POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism is often viewed as a culture of quotations.

Take Matt Groening’s The Simpsons (1989–). The very structure of the television show
quotes the classic era of the family sitcom. While the misadventures of its cartoon characters
ridicule all forms of institutionalised authority – patriarchal, political, religious and so on – it
does so by endlessly quoting from other media texts.

This form of “intertextuality” generates a relentlessly ironic or postmodern worldview.

The difficulty of defining postmodernism as a concept stems from its wide usage in a range of
cultural and critical movements since the 1970s. Postmodernism describes not only a period
but also a set of ideas, and can only be understood in relation to another equally complex
term: modernism.

Modernism was a diverse art and cultural movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
whose common thread was a break with tradition, epitomised by poet Ezra Pound’s 1934
injunction to “make it new!”.

The “post” in postmodern suggests “after”. Postmodernism is best understood as a

questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in
progress and innovation. Modernism insists on a clear divide between art and popular culture.

But like modernism, postmodernism does not designate any one style of art or culture. On the
contrary, it is often associated with pluralism and an abandonment of conventional ideas of
originality and authorship in favour of a pastiche of “dead” styles.

The shift from modernism to postmodernism is seen most dramatically in the world of
architecture, where the term first gained widespread acceptance in the 1970s.

One of the first to use the term, architectural critic Charles Jencks suggested the end of
modernism can be traced to an event in St Louis on July 15, 1972 at 3:32pm. At that moment,
the derelict Pruitt-Igoe public housing project was demolished.

Built in 1951 and initially celebrated, it became proof of the supposed failure of the whole
modernist project.

Jencks argued that while modernist architects were interested in unified meanings, universal
truths, technology and structure, postmodernists favoured double coding (irony), vernacular
contexts and surfaces. The city of Las Vegas became the ultimate expression of postmodern
architecture.

Theorists associated with postmodernism often used the term to mark a new cultural period in
the West. For philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition was defined as
“incredulity towards metanarratives”; that is, a loss of faith in science and other emancipatory
projects within modernity, such as Marxism.
Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson famously argued postmodernism was “the cultural
logic of late capitalism” (by which he meant post-industrial, post-Fordist, multi-national
consumer capitalism).

In his 1982 essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Jameson set out the major tropes of
postmodern culture.

These included, to paraphrase: the substitution of pastiche for the satirical impulse of parody;
a predilection for nostalgia; and a fixation on the perpetual present.

In Jameson’s pessimistic analysis, the loss of historical temporality and depth associated with
postmodernism was akin to the world of the schizophrenic.

In the visual arts, postmodernism is associated with a group of New York artists – including
Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman – who were engaged in acts of image
appropriation, and have since become known as The Pictures Generation after a 1977 show
curated by Douglas Crimp.

By the 1980s postmodernism had become the dominant discourse, associated with “anything
goes” pluralism, fragmentation, allusions, allegory and quotations. It represented an end to
the avant-garde’s faith in originality and the progress of art.

But the origins of these strategies lay with Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, and the Pop artists of
the 1960s in whose work culture had become a raw material. After all, Andy Warhol was the
direct progenitor of the kitsch consumerist art of Jeff Koons in the 1980s.

Postmodernism can also be a critical project, revealing the cultural constructions we designate
as truth and opening up a variety of repressed other histories of modernity. Such as those of
women, homosexuals and the colonised.
The modernist canon itself is revealed as patriarchal and racist, dominated by white
heterosexual men. As a result, one of the most common themes addressed within
postmodernism relates to cultural identity.

American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger’s statement that she is “concerned with who
speaks and who is silent: with what is seen and what is not” encapsulates this broad critical
project.

The discourse of postmodernism is associated with Australian artists such as Imants Tillers,
Anne Zahalka and Tracey Moffatt.

Australia has been theorised by Paul Taylor and Paul Foss, editors of the influential journal
Art & Text, as already postmodern, by virtue of its culture of “second-degree” – its uniquely
unoriginal, antipodal appropriations of European culture.

If the language of postmodernism waned in the 1990s in favour of postcolonialism, the events
of 9/11 in 2001 marked its exhaustion.
While the lessons of postmodernism continue to haunt, the term has become unfashionable,
replaced by a combination of others such as globalisation, relational aesthetics and
contemporaneity.

During the Twentieth Century the advanced technological societies of the West and some in
the East experienced a decline in the number of people who practiced their religion regularly
and accepted a morality based upon Natural Law Theory. There was a decline in the belief
that:

1. there is a single reality and that humans can have knowledge of it.

