POSTMODERNISM

1- ORIGINS:
The term postmodernism appeared in the end of the fifties and sixties, as an attempt to classify the
cultural phenomena that were happening. As the term implies, postmodernism is something that
comes after modernism. Actually, it is impossible to set a concept of postmodernism without
referring to modernism. In a general way, modernism represented a historical process by which the
arts have dissociated themselves from the nineteenth-century assumptions. The beginning of the
20th century shows a different world from that of the Victorian Era. The First World War is
responsible for deep changes in society. Scientific explanations become more complex. Freud
shows the importance of the unconscious. The traditional bourgeois realism is rejected. All those
changes influence art and literature. Self-consciousness towards the work of art becomes intense. In
literature, for instance, writers explore multi points of view, breaking with the linear flow of
narrative that presents beginning,middle and end. Art is not considered something sacred anymore
and it results in a large use of parody and satire. Another important characteristic is complete
freedom to create. The artist is not bound to any kind of conventions,or social commitment, or
whatever. Literature becomes more abstract and is constructed upon mental and spiritual
experiences. The avant-garde movements such as dada, surrealism, cubism, futurism , imagism,
expressionism, postimpressionism characterize the multiple faces of modernism.
Avant-garde movement: a term that denotes exploration, innovation and invention, something new,
something ahead of its time and revolutionary.
Cubism - reality can not be seen whole from any single perspective, but only surmised by the
intersection of varied perceptions.
Dadaism- c. 1916 -movement that started in Zurich, created Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball
and Richard Huelsenbeck. The term was meant to signify everything and nothing at the same time,
or total freedom, anti rules, ideals and traditions. Its aesthetic manifestations were collage effects.
the arrangement of unrelated objects and words in a random fashion. It was subsumed by
surrealism.
Surrealism- 1920s -an attempt to express in art and literature the workings of the unconscious
mind and to synthesize these workings with the conscious mind. According to Andr Breton, there
was a point in the mind where, beyond realism, one attained a new knowledge.
Futurism - c. 1909 -movement that advocated a complete break with traditions and aimed at new
forms, new subjects and styles in keeping with the advent of a mechanistic age.
Concerning English and American Literature, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner,
John Dos Passos are the main figures of high- modernism (1920-30s- late 40s late modernism) .
In terms of literature, the movement is concerned with language and how to use it. The act of
writing itself is emphasized.
2- FIRST MANIFESTATIONS
The first manifestations against modernism occurred in architecture in the late fifties and beginning
of the sixties. The rationalism of famous modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius,
Mies Van der Rohe is put into question. Instead of constructing buildings of steel and concrete,
emphasizing its lines, space and form, in order to show its functionality. Postmodern architects start
matching romantic, classic and modern styles, without discrimination. In postmodern architecture
there is an openness in relation to the past.
This evolution in architecture influenced the other fields as fine arts and literature. The sixties was a
decade marked by many manifestations. In the USA and Europe were under the counter-culture
movement. It starts in the late fifties with the Beat generation, represented by Allen Ginsberg, Jack

