Module B: Texts and Ways of Thinking

Elective 2: Postmodernism

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What is Postmodernism?

A Critical Theory Timeline

relevant to Texts and Ways of Thinking: Postmodernism

Modernism is the literary and artistic period that precedes Postmodernism. It is a term that describes the arts and culture in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly from 1910 to 1930. Writers you might know from this period include T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf from England and Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka from Europe.

 These composers reveal:

• Impressionism and subjectivity
• Moving away from omniscient narration; external narration and clear moral positions
• Blurring the distinctions between genres so that prose could also be poetic and conversely, poetry could be more prose like
• Fragmentation; discontinuous narrative
• Reflecting on the nature and status of the literary forms within the form itself

Postmodernism is a broad term that refers to a historical period, the second half of the twentieth century, principally since the 1970’ and 1980’s, and to a ‘style’ in Western culture, based on the merging of artistic and industrial forms of production, both mechanical and electronic. The distinction between art (and its traditions) and consumer product became blurred: the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ could be reproduced on any number of different types of products from stationary to t-shirts and mass produced on posters or prints.

 For example, Andy Warhol’s famous series of portraits of Mona Lisa (1963), Liz ( 1963), Elvis I and II (1964) , Jackie triptych (1964) are the product of ten years as a successful commercial artist. His images were already familiar, even stereotyped and he brought to them his knowledge of commercial silk screen printing and marketing to his art generating a new and initially controversial form of portraiture.

1 2 3 4 5

Sources of the images used above:

1 http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Image-Library/Warhol/MonaLisa-silkscreen-linen.jpg

2 http://www.artofcolour.com/in-depth/mona-lisa/mona_gold.jpg

3 http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/786.html

4 http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Triple-Elvis-1963-Posters_i825861_.htm

5http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--10116333/SP--A/IGID--853346/Nine_Jackies_1964.htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=11257&ui=3EBF238607794E07AD8D695091851C58

However mechanical reproduction saw the growth and recognition of newer art forms such as photography and film (as well as television). The issue of ‘the original’ is not a concern in these cases and ‘art’ was opened up to the masses in a way that was not possible earlier.

 Artists, composers and directors also began to borrow elements from other artworks and meld them to produce new artworks.

The use of elements of other artworks and combining them to form a new work is called pastiche.

Good pastiche pays homage to the works it borrows from. It can also become a significant art work in its own right when the borrowing and melding allows the composer to make an original and distinctive statement through their work.

Post modern works of art or literature are often characterised by a mixing of texts and genres, and a resistance to singular, fixed meanings and interpretations. These texts, by their nature, question or overturn dominant ways of thinking, forcing the reader/viewer to re-evaluate the meaning of texts.

 It is also an example of the ‘death of the author’ put forward by Roland Barthes (1967) in which the traditional role of the author is altered: the author is no longer in control once the text passes into public circulation. The composer creates his own meaning; the reader creates his or her own meaning by interpreting the text in the light of their own experience. This explains why a writer, for example William Shakespeare, can produce varied and often conflicting interpretations and yet is still widely read.

 These composers:

• Mix literary genres
• Use intertextual elements such as parody, pastiche, allusion, allowing references between texts rather than being tied to reality
• Use of irony to examine past and present
• Debate the purpose and processes of text and composer
• Meld high and low culture

From an online dictionary:

These quotations about Postmodernism come from:

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/quotations/category/modernism+and+postmodernism

• Quote:
  Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.
  
  Author: Adair, Gilbert
  
  Attribution: Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991).

• Quote:
  I think the adjective “post-modernist” really means “mannerist.” Books about books is fun but frivolous.
  
  Author: Carter, Angela
  
  Attribution: Angela Carter (1940–1992), British author. Novelists in Interview, ed. John Haffenden (1985).

• Quote:
  The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”
  
  Author: Eco, Umberto

         Attribution: Umberto Eco (b. 1932), Italian semiologist, novelist. “Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable,” Reflections on the Name  of the Rose (1983, trans. 1984).

• Quote:
  A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
  
  Author: Lyotard, Jean François
  
  Attribution: Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924), French philosopher. repr. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979, rev. 1986). “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Critique, no. 419 (Paris, April 1982).
  
   

• Quote:
  Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict.
  
  Author: Wilson, Elizabeth
  
  Attribution: Elizabeth Wilson (b. 1936), British journalist, author. Hallucinations, ch. 23 (1988).

• Quote:
  Not “Seeing is Believing” you ninny, but “Believing is Seeing.” For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.
  
  Author: Wolfe, Tom
  
  Attribution: Tom Wolfe (b. 1931), U.S. journalist, author. The Painted Word, ch. 1 (1975).