English Postmodernism (Mickey, Aleksi, Robert)

 

Postmodernism doesn't believe in facts and argues that truth is
dependent on convention and language

Postmodernism is a late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterised by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories

Timeline

• Defining postmodernism is both controversial and extremely dependent on convention. 
• Some say it starts only in the 1960s, but for conventional reasons we will address postmodern as starting after WWII.
• The time period doesn’t have any radical notions after its rise.

Characteristics

• Postmodernism does not have any rules. It is full of self-reflexivity, which encompasses irony, sarcasm, metafiction and black humor as well. After modernism the social atmosphere got tired of immediate reality and truth and started inventing things which defied the laws of literature, physics, human logic and art.

Main Authors

• Anthony Burgess
• A Clockwork Orange (1962)
• Nothing Like the Sun (a fictional recreation of Shakespeare’s love life)
• J.G Ballard
• Crash (1973)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)

Major Themes

• Postmodern literature is full of different psychological tricks, which tend to move to even philosophical areas. It isn’t uncommon for literature to question the existence of truth. One of the main themes in postmodernism is human psychology and life.
• Equality and the common humanity, which we share often rises as a common topic in postmodern works.
• Many postmodern authors, as a response to modernism, which frequently set its authors apart from their readers, attempt to involve the reader as much as possible over the course of a novel. 
• This can take the form of asking the reader questions, including unwritten narratives that must be constructed by the reader, or allowing the reader to make decisions regarding the course of the narrative. In a sense, they make the reader “work”.

Things Fall Apart is considered a
breakthrough work of the postmodern
era. 

Criticism
Postmodernism is an era, which tends to be criticised very often. The criticisms are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes the ideology of obscurantism. It is often debated that is postmodern art even art - in a sense that does art need to be beautiful to be art.

For example, Noam Chomsky argues that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has noted "The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism!"

Staying In Power
The end of postmodernism is a very heated topic nowadays. People are promoting the idea of post postpostmodernism or metamodernism. It is however debated on a very weak stand, since even the start of postmodernism is up to convention and really hard to define.

References

• Unknown Authors (2014) Oxford University Press: Postmodernism. Web: Accessed 28.04.2014. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/postmodernism
• Unknown Authors (2014) Wikipedia: Postmodernism. Web: Accessed 28.04.2014 http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
• Unknown Authors (2014) Dictionary.com: Self-reflexivity. Web: Accessed 4.5.2014 http://www.ask.com/question/self-reflexivity-definition
• Felluga, Dino. "General Introduction to Postmodernism." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Accessed 4.5.2014 http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/postmodernism/modules/introduction.html
• Sklar, Stephanie (2014) 10 Key Characteristics Of Postmodernism. Web: Accessed 4.5.2014 http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8892593-10-key-characteristics-of-postmodernism