Content introduction chapter modern american literature

CONTENT
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1. MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE.
1.1. Postmodernism in American literature.
1.2. Major themes in postmodernism.

CHAPTER 2. JOHN CHEEVER AS A MAJOR LITERARY FIGURE.
2.1. John Cheever as a postmoderist writer.
2.2. John Cheever as a short-story writer and a novelist.

CHAPTER 3. FAMILY TRADITIONS IN JOHN CHEEVER'S SELECTED SHORT STORIES.
3.1. Expression of family traditions in ...
3.2. Expression of family traditions in ..
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE/

Postmodernism is a direction of literary creativity, the works of which have been written from the 1950s to the present. This is what most writers think. The name of this direction received from the Latin word "postmodern", which means "new", "modern". Contents: Characteristic features of postmodernism in literature Favorite themes and techniques of postmodernists Most significant works Influence of realism Most likely, postmodernism originates from the desire to fight for peace on Earth and for the absence of discrimination. He denies the ideas of the Enlightenment, realism and modernism. If the modernist author is looking for meaning in a changing world, then the postmodernist believes that the surrounding reality is absurd and has no meaning. Postmodernism in literature has many features. About them - in this article. Characteristic features of postmodernism in the literature There is no exact definition of postmodernism, since this trend lacks clear criteria and is very multifaceted. Some researchers even consider it debatable whether it still exists. Some have coined the term "post-postmodernism", but that's a separate issue. Here we will talk about how postmodernism is understood by most writers.


1.1. Postmodernism in American literature

In the Premodernism period Before the 1600s, people in the West generally believed that God furnished the basis for moral absolutes, rationality, human dignity, and truth.

This is expressed by the noted Christian theologian Anselm who said, "I believe that I may understand" he spoke of a "faith seeking understanding" That is, the starting point for knowledge and wisdom was God who provided the lens through which one could
properly interpret reality and human experience. By having faith in God, the world could be rightly understood. In the Modernism period, came philosopher René Descartes as a Roman Catholic, he was troubled by the philosophical skepticism and the theological uncertainty of his day.So he embarked on a "skeptical voyage" in the pursuit of absolutely certain knowledge. As part of his project, he determined to doubt everything: Maybe an evil genius was tinkering with his mind or maybe everything is an illusion. But he concluded that at least he knew he was doubting, which is a form of thinking.So without realizing it, Descartes' project removed God from center stage, replacing it with the human knower as the starting point. The effect would be momentous. The rationalism of the European Enlightenment reflected this shift. This period was both optimistic about human potential and reason, but was also skeptical about church authority/state churches.In the Postmodernism period, in the wake of two World Wars, a postmodern climate started to permeate the West. Confidence in human progress and autonomy was shattered on the rocks of Auschwitz and the Soviet gulags. The systems or "grand stories" of Nazism, Marxism, scientism, or rationalism ended up oppressing "the other—that is”, those marginalized by these systems such as Jews, capitalists, etc. These systems proved to be total failures. So with postmodernism, not only was God excluded as a foundation for making sense of reality and human experience; we cannot speak of any universal truth, reason, or morality. We just have fragmented perspectives. [ www.Studylib.net ]
Researchers recognize the United States as the birthplace of postmodern literature - it was from here that postmodernism spread throughout Europe. The theory of postmodernism begins to take shape in the United States on the wave of interest in the intellectual-philosophical, post-Freudian and literary concepts of the French post-structuralists. The American soil turned out to be the most favorable for the perception of new trends for a number of reasons. Here there was a need to comprehend those trends in the development of art and literature that had declared themselves since the mid-1950s. (the appearance of pop art, which made citation the leading artistic principle) and increasingly gained strength, which led to a change in the cultural paradigm in the mid-70s: modernism gave way to postmodernism.Time did not inspire hope, did not leave a way out. The way out was an exciting way of literary play, a daring experiment, parody. These two points: firstly, a sense of the absurdity of social life and history, and, secondly, a taste for a literary game - in various combinations, determined the essence of American postmodernism, which was the main trend in US literature in the 60s and 70s, remained an important factor in its development until the mid-80s and largely influenced its future fate. [ www.studbook.net ]
As you know, literary postmodernism is not the specifics of only American literature. And also, the words of some critics sound like a paradox, saying: "Unlike modernism, which appeared in Europe, postmodernism is a purely American phenomenon." Meanwhile, there is a great deal of truth in this paradox. Indeed, unlike in Europe, postmodernism in the US is not genetically related to the "high" modernism of the beginning of the century. Practically devoid of a literary basis, postmodernism in the United States arose exclusively on a sociocultural basis. Modern America, with its purely technological superiority, cultural heterogeneity, and the rapid erosion of moral and political beliefs from recent American life, has been a land of distinctly postmodern culture. This determined the specific turn of postmodernism in the United States and its special expressiveness. Significant in this regard was the article by the famous literary critic Leslie Fiedler "Cross the borders, fill in the ditches", published in 1969 in Playboy magazine. The very name and place of publication demonstrated the pathos of rapprochement and combination of the language of modernism with the language of popular literature. Such a convergence of the extreme poles was intended to overcome both the elitism of modernist literature (oriented to a relatively narrow circle of intellectuals and, due to its complexity, inaccessible and uninteresting to the people), and primitivism, and the stereotyped mass fiction (despised by aesthetes, but constituting the main product of consumption of a wide range of readers) . This trend characterizes the works of the emerging postmodern literature, in which the gap between “art for the educated” and its simplified version “for the uneducated” is overcome, it is planned to go beyond the established boundaries of literary movements, genres, reader expectations, etc. The act of trampling boundaries is considered by Fiedler as the act of gaining freedom. The heralds of the latter are John Bart and Norman Mailer, who earlier than others combined the mass and the elite in their works.The American theologian Harvey Cox, in his works of the early 70s devoted to the problems of religion in Latin America, widely uses the concept of "postmodern theology". However, the term "postmodernism" gained popularity thanks