American Postmodernism
Background
Postmodernism is a late 20th-century movement, which rejected the previous modernist points of view for new ones. It is the era after World War II. The term postmodernism came to use around 1950 for the use of arts and architecture, but only became a popular term used for literature around 1970-80. According to the postmodernism point of view no definite boundaries or rules exist. This point of view is largely considered as a belief in the non-existence of real certainties and reality. Therefore it has emerged from the modernist ways of trying to explain reality based on the certainties of scientific and objective knowledge. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."
Post-postmodernism?
It has often been debated whether postmodernism is still the current literary and artistic movement, or if we are already living in post-postmodernism. However it cannot yet be entirely determined since no great or significant differences have been observed amongst them, and we have not lived long enough for them to be noticed. Therefore one could argue, that we are currently in the midst of the change from postmodernism to post-postmodernism.
Famous Contributors to the American Postmodernism
Truman Capote and Harper Lee are both well known authors who wrote during the postmodernist era in America, after the World War II. Capote and Lee were close friends since childhood. Capote helped Lee with the editing and promoting of her novel and Lee thereof also helped him in the research for his novel In Cold Blood. They even based characters in their works on each other. For example Lee created Dill in To kill a Mockingbird based on Capote, and Capote based the character of Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms on Lee. It was only until the later years of Capote’s life that they became more distant due to Capote’s increased drug and alcohol use.
Truman Capote was an American author, screenwriter and playwright. He wrote several successful novels, plays, short stories and nonfiction writing. He was openly gay to everyone, a feature that always threatened his career. His perhaps best known works are the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. Capote was one of the first to be acknowledged for the writing of a nonfiction novel and hence greatly contributing to the postmodern movement. It is a literary genre portraying real characters and true events in a fictional storytelling way.
Harper Lee is an American novelist, known for her only, but successful novel To kill a Mockingbird. It explores the issues of racism and is based on her childhood growing up in Alabama. It features several postmodernist points of view, such as the Civil Rights Movement in America, which rebelled against racial discrimination. To kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, around the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, therefore it has also played an important part in creating the theme about discrimination for the novel. This theme can be seen represented through the character of Tom Robinson, who is wrongly accused of raping a white girl.
John Irving
John Irving (born March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award- winning screenwriter. He has written a total of 13 novels, nine of which have been international bestsellers. He is likely best known for his novels The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp. Recurring subjects in Irving’s novels include bears, Vienna, deadly accidents, wrestling, and the absence of one or both parents as well as unusual sexual relationships. He is also known for his carefully detailed descriptions of both characters and settings as well as his extremely complex and intricate plots. Irving’s novels often deal with controversial subjects in a way that has been described as being quirky, humorous and brave. Much of Irving’s writing has been influenced by a number of elements from his own life.
In the late 1960s, John Irving studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop with future novelists Vance Bourjaily and Kurt Vonnegut. Irving and Vonnegut remained close friends throughout their lives until Vonnegut’s death in early 2007.
Setting Free the Bears
Setting Free the Bears, published in 1968, is John Irving’s first novel. The book’s central plot revolves around a plan to free all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, as happened just after the end of the Second World War. It tells the story of two protagonists – Graff and Siggy, two young Austrian college students – who embark on a motorcycle tour of Austria. Setting Free the Bears also describes the life of Siggy’s family from before the Second World War, through the occupation of the Soviets, to the late 1960s. The book explores themes such as the search for freedom as well as one’s personal significance and meaning.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American author best known for his novels Timequake, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut is known for his satirical style of writing as well as the fantasy and science fiction elements present in much of his work. He is also known for his black humour and cutting social commentary and his very humanist point of view. During his lifetime, he wrote a total of 14 novels as well as a vast amount of other works including short stories, articles and plays. Vonnegut began his literary career with science fiction novels and short stories but later abandoned the genre to focus on political writing and painting. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential American novelists of the 20th century.
The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a group of American writers who came to fame in the 1950s. The movement was not very large in numbers, yet it was highly influential. Allen Ginsberg explained the meaning of the name of this movement in the early 1950s: “The point of beat is that you get beaten down to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to see the world in a visionary way.”
The Beat Way of Living and Writing
In the 1950s, the United States was experiencing an economic boom which created a society centered around materialism and capitalism. The events of the Cold War also marked the decade and created a fear of communism that would direct the country’s foreign policy for years after the conflict. People generally trusted, almost blindly, to political figures and many people desired conservatism and conformity.
However, the Beats had quite different opinions than the mainstream. They thought capitalism to be destructive for the human spirit and against social equality and were fed up with people’s mindless acceptance of conformism and new materialistic roles. The Beat figures were anything but conservative, they freely experimented with drugs and sex and were generally very tolerant and open-minded. However, the this movement was not just about questioning authorities and social norms. In the 1950s, after the Second World War, people were living in a new era of freedom and were desperate for something new.
The Beats created a writing style that was bold, straightforward and expressive. Their stream-of-consciousness writing style was largely inspired by Walt Whitman, especially his poems in Leaves of Grass. Whitman was one of the first to abandon traditional verse structures and his poems often focused on the awakening and divinity of the self. These new ways of writing fascinated and encouraged many Beat writers.
Jazz was also a big part of the lives of the Beats and a great influence for them. They borrowed a lot of the jazz slang of the 1940s for their works, but more importantly it served the writers as an ever-growing source of adventure and excitement.
