One of the Main Characteristics of Postmodernism Is Arts
Literary Theory and Criticism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, mode, communications, and engineering science. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime dorsum in the late 1950s, and is probably still standing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post-2nd World State of war era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.
The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier artful move which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has ofttimes been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break abroad from the Modernist opinion.
Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools turn down the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism fifty-fifty goes a footstep further and deliberately mixes depression fine art with high fine art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism's use of lighthearted parody, which was besides used by Modernism. Both these schools as well employed pastiche, which is the false of some other's style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which ways that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the piece of work is not "existent" but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and practice not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously cryptic and give fashion to multiple interpretations. The private or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central significant or goal in life, and dehumanized, oftentimes losing private characteristics and condign merely the representative of an age or culture, like Tiresias in The Waste Land.
In short, Modernism and Postmodernism requite vocalism to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because information technology progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn autonomously past two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such equally Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity betwixt the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.
Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of gimmicky world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and center of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in mod life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste material Land tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity past turning to Eastern cultures, and in the apply of Tiresias as protagonist
In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other mitt celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible fashion of being, and does not try to escape from these weather condition.
This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism —both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to accept a coherent center. In Derridean terms, the middle is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the heart, which is the seat of ability, is never entirely powerful. It is continually condign powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to learn ability. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that at that place are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida chosen differance. In Postmodernism's celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance, a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.
The Postmodernist atheism in coherence and unity points to some other basic distinction betwixt Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more than rationality leads to more lodge, which leads a social club to function ameliorate. To establish the primacy of Social club, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other—which includes the not-white, not-male, not-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to constitute the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, not-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Postmodernism, nevertheless, goes to the other farthermost. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder.
The Modernist belief in order, stability and unity is what the Postmodernist thinker Lyotard calls a metanarrative. Modernism works through metanarratives or grand narratives, while Postmodernism questions and deconstructs metanarratives. A metanarrative is a story a culture tells itself well-nigh its beliefs and practices.
Postmodernism understands that k narratives hide, silence and negate contradictions, instabilities and differences inherent in any social system. Postmodernism favours "mini-narratives," stories that explain pocket-sized practices and local events, without pretending universality and certitude. Postmodernism realizes that history, politics and culture are thou narratives of the power-wielders, which comprise falsehoods and incomplete truths.
Having deconstructed the possibility of a stable, permanent reality, Postmodernism has revolutionized the concept of linguistic communication. Modernism considered language a rational, transparent tool to represent reality and the activities of the rational listen. In the Modernist view, language is representative of thoughts and things. Hither, signifiers always point to signifieds. In Postmodernism, however, at that place are only surfaces, no depths. A signifier has no signified here, because in that location is no reality to signify.
The French philosopher Baudrillard has conceptualized the Postmodern surface civilisation as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a virtual or false reality simulated or induced by the media or other ideological apparatuses. A simulacrum is not only an imitation or duplication—information technology is the commutation of the original by a simulated, fake image. Contemporary globe is a simulacrum, where reality has been thus replaced by faux images. This would hateful, for instance, that the Gulf war that we know from newspapers and television reports has no connection whatsoever to what tin can be called the "real" Iraq war. The simulated image of Gulf state of war has become and then much more popular and real than the real war, that Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not take place. In other words, in the Postmodern world, in that location are no originals, only copies; no territories, only maps; no reality, merely simulations. Hither Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that the postmodern world is bogus; he is also implying that nosotros have lost the chapters to discriminate between the real and the artificial.
Fredric Jameson
Just equally we have lost impact with the reality of our life, we take also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume. If the media class one driving strength of the Postmodern condition, multinational capitalism and globalization is another. Fredric Jameson has related Modernism and Postmodernism to the 2nd and third phases of capitalism. The showtime phase of capitalism of the 18th -19th centuries, called Marketplace Capitalism, witnessed the early technological development such as that of the steam-driven motor, and corresponded to the Realist phase. The early 20th century, with the evolution of electric and internal combustion motors, witnessed the onset of Monopoly Capitalism and Modernism. The Postmodern era corresponds to the age of nuclear and electronic technologies and Consumer Capitalism, where the emphasis is on marketing, selling and consumption rather than production. The dehumanized, globalized world, wipes out individual and national identities, in favour of multinational marketing.
