POST MODERNISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Post – Modernism

Post-modern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator and often is defined as a style or a trend that emerged in the post-world war II era.

All critics agree that the concept of post-modernism is nothing but an expression of intense longing for popular art.

• The ever-increasing division between art and life has provided a new reaction in the name of post-modernism.
• Particularly reader-response and deconstructionist approaches, and the subversions of the implicit contract between author, text, and reader, have led to pre-modern fictions such as „Cervantes‟ Don Quixote” (1605) and Laurence sterna‟s 18th-century satire “Tristram shandy” being considered by early examples of postmodern literature.
• The modern Aesthetics is more an apollonian affair depending and rearing itself on the support of reason. The pose-modernist art is a kind of Dionysian phenomenon, drawing its strength from the ranges of imagination and intuition.
• The Apollonian form ie., Science, Technology, rationalism.
• “Leslie fielder”  coined the term  "Postmodernism‟  in his essay “Cross the Border close that Gap”. To fielder “Post-modernism is primarily a de-Eliotisation movement in art”.
• Postmodernism is an unexpected intellectual revolution in arts and science. Postmodernist's use of psychology in literature. It paralleled in linguistic theory (Poststructuralism) and criticism (Feminism)
• It is also linked to post-colonialism. the founder of post-modernism is Jean Francis Leopard and Joan Baudrillard (French intellectuals)
• Influential persons – Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault and Rolland Barthes.
• Thomas Pyncheon and Gabriel Marques practiced postmodernism (North and south American writers)
• Inspired British writers – D. M. Thomas, Salman Rushdie
• The beginning of post-modernism with the first publication of John Hawkes‟ "The cannibal‟ (1949) "En attendant Godot‟ (1953), “Waiting for Godot” (1955), Howl (1956), or “Naked Lunch” (1959).
• Jacques Derrida‟s  “structure, sign and play ‟ (1966), Ihab Hassan‟s
• "The Dismemberment of Orpheus‟ (1971).
• Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the “Theatre of the absurd, the Beat Generation and magic Realism” have significant similarities)
• Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are contributors to the post-modern aesthetic. 
• Jarry, the surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello, influenced the work of playwrights from the “Theatre of the Absurd”. The term "Theatre of the Absurd” was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s
• One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and post-modern is Samuel Beckett.
• the "Beat generation” was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950‟s. Jack Kerouac who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose‟ to create a maximalist.
• “Beat Generation” often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York school, the son Francisco Renaissance.
•  Magic Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane.

Common themes and techniques:

All of these themes and techniques are often used together. For example, Metafiction and Pastiche are often used for irony.

1) Irony, playfulness, black humor 

2. Intertextuality – in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature.

3. Pastiche – means to combine or “paste together, multiple elements.

4. metafiction – writing about writing or “foregrounding the apparatus

5. Fabulation – is a rejection of realism and it relates to metafiction and pastiche.

6. Poioumena – (from an ancient Greek word which means product) 

7. Historiographic metafiction – to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures.

8. Temporal distortion is used in a variety of ways often for the sake of irony. 9. Magic realism – a literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner.

10. Technoculture and hyperreality – Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the “cultural logic of late capitalism which implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age.

11. Paranoia – the belief that there‟s an ordering system behind the

the chaos of the world is another recurring post-modern theme.

12. Maximalism – the purpose of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged.

13. Minimalism represents only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by an economy with words.

14. Fragmentation – various elements concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery, and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout the entire work.

Post-modernist Fiction:

It certainly shows a decline. The postmodernist British novelist can be classified into four groups:

1. The survivors of the Thirties:

Many of the writers of this group contrived to write in the traditional manner shutting their eyes to the new realities. The important survivors of the thirties are Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Charles Morgon, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green.

2. The Second group consisting of those who started writing before the war but achieved recognition only in the postwar years are C.P. Snow, Anthony Powell, and Joyce Cary.

3. The Angry Young men: The angry group is associated with the novel of 1950‟s. The term is applied to writers of varying talents. John wain, John Braine, Dorris Rossing, and Alan Sillitoe belong to this group.

4. The fourth group includes writers like William Golding and Muriel Spark. The power of innate evil in man is the central theme.