2. there is objective truth

3. there are absolutes

This decline can be attributed to a number of factors:

1. the increase in information about other cultures and their various practices, beliefs and
values,

2. advances in what science and technology could provide for humans in improvements
in their basic living along with an appreciation for material goods,

3. the spreading influence of ideas from the existentialist and pragmatist movements

4. the spread of democratic ideals

Post-Modernism then refers to a complex set of philosophical presumptions, most of which

reject modern philosophical systems that promoted the idea of rationality, positive science,
advance of humankind and promotion of liberal values. The post modern critiques did not
replace the idea and ideals and values of the modern period with any alternate system. So ,
postmodernism is more often characterized by its opposition to modernism with its
ambivalence or rejection of the Enlightenment and its ideology. It thus derives from an anti-
epistemological standpoint; anti-realism; opposition to transcendent arguments; rejection of
truth theories; rejection of categorical analyses; a critique of reason itself as a positive guide
for the life of humans.

If Post-Modernism is represented in any positive manner it might might be characterized by

gendered, historical, and ethno-centric definitions of truth, as well as an insistence on the
social construction of world views. However, the basic postmodernist movement is
unfortunately but inextricably bound to factionalism and centrisms of all sorts and supportive
of primitive tribal, clan , and ethnic groupings and validations for all beliefs..

In the Post Modern view there are no absolutes of any kind and there are no universal truths
nor universal criteria for beauty and nor are there universal principles of the GOOD. Thus,
there is a return of relativism in the sphere of morality. With that return there is also the
threat of chaos which relativism spawns. As reaction to this trend there is an increase in the
numbers of people returning to religion and religious principles as the foundation for their
moral lives.

In moral theory there have developed a number of traditions that extol alternatives to the
teleological and deontological approaches based upon reason and the belief that universal
principles can be reached through the exercise of reason. In contrast to the theories of
modernism there are a number of traditions in moral theory that have features typical of the
relativism of the postmodern period.

 The Pragmatists focused on the impossibility of reason reaching beyond the frailties of
limitations of human reason.

 The Existentialists called for an acceptance of the inescapable role of human

emotions.

 Feminist theoreticians have devised a number of approaches to ethics that have at least
this much in common: the denial of previous theories as being biased and deluded.

POSTMODERNISM POSES SERIOUS CHALLENGES to anyone trying to explain its

major precepts in a straightforward fashion. If we are to understand it fully, we need to make
a distinction between postmodern culture and postmodernist theory:

Our current period in history has been called by many the postmodern age (or
"postmodernity") and many contemporary critics are understandably interested in making
sense of the time in which they live. Although an admirable endeavor, such critics inevitably
run into difficulties given the sheer complexity of living in history: we do not yet know which
elements in our culture will win out and we do not always recognize the subtle but insistent
ways that changes in our society affect our ways of thinking and being in the world. 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. In order to keep clear the distinction between postmodernity and
postmodernism, each set of modules includesan initial module on how each critic makes sense
of our current postmodern age (or "postmodernity").

Critics or therorists tend to use "postmodernism" to refer to a group of critics who, inspired
often by the postmodern culture in which they live, attempt to rethink a number of concepts
held dear by Enlightenment humanism and many modernists, including subjectivity,
temporality, referentiality, progress, empiricism, and the rule of law. "Postmodernism" also
refers to the aesthetic/cultural products that treat and often critique aspects of
"postmodernity." Given how the "postmodern" refers to our entire historical period, some of
the theorists who have influenced postmodern theory included Judith Butler, her use of
concept of performativity was extremely influential on postmodernism. We can say that, one
cannot properly understand our current age without understanding exactly what came before.
How can we understand the full force of that "post" without understanding not only the
modern but also the premodern?
There is this range of debate surrounding postmodernism, a debate which is central to much
current thinking on hypertext, here is a definition provided by James Morley.

Firstly, postmodernism was a movement in architecture that rejected the modernist, avant
garde, passion for the new. Modernism is here understood in art and architecture as the project
of rejecting tradition in favour of going "where no man has gone before" or better: to create
forms for no other purpose than novelty. Modernism was an exploration of possibilities and a
perpetual search for uniqueness and its cognate--individuality. Modernism's valorization of
the new was rejected by architectural postmodernism in the 50's and 60's for conservative
reasons. They wanted to maintain elements of modern utility while returning to the reassuring
classical forms of the past. The result of this was an ironic brick-a-brack or collage approach
to construction that combines several traditional styles into one structure. As collage, meaning
is found in combinations of already created patterns.