Kerouac and Laurence Ferlinghetti. It is a movement for social and political protest and personal
liberation through experimentation with drugs and rejection of sexual taboos. The pop art appears.
If in the modernist movement art was elitist, now it becomes accessible. Everybody can produce art.
The happenings appear. All these manifestations had an enormous influence on writers at that time.
Writers later known as postmodern, such as Barth, Coover, Pinchon, Vonegut, Barthelme, started
writing and publishing. John Barth, for instance, wrote an essay entitled The Literature of
Exhaustion in which he declares the exhaustion of the modernist model to guide art and literature.
So, the postmodern movement takes off in the sixties and is crystallized in the seventies and
eighties.
3- LYOTARD-HABERMAS DEBATE
One of the reasons of the settlement of the debate on postmodernism was the publication of La
Condition Postmoderne, in 1979 by Jean Franois Lyotard. He is a French thinker (philosopher)
and in his book he says that we are in fact living the postmodern era. What characterizes
postmodernity is the incredulity towards metanarratives, it means, there is a deep suspicion of
Hegel, Marx and any form of universal philosophy.( which are characteristic of the modernity
project.) Lyotard believes that it is no longer possible to propose a telos for humankind, as Hegel
( Hegels philosophical idealism sees human culture and history as part of a total process, that
moves toward the Absolute.Then, the result of this process is a synthesis, a larger unity. Hegel is
concerned with the whole.) , Marx and other philosophers did. Marx is concerned with the class
struggle. In this confront the working class defeats bourgeoisie and installs the perfect society,
where everybody is equal, and live happy forever, and so on and so forth. Lyotard says : No, this
kind of narrative does not work anymore. The Postmodern society is fragmented, it means, we
cannot grasp what is going on in society as a whole. Then we have fragmentation of language, of
time, of the human subject, of society itself.
Reacting against Lyotard is the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. As an idealist, he defends a
totaling and dialectical tradition. He is completely Hegelian. While he talk about consensus, Lyotard
talks about dissensus. For Habermas, the cognitive, ethical and political discourses should come
closer together. What he wants is to defend modernity against the neo-conservative postmodernists.
Postmodernity is the designation of the social and philosophical period
Postmodernism is the cultural manifestations of this condition in many fields like architecture,
literature, photography, cinema, painting, video, dance, music, and elsewhere.
Of course one influences the other.
4- SOME THEORIES ON POSTMODERNISM
We have a very general description of postmodernism. It happens because we have several views of
postmodernism. Many theoreticians write and expose their notion of what postmodernism is. Lets
briefly talk about four of them.
Ihab Hassan - American. Wrote The dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature.
For him, postmodernism is the antithesis of modernism.
Brian MacHale - What occurred was a change of the dominant. The dominant is a concept
established by Jakobson. The dominant is the focusing component of a work of art: it rules ,
determines and transforms the remaining components. It gives the work its organic unity. For Brian

MacHale, the dominant of modernism is epistemological, it brings out questions related to

knowledge and interpretation, such as: How can I Interpret this world of which I am part? What is
there to be known? Who knows it? How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another?
How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower? what are the limits
of the knowable? And so on. In fiction the dominant is ontological. The questions it asks are:
which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it? What is a world?
What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? So, the modernist
texts present a concern about the limits and possibilities of the individuals consciousness
(Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!), whereas postmodernist texts are concerned with the creation of
autonomous worlds. Alain Robbe Grillets Jealousy.
Linda Hutcheon - For Linda Hutcheon what characterizes postmodernist fiction is what she calls
historiographic metafiction, there is, those novels which are both intensive and self-reflexive and
use historical events and personages. But such events and personages are fictionalized, distorted,
showing history own fictionality.Postmodernist fiction makes emerge the margins, the ex-center.
Who was in the periphery, now has voice (blacks, women, ex-colonized, etc.)
Fredric Jameson- Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, there is, he sees the
economic structure of the world reflecting in the culture. The Postmodern world can be
characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject id displaced by the fragmentation of the
subject. Postmodernism does not produce great works like modernism, it rearranges the fragments.
The impossibility to have a unique and personal style has brought a new practice: pastiche. The
cultural production of postmodernism is mere pastiche. Postmodern society has lost the sense of
history, that is why it looks to the past, it is a kind of nostalgia, a wish to be recalled at times less
problematic than our own. In this sense Jameson and Hutcheon are in opposite places. The return to
the past for Jameson has a negative connotation, for Hutcheon it means creativity.
Harold Blooms interview in Folha de So Paulo (August the 6th): the discourse of the ex-center has
gone too far.
Parody: the imitative use of the words, attitude, tone and ideas of an author in such a way as to
make them ridiculous. According to Linda Hutcheon, parody in postmodernism is a repetition with
critical distance that allows ironic signaling of the difference at the very heart of similarity.
Pastiche: A patchwork of words, sentences or complete passages from various or one author. It is a
kind of imitation. An elaborate pastiche is a sustained work ( a novel) written entirely in the style
and manner of another writer. It is a kind of parody.
Collage: a work which contains a mixture of allusions, references, quotations and foreign
expressions. (The Waste Land).