Post-Modernism features in English Literature

Post-Modernism features in English Literature

Abstract: The present article is an attempt to reflect on new openings and recent developments in literature, literary theory and culture which seem to point postmodernism and raise a question whether what appears as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises and authorial practices.

Post-Modernism can be described as a particular style of thought. It is a concept that correlates the emergence of new features and types of social life and economic order in a culture; often called modernization, post-industrial, consumer, media, or multinational capitalistic societies. In Modernity, we have the sense or idea that the present is discontinuous with the past that through a process of social, technological, and cultural change (either through improvement, that is, progress, or through decline) life in the present is fundamentally different from life in the past. This sense or idea as a world view contrasts with what is commonly known as Tradition, which is simply the sense that the present is continuous with the past, that the present in some way repeats the forms, behavior, and events of the past. I would propose that traditional ways of life have been replaced with uncontrollable change and unmanageable alternatives, but that these changes and alternatives eventually create something that may result in the society that traditionalists actually seek after; the balance between Nature and Technology.

The term "postmodernism" - a style of art, especially in the nineteen eighties, which uses an unusual mixing of old and new forms - was itself a movable feast, and its theoretical associations were changing again; it meant the "postmodern condition" itself. It was explained by the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard: there were no Grand Narratives left on which thinkers or writers could depend; "simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives".

The Postmodernist reconstruct the modernist literature. They removed so much as to reach Minimalism, in which the functioning of the remaining elements was based on the principle of "less means more". Narrative was reduced (in "Ulysses" and in the French nouveau roman). Tendencies have crystalized to shape new genres. One broad grouping is the Metafiction, or the novel that exposes conventions only to discard, perhaps by the use of an obviously naïve narrator. Recent writers have gained confidence into the Magic Realist or Poetic novel Salman Rushdie, J. Irving, A. Carter. Here real places and traditional events are often introduced, but all in a distorted or poetically molded form. These fabulators return to the loose Dickensian form of the novel.

Introduction:

Postmodern literature is part of socio-cultural and historical development and can be seen as a specific way of a depiction of the postmodern life and culture. It shows a crisis of identity of human being (ethnic, sexual, social and cultural) and its struggle for legitimization in a hypocritical society. This theme was treated by other authors before (example), but it started to be treated much more systematically after the Civil Right Movement in the USA in the nineteen sixties (Martin Luther King, ethnic and sexual/homosexual and lesbian minority rights), the Vietnam and student protests in Europe and the USA. While this movement led to democratization of the public life, more prerogatives, education and publishing opportunities for minorities in the Western countries, the East and Central European countries became much more authoritarian under the influence and control of the USSR, especially between the nineteen fifties - nineteen eighties. With a more employment, educational and public opportunities to find a place in the society, new authors representing minority ethnic (in addition to quite well-established Jewish and Black-American authors, especially Native-American, Asian-American and Hispanic-American authors), gender (female), sexual (gay, lesbian) started to gain a prominent position in American literature, for example. Later similar development could be observed in British, Australian and Canadian literature in which the authors coming from different cultural background, usually former British colonies, started to appear (Ben Okri, Kasugio Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Hanif

Kureishi, for example, in British fiction; or the representatives of formerly oppressed original inhabitants such as Collin Johnson, Kath Walker, Sam Watson and Kim Scott in Australian literature). In literary theory and criticism, it was especially the emergence of feminist and post-colonial theories which was a result of this development. At the same time, literatures in English, especially American literature, depicted a growing awareness of the negative effects of industrialization and commercialization of public life leading to the ecological crisis and consumerism (the Beatnick authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Snyder, Gregory Corso and others). These authors expressed negative attitudes to the Western civilization and emphasized oriental vision and understanding of the world (Zen-Buddhism, Buddhism, Hinduism), pacifistic and peaceful way of life along with the appreciation of drugs, alcohol and spontaneity as a liberating alternative to the Western ethical norms, hypocrisy, and civilization.

Discussion: Postmodernism is a fairly recent phenomenon, and is more evident in America and France than in England, except in the field of Drama. Beckett, being settled in Paris (France) and being French as well as English writer, showed "Postmodernist" tendencies more than any other English writer. His plays as well as novella are typical examples of Post-Modernist writings. Among other Post-Modernist, prominent examples are works of John Fowles, Alain Robbe Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Leonard Michaels, Brigid Brophy and Richard Brautigan. Post-modernist writers break away from all the rules and seek alternative principles of composition conforming to their content of existentialist thought. They seek to capture human situation in its most concentrated form and render themselves capable of employing a form which can fully assimilate human existence, which is capable of accommodating the meaninglessness, purposelessness and absurdity of human existence. They have employed various devices such as fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, contradiction, permutation, discontinuity, randomness, excess, short circuit et cetera which manifest chaotic condition of the world in equally chaotic technique and form. Unifying features often coincide with Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the "metanarrative" and "little narrative", Jacques Derrida's concept of "play", and Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest.