POSTMODERNISM

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
The dominant attitude in postmodernism is disbelief. The origin of postmodernist disbelief can be traced
back to the Victorian Period and the cultural crisis at that time. Waning of Christianity was the result of
scientific theories like Darwinism evolution and scientific discoveries in Geology. This crisis further
deepened in the modernist period.
The influence of science on perception of human knowledge and identity, the impact of increasing
urbanization and mechanization collapsed the social and cultural hierarchies.
“things fall apart: the center can’t hold”
Was the dominant voice of modernist period? What fell apart in the modern era were the values of 18 th C.,
the age of enlightenment. Probably the main values of the age besides reason were the idea of progress.
The idea that universal values of science, reason and logic would ultimately liberate humanity from
misery, religion, superstition, irrational behavior and ensure happiness, freedom and progress for
mankind.
But the situation before and after the World War II and the holocaust in particular further undermined the
humanist consensus, so, the problem with modernism was that science and reason didn’t just create
progress, they created Auschwiz and Hiroshima also.
There were historical and social changes which caused radical shifts in cultural perceptions. The end of
empire, the rise of women movement, black power and gay pride, increasing importance of popular
culture caused the further breakaway form modernism.
Key economic and social changes are associated with post modernism so postmodernism means entirely
different things to different disciplines. Many of the American literary critics brought the term
postmodernism into circulation in 1960s and early 1970s. the key background of literary postmodernism
has roots in poststructuralism.
Linguistic theories of Ferdinand De Saussure call into question the idea that language is simply the means
through which we convey reality. The anti-realism which characterizes postmodern can be explained with
reference to this basic idea.
The most important point for anti-realism input postmodernism is the relationship between the signifier
and the signified which is arbitrary and non-stable. Further poststructuralist philosophers especially
Jacques Derrida advocates that meaning is not present in sign. There is continual flickering, spilling and
defusing of meaning what Derrida calls dissemination.
This idea further creates gulf between the world of language and reality
“The gap this opens between language and world is the space into which all postmodernist literature
enters.”
So postmodern disbelief is extended first and foremost to language. So the poststructuralist deconstructs
or wishes to show how a previously trusteed relationship between the language and the world will go
astray. Further they advocate that the relationship between language and reality is not given or even
reliable. All language system are inherently unreliable cultural constructs so due to these assumptions and
sceptic approaches of the poststructuralist and the postmodernist writers, literature drifts away from
narration and representation. Further the difference between modernism and postmodernism can be traced
back to the idea that Saussure’s linguistic implies that it is possible to fly above the landscape of the
language to discern its structural features but deconstruction emerges from the poststructuralist sense that
this landscape of language is inescapable. This difference exemplifies an important contract between
modernism and postmodernism. So Saussure’s linguistic is characteristically modernist which is,
however, able to discern hierarches and pattern s of meanings whereas poststructuralist in the way it
flattens hierarches. Michael Ryan says:
“If structuralism emphasizes order, structure and rules poststructuralism argues that language is
subject to contingency, indeterminacy and generation of multiple meanings.”
Peter Barry sums up the most critical attributes of postmodernism in the following words that politics is
pervasive, language is constitutive, truth is provisional, meaning is contingent and human nature is a
myth.
Further he says structuralism seeks parallels symmetry, patterns, contracts and repetitions to show textual
unity and coherence whereas the poststructuralist seeks the contradictions, shifts in view point, tone,
tense, time and absences, aporia to show textual disunity.
One of the most influential postmodern theorists, Ihab Hassan, while offering the table of difference
between modernism and postmodernism says that postmodernism is the “process” of making the product;
it is absence within presence; it is dispersal in contrast with centering; it is anarchy within hierarchy; it is
inter-text within text. He further elaborates that postmodernism wallows in the play of meanings, it surfs
these meanings and is concerned with performance, play and process. It delights in the ever changing play
of appearances, rather than with sources, roots and origins. He offers a table of difference between the
two movements as quoted by Jim Powell.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MODERNISM

AND POSTMODERNISM
MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM

Form (conjunctive/ closed) Anti-form (disjunctive/ open)

Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Art object/ finished work Process/ performance/ happening
Presence absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre / boundary Text / inter-text
Root / depth Rhizome/ surface

POSTMODERN FICTION:
Postmodern fiction is characterized by a differences, a recognition of heterogeneity of system through
which knowledge is validated. So postmodernism has extended its concerns with the foundations of
knowledge to the way in which reality is represented in specific cultures.
Postmodern art undermines such principle as order, values, meaning and control. Further it questions the
centralized, totalized and hierarchized closed system as Hutcheon says;
“Postmodernism challenges some aspects of modernist dogma: its view of the autonomy of art and its
deliberate separation from life: its expression from individual subjectivity.”
Lyotard argues that modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime thought it has a nostalgic tones and
further it allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents. So, far as its form is
concerned, it constitutes to offer solace and pleasure to the reader or viewer. On the contrary, the
postmodern would search for new presentations not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a
stronger sense of the unpresentable and further it denies itself the solace of good forms.
Same is the case with postmodern fiction which has destabilized perceived notions with regard to
language, representation, the subject and it has effectively undermined all metanarratives and beliefs.
Hutcheon says:
“the postmodernist novel puts into question the entire series of interconnected concepts that are
associated with liberal humanism; autonomy, transcendence, certainly, authority, unity, totalization,
universalization, system, center, continuity, teleology, closure, hierarchy, homogeneity, uniqueness,
origin.”
Postmodernist works are thus characterized by self-reflexivity, by strategies that foreground the formal
conventions through which reality is artistically represented. Western literature portrays individuals in
lyric poetry and realistic fiction as stable, solid and autonomous individuals who have unique essence. In
the realistic novels of the mid nineteenth century, characters escaped being defined by their social and
economic circumstances. Because they are fundamentally free, their self is largely independent of their
situation, the circumstances in which they find themselves can be transcended characters of realistic
fiction find the reason for actions and decision inside themselves.
“we create ourselves and our destiny, through the choices we make.”