It is thus clear from this exposition that at that place are at least three dissimilar directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Postmodernism also has its roots in the theories Habermas and Foucault. Furthermore, Postmodernism can be examined from Feminist and Mail service-colonial angles. Therefore, one cannot pinpoint the principles of Postmodernism with finality, because there is a plurality in the very constitution of this theory.
Postmodernism, in its denial of an objective truth or reality, forcefully advocates the theory of constructivism—the anti-essentialist argument that everything is ideologically constructed. Postmodernism finds the media to exist a bang-up deal responsible for "amalgam" our identities and everyday realiites. Indeed, Postmodernism developed as a response to the contemporary boom in electronics and communications technologies and its revolutionizing of our former world order.
Constructivism invariably leads to relativism. Our identities are constructed and transformed every moment in relation to our social environment. Therefore there is telescopic for multiple and diverse identities, multiple truths, moral codes and views of reality.
The understanding that an objective truth does not be has invariably led the emphasis of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is of course plural and conditional. A stress on subjectivity will naturally lead to a renewed interest in the local and specific experiences, rather than the and universal and abstract; that is on mini-narratives rather than yard narratives.
Finally, all versions of Postmodernism rely on the method of Deconstruction to analyze socio-cultural situations. Postmodernism has oftentimes been vehemently criticized. The fundamental feature of Postmodernism is disbelief, which negates social and personal realities and experiences. It is easy to claim that the Gulf War or Iraq War does not exist; but and so how does 1 account for the deaths, the loss and pain of millions of people victimized past these wars? Also, Postmodernism fosters a deep cynicism well-nigh the one sustaining force of social life—culture. By entirely washing away the ground beneath our feet, the ideological presumptions upon which human culture is built, Postmodernism generates a feeling of lack and insecurity in contemporary societies, which is essential for the sustenance of a capitalistic world guild. Finally, when the Third World began to assert itself over Euro-centric hegemonic ability, Postmodernism had rushed in with the warning, that the empowerment of the periphery is simply transient and temporary; and that merely as Europe could non retain its imperialistic power for long, the new-plant ability of the erstwhile colonies is also under erasure.
In literature, postmodernism (relying heavily on fragmentation, deconstruction, playfulness, questionable narrators etc.) reacted against the Enlightenment ideas implicit in modernist literature – informed by Lyotard'south concept of the "metanarrative", Derrida's concept of "play", and Budrillard's "simulacra." Deviating from the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic globe, the postmodern. writers eschew, often playfully, the possibility of significant, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this. quest. Marked by a distrust of totalizing mechanisms and self-awareness, postmodern writers often celebrate chance over arts and crafts and apply metafiction to undermine the author'south "univocation". The distinction between high and low civilization is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Postmodern literature can exist considered equally an umbrella term for the post-state of war developments in literature such as Theatre of the Cool, Shell Generation and Magical Realism.
Postmodern literature, as expressed in the writings of Beckett, Robbe Grillet, Borges, Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz and Angela Carter rests on a recognition of the complex nature of reality and experience, the role of time and memory in human perception, of the self and the globe as historical constructions, and the problematic nature of linguistic communication.
Postmodern literature reached its peak in the '60s and '70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Gene by John Barth, Gravity'southward Rainbow, 5., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, "factions" similar Armies in the Nighttime and In Cold Claret past Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, postmodern science fiction novels like Neoromancer by William Gibson, Slaughter-house-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the decease of postmodernism in the '80's with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 commodity Stalking the Billion-Footed Animal called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to supplant postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some alleged White Noise in (1985) or The Satanic Verses (1988) to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.
Postmodern flick describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism trough the cinematic medium – by upsetting the mainstream conventions of narrative construction and characterization and destroying (or playing with) the audience's "interruption of atheism," to create a work that express through less-recognizable internal logic. Two such examples are Jane Campion's Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse gild; and Karel Reisz'due south The French Lieutenant's Adult female, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the individual lives of the actors playing information technology, which the audition also sees. All the same, Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone's epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the start postmodern film. Other examples include Michael Winterbottom'due south 24 Hr Party People, Federico Fellini's Satyricon and Amarcord, David Lynch' s Mulholland Drive, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
In spite of the rather stretched, cynical arguments of Postmodernism, the theory has exerted a fundamental influence on late 20th century thought. It has indeed revolutionized all realms of intellectual research in varying degrees.
Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Literature, Modernism, Postmodernism
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Source: https://literariness.org/2016/03/31/postmodernism/
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