The results of the experimental drug use of the writers is difficult to determine, but the drugs might have had an effect on their creativity and productivity.
Many similarities can be found between the beat generation and the romantic era, such as the appreciation of originality, imagination and spontaneity. William Blake is said to be Allen Ginsberg’s “guru” and a “catalyst” for his poetry.
Surrealism was still a relevant art movement in the 1950s, and many of its characteristics can be found in beat writing. The surrealist aim to discover a super-reality by interpreting dream and reality together is similar to the Beats trying to get to the inner, “naked” state of self-expression where one could see the world in an imaginative, visionary way.
The Zen Buddhist philosophy was the followed by many of the Beats. The essence of this way of thought is that people have to look into themselves for enlightenment. This can be seen again in the writers’ ambition to discover the inner natural creativity without any formality.
Key Figures of the Beat Generation and a Few Important Works
Alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, other original members include of the beat generation include Lucien Carr and William S.Burroughs.
Lucien Carr was in a sense the founder and the muse of the beat generation. Ginsberg described him as a “self-destructive egotist but also a possessor of real genius”. He never sought public attention as a writer, but he was the one who introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to each other. “Lou was the glue”, as Ginsberg put it. Carr also introduced Kerouac and GInsberg for example to the works of Rimbaud who later became a great influence especially for Ginsberg. He was mentally unstable and his family believed David Kammerer, an english teacher who Carr met when he was 14, to be a big reason for his psychological problems. Kammerer followed Carr around with a sexually predatory persistence for five years. (It has been debated whether he enjoyed this attention at any point or not, but Carr’s friends believe that he never slept with Kammerer.) After having an argument on August 13,1944 that resulted in Kammerer physically assaulting Carr, he stabbed and drowned Kammerer to the Hudson River. MORE
William S.Burroughs is considered to be one of the most influential and innovative artists of the 20th century. He wrote novels, short stories, novellas and essay as well as painted, collaborated with various performers and musicians and appeared in films. Most of his work is semi-autobiographical, for example about his experiences of being a heroin addict.
Jack Kerouac is said to be the father of the beat generation. This French-Canadian writer was born on March 12 1922 and died due to alcohol abuse on October 21, 1969 aged 47.
He is praised for his method of spontaneous prose, where the subject of writing was himself. He would type spontaneously and set the story on one continuous sheet.
Kerouac got a football scholarship from Columbia University but quit playing shortly after entering the university due to injury. He dropped out of Columbia and for a short while served in the navy. When he returned to New York he met Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. During that time he was constantly on the move across the country. His travels were the basis for his most famous novel On the Road. He was often accompanied by a young drifter from Denver called Neal Cassady with whom he shared the same worldview. Cassady never published anything, but it is said that his letters were a big inspiration of Kerouac works. The letters were "fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed," as Kerouac later described.
Allen Ginsberg, one of the most influential beat poets, was born on June 6,1926 and died on April 5, 1997. His poem collection Howl and Other Poems was first published in 1956.
The Importance of the Beat Generation
Some argue that the Beat Generation was just a cry for attention but in reality the effects of this movement are visible in history and still even today. The Beats influenced the following Hippie Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and led way to a more tolerant, accepting society. On the other hand, Kerouac for example thought Hippies to be insincere “flower children” and didn’t want to be associated with them. The beat generation liberated people spiritually and sexually and reduced censorship in art. Interest towards Eastern Cultures and opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization grew. The free style of writing led way to the following, in all ways very diverse rule-free, decades of postmodernism.
Postmodern Poetry
Confessional Poetry
Confessional poetry or 'Confessionalism' is a style of poetry that began in the United States during the 1950s. It has been classified as poetry "of the personal," focusing on moments of individual experience, including previously taboo subjects such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide. Confessional poems were often set in relation to broader social themes. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and W.D. Snodgrass were all acclaimed confessional poets.
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Her poems were almost all in the style of confessional poetry and her only novel, “The Bell Jar” is extremely autobiographical and explores similar themes as many of her poems. Plath is best known for her two published poetry collections: “ The Colossus and Other Poems” and “Ariel”. Sylvia Plath married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Hughes and Plath lived together in the United States and then England, and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath suffered from depression and in 1963 shortly after the publication of the Bell Jar she committed suicide by putting her head into an over.
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s only novel published originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The book tells the story of young Esther Greenwood who has just finished her junior year of college, a character based largely on Plath herself, and her own experiences. The novel chronicles Esther’s mental health issues and focuses on the role of women in the 1950s, as well as society’s expectations.
This quote taken from chapter 15 of The Bell Jar highlights Esther’s struggle with depression and introduces the symbol of the bell jar which recurs throughout the book. Being under the bell jar signifies to Esther being isolated from the outside world and being trapped within her own mind. She feels no external situation can ameliorate her problems as she is separated from the world in her own bell jar.
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse exploring her relationships with her children and husband, as well as her battles with mental illness. In 1967 she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Live or Die. Sexton was born in Massachusetts and later studied with Sylvia Plath at Boston University, and they were both taught by Robert Lowell. She was inspired and mentored by poet W.D. Snodgrass who she met at a writers conference.
Maxine Kumin described Sexton's work by saying: "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry."
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic setting of his home city of Los Angeles. His work addresses the ordinary lives of Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and depression. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books.
Escape
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References
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