This path was created by Elizabeth Pilon. The last update was by Austin Gerth.
Postmodernism
The College of Liberal Arts at Purdue offers an online Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, which covers several areas of critical theory. The Guide’s Introduction to the Postmodern begins by making a distinction between Postmodern culture and Postmodern theory, wherein the culture is life in the present, the state of “postmodernity,” and the theory is formulated by critics to understand the complexity of the present. According to the Guide: “One symptom of the present’s complexity is just how divided critics are on the question of postmodern culture, with a number of critics celebrating our liberation and a number of others lamenting our enslavement.” (Felluga) The discussion of postmodern culture and postmodern theory (and by extension postmodern art) differs from discussion of, say, “Modernism,” in that the historical-cultural period discussed as “postmodern” tends to line up more directly with the period in art known as “postmodern”. In contrast, the outset of “Modern” in history is sometimes placed as far back as the Renaissance, while Modernism in art is typically defined as beginning around the dawn of the 20th Century. The implication I want to suggest here for postmodernism is that this temporal lining up of both the historical and the artistic here is not simply a phonological quirk, but also a reflection of the acceleration of culture and the destabilization of time through reflexivity and reference which postmodern theory and art.
Major critics involved in postmodernism include Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Beaudrillard. A major voice in defining postmodernism was Jean-François Lyotard, whose 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge brought the term postmodernism into philosophy and critical theory. Jacques Derrida and deconstruction also hold relevance for understanding of postmodernism.“In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression” (Felluga).
Although postmodernism continues using many of the same techniques as modernism, as Felluga notes, postmodernism can be understood as a “more radical break” with the past, and one that responds to several different cultural currents. The transition point from modernism to postmodernism is often placed, somewhat retroactively, at the end of World War II. This make sense given the distrust of dogmatic ideological constructs that characterizes postmodernism, which can be seen as stemming from the failure of the ideology-driven modernists to prevent the horrors of the war. (Felluga notes that “bold manifestos...for an improved future” were common to modernism in both political and artistic spheres.) Post-WWII also saw a number of then-new media come to a theretofore unseen prominence: TV, film, and popular music (and, later, the Internet).
“Simplifying in the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” (Lyotard) [find page in physical book to cite]Part of the difficulty in defining postmodernism is its call to consider extra-textual considerations in order to make meaning from texts. It is hard to define a theory that asks us to consider so much information as relevant to understanding art.
“(T)he potential of fiction to produce historical consciousness must be ‘realised in the process of reception’ and, consequently, the meaning of a text must be traced beyond its own borders to the debates, remediations, and intertextual references it generates (2008, 395)” (Mitchell 2).
In further pages on this path, we will explore the way different characteristic techniques of postmodernism are present in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, and, in the process, understanding of both postmodernism and O’Connor’s novel will be deepened.
Works Cited
Felluga, Dino. “General Introduction to Postmodernism.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 31 January 2011. Purdue U. Web. February 29, 2016.
Mitchell, Kate. “Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present.” Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past. Kate Mitchelland Nicola Parsons, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