Following this, the modern romantic image of the lone creative artist was abandoned for the
playful technician (perhaps computer hacker) who could retrieve and recombine creations
from the past--data alone becomes necessary. This synthetic approach has been taken up, in a
politically radical way, by the visual, musical,and literary arts where collage is used to startle
viewers into reflection upon the meaning of reproduction. Here, pop-art reflects culture
(American) where the person--though ethnically European, African, Asian, or Hispanic--
searches for authentic or "rooted" religious experience by dabbling in a variety of religious
traditions. The foundation of authenticity has been overturned as the relativism of collage has
set in. We see a pattern in the arts and everyday spiritual life away from universal standards
into an atmosphere of multidimentionality and complexity, and most importantly--the
dissolving of distinctions. In sum, we could simplistically outline this movement in historical
terms:

1. premodernism: Original meaning is possessed by authority (for example, the Catholic

Church). The individual is dominated by tradition.when it comes to premodern, individual is
dominated by tradition.

2. modernism: The enlightenment-humanist rejection of tradition and authority in favour of

reason and natural science. This is founded upon the assumption of the autonomous individual
as the sole source of meaning and truth. Progress and novelty are valorized within a linear
conception of history--a history of a "real" world that becomes increasingly real or
objectified. One could view this as a Protestant mode of consciousness.

3. postmodernism: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon

anonymous experience collective. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable,
Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of
distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful
parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist
rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject.

To sum up:
Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, as well
as a description of the period that followed modernism's dominance in cultural theory and
practice in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. The term is associated with
scepticism, irony and philosophical critiques of the concepts of universal truths and objective
reality.

The term was first used around 1970. As an art movement postmodernism to some extent
defies definition – as there is no one postmodern style or theory on which it is hinged. It
embraces many different approaches to art making, and may be said to begin with pop art in
the 1960s and to embrace much of what followed including conceptual art, neo-
expressionism, feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s.

Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on

idealism and a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. It assumed
that certain ultimate universal principles or truths such as those formulated by religion or
science could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with
form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a
way of purely reflecting the modern world.

While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of scepticism
and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths.
Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that
individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract
principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism
embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning. That is why we talk about
intertextuality, pluralism, quotations, fragmentations, allusions, allegory.

Anti-authoritarian by nature, postmodernism refused to recognise the authority of any single

style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and
mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life. Because postmodernism broke the
established rules about style, it introduced a new era of freedom and a sense that ‘anything
goes’. Often funny, tongue-in-cheek or ludicrous; it can be confrontational and controversial,
challenging the boundaries of taste; but most crucially, it reflects a self-awareness of style
itself. Often mixing different artistic and popular styles and media, postmodernist art can also
consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles
from the past.

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), was a prominent French psychoanalyst and theorist. His ideas
had a huge impact on critical theory in the twentieth century and were particularly influential
on post-structuralist philosophy and the development of postmodernism. Lacan re-examined
the psychiatry of Sigmund Freud, giving it a contemporary intellectual significance. He
questioned the conventional boundaries between the rational and irrational by suggesting that
the unconscious rather than being primitive, is just as complex and sophisticated in its
structure as the conscious. He proposed that the unconscious is structured like a language
which allows a discourse between the unconscious and conscious and ensures that the
unconscious plays a role in our experience of the world.

Raymond Carver

American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in
1938 and died in Port Angeles, Washington, in 1988. Very few writers have been more
influential on future generations of American and international authors. Carver played a major
role in reviving the American short story form in the 1980s, and he has been referred to as one
of the “greatest modern short story writers”. Although he is often associated with
Minimalism, Carver himself disliked the label, thinking it misrepresented the nature of his
work. His later stories and the recently published Beginners, which features the original
versions of the severely edited stories that appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love, demonstrate the true expansiveness and heart of his style. Though he may be best
known for his eight books of short fiction, he also wrote essays, plays, a screenplay, reviews,
introductions, and seven books of poetry.

Carver married and had two children shortly after his high school graduation and made his
living in a series of menial jobs. The young Carver family moved frequently, with Carver
often changing jobs and attending college courses when possible. He later found work as a
textbook editor and finally as a creative writing faculty member at a number of universities.
As his writing began to gain recognition, Carver began drinking more. Like the characters in
his fiction and poetry, who often struggled with alcoholism, divorce, or bankruptcy, Carver’s
family life was difficult, and the strain eventually unraveled his first marriage. Unlike many
of his characters, who are not quite able to put their feelings into words, Carver was able to
tap into the kind of suffering he had lived and observed and ultimately to relate these conflicts
to readers in his carefully crafted and highly realistic stories and poems.

