlds, rampant undisguised neoliberalism - but his writing is simplistic, very pulpy, and in the service of telling the story above all else. Some (short) books to start with: Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov The Loser - Thomas Bernhard Don't get too caught up on the label, think of it more like Wittgenstein's concept of a family resemblance than a coordinated movement.
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Feb 16, 2015 02:47
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 21:44 |
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