After multiple hospitalizations due to severe alcoholism, Carver finally confronted his
addiction starting in 1977. He attended Alcoholics Anonymous and consigned himself to
Duffy’s, a treatment center in Northern California, where he dried out and afterwards began to
get his life back, despite at least one more relapse. His sobriety date was June 2, 1977. In
1977, he also met the poet Tess Gallagher and began a relationship with her that would
continue until his death. Gallagher had grown up in Port Angeles, Washington, and she and
Carver began to return there each summer and holiday since she had built a writing retreat
there she called Sky House. In 1983, after Carver received the Mildred and Harold Strauss
award, they began to travel more frequently to Port Angeles, eventually moving there,
because the award required that he quit teaching and devote himself fully to writing. He wrote
200 poems alone in Sky House. He also wrote several stories at what the couple called “The
B Street” house on the west side of Port Angeles. Carver’s most recent publishing event was
the publication of Beginners, the original restored versions of his book What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love. Tess Gallagher was instrumental in seeing to it that the North
American Library published this book as part of Raymond Carver: Collected Stories in 2009.

Whoever Was Using This Bed

What are the postmodern motifs you can detect in the story? In what ways this is a
postmodern work?

It starts out with the phone call ringing at three thirty in the morning with a drunk woman on
the other line saying “Is Bud there?” Then she calls again saying “I have to talk to Bud.” The
man then tells the woman that there is no one here named Bud and that she should never call
again. His wife is very angry that someone is calling so late. Her husband wants to go back
to sleep but all she wants is a cigarette.

As the phone was ringing, his wife Iris was having a dream. It is a thing that happens almost
every night. Iris then goes on and telling her husband about her dream. He gets kind of mad
that he is never in her dreams. He says to her, “ I don’t think I like it, knowing you’re
supposed to be here beside me all night but instead you are dreaming about strange dogs,
parties, and ex-husbands.” It makes you wonder why he gets so mad that he isn’t in her
dreams? They are just dreams and she can’t control it. However, sometime dreams are
actually real. So does she really feel the way she is in her dreams but is too scared to admit
it?

They decide that they won’t be sleeping the rest of the night and continue to talk. Their
conversation turns from talking about dreams to talk about dying and different way they could
die. They also talked about their family members and how each one of them have died and
that they could possibly die from that too.

They are talking about an issue when it comes to die in hospital that it plug or unplug and who
is going to decide this. Or should they be decide anything?

We can say that this story is about life and things that happen on a daily basis and struggles
that we face everyday. And the story is about a husband and wife and her dreams and how
they think they are going to die.

Raymond Carver says “I Write Stories About a Submerged Population”: “A writer ought to
speak about things that are important to him. As you know, I’ve taught in universities, in fact
for some fifteen years. I had time there for other work, and I never wrote a single story about
university life because it’s an experience that left no mark on my emotional life. I tend to go
back to the time and the people I knew well when I was younger and who made a very strong
impression on me . . . Some of my recent stories deal with executives. (For example, that one
in The New Yorker, “Whoever Was Using This Bed,” where the people discuss things the
characters in my earlier stories would never discuss). He’s a businessman, and so on. But
most of the people in my stories are poor and bewildered, that’s true. The economy, that’s
important . . . I don’t feel I’m a political writer and yet I’ve been attacked by right-wing critics
in the U.S.A. who blame me for not painting a more smiling picture of America, for not being
optimistic enough, for writing stories about the people who don’t succeed. But these lives are
as valid as those of the go-getters. Yes, I take unemployment, money problems, and
marital problems as givens in life. People worry about their rent, their children, their home
life. That’s basic. That’s how 80-90 percent, or God knows how many people live. I write
stories about a submerged population, people who don’t always have someone to speak for
them. I’m sort of a witness, and, besides, that’s the life I myself lived for a long time. I don’t
see myself as a spokesman but as a witness to these lives. I’m a writer.”

Philip Roth

Philip Roth, the prolific and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in
20th-century literature, died on Tuesday night at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.

The writer Judith Thurman, a close friend, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Mr.
Roth had homes in Manhattan and Connecticut.

Mr. Roth took on many guises — mainly versions of himself — in the exploration of what it
means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man. He was a a passionate student of American
history and the American vernacular. And more than just about any other writer of his time,
he was tireless in his exploration of male sexuality.

Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males:Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others
— who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both
and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of
them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer to have his books enshrined in the
Library of America.

“Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,”
Mr. Roth once said. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”

He engaged with America and American themes in his books.

Almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to writing about themes of
Jewish identity, anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in America. He returned often,
especially in his later work, to the neighborhood of Newark, where he had grown up and
which became in his writing a kind of vanished Eden: a place of middle-class pride, frugality,
diligence and aspiration.

It was a place where no one was unaware “of the power to intimidate that emanated from the
highest and lowest reaches of gentile America,” he wrote, and yet where being Jewish and
being American were practically indistinguishable. Speaking of his father in “The Facts,” an
autobiography, Mr. Roth said: “His repertoire has never been large: family, family, family,
Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.”

Mr. Roth’s favorite vehicle for exploring this repertoire was himself, or rather one of several
fictional alter egos he deployed as a go-between, negotiating the tricky boundary between
autobiography and invention and deliberately blurring the boundaries between real life and
fiction. Nine of Mr. Roth’s novels are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist whose career
closely parallels that of his creator. Three more are narrated by David Kepesh, a writerly
academic who shares some of Mr. Roth’s preoccupations, women especially. And sometimes
Mr. Roth dispensed with the disguise altogether — or seemed to.
Mr. Roth’s other great theme was sex, or male lust, which in his books is both a life force and
a principle of rage and disorder. It is sex, the uncontrollable need to have it, that torments
poor, guilt-ridden Portnoy, almost certainly Mr. Roth’s most famous character, who
desperately wants to “be bad — and to enjoy it.” And Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of
“Sabbath’s Theater,” one of Mr. Roth’s major late-career novels, is in many ways Portnoy
grown old but still in the grip of lust and longing, raging against the indignity of old age and
yet saved from suicidal impulses by the realization that there are too many people he loves to
hate.

Mr. Roth later called his first two novels “apprentice work.” “Letting Go,” published in 1962,
was derived in about equal parts from Bellow and Henry James. “When She Was Good,”
which came out in 1967, is the most un-Rothian of his books, a Theodore Dreiser- or
Sherwood Anderson-like story set in the WASP Midwest in the 1940s.

The books are full of dense reportorial detail — about such seemingly un-Rothian subjects as
glove making and ice fishing — as they tell Job-like stories.

Mr. Roth received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.
When he retired the next year, a Post-it note on his computer read, “The struggle with writing
is done.”

You Can't Tell a Man by The Song He Sings

This is his first story in a national magazine.

How are the characters? Are they in a comfortable situation or are they in a trapped situation?

The character here is in a trapped within the social constraints of their immediate
environment, usually the family, religion, or American society in general.

In here, the hero who is not named is trapped in a high school confrontation with a teenage
gangster named Albie Pelagutti. In this short story with a long title, the main character re-
experiences his freshman year in high school which featured many of unforgettable events
involving fellow classmates, Alberto (Albie) Pelagutti and Duke Scarpa and his teacher, Mr.
Russo. The story begins at the time of the “Preference Test”.

Philip Roth has effectively written the story in an interesting humorous way to allure the
readers to keep reading his masterpiece till the end. There are a lot of humors present in this
short work of fiction.

The answers of every question in a test like that can be anything. Despite this fact, Albie had
to cheat so that he could “pass” the test because he was planning to “go straight”.
Furthermore, the result of his test was the same as the protagonists’ that they “were going to
be lawyers”.

The second comedy is about overestimating someone’s ability based on physique and
regretting it later on. The leading character was picked by Mr. Hopper as the captain of the
softball team was given a privilege to pick his teammates. With an opportunity like this,
undoubtedly he chose Albie. Albie had once told him that he had ever played the game back
at the Jamesburg Reformatory. Besides the captain thought that Albie had seemed to “star”
his Jamesburg Reformatory’s baseball team. Not to mention Albie’s physical features. His
arms might be able to “hit the ball a mile”. Unfortunately, the dream of having a chance to
win the game was demolished by Albie who was a “lemon”. Albie was the weak link in the
anonymous character’s team. They had lost really badly with a nil score during the first half
while the opponent’s team had scored 8. Additionally, Mr. Hopper was mocking the main
character’s wrong choice by winking at him.

Symbolism plays an important role in this fiction. Some of the symbols are used to hint out
the true meaning that Roth has hidden. And almost all of the symbols describe about
America’s background. First of all is the baseball game during gym class. Baseball has been
called a “national pastime” by the United States since 1856. The game represents a linkage
between their “heritage and national institutions”

Characters are coming from different origins and classes, countries. What is the writer doing
here?

Is the title is a message fort he society?

Roth has titled his fiction as “You can’t tell a man by the song he sings” to criticize 1950
society’s view that they a person’s reputation and career should be sacrificed as a
consequence of innocently belonging to a communist organization. just by the fact of his
communist past. Russo had changed. He joined the students’ prank on singing America’s
national anthem. If he was still a communist, he would not even bother to stand up and join
the sing-along. This proved that Russo was as true an American as any of other Americans.
He respects American. And the society is wrong to say “You can’t tell a man by the song he
sings”. It is the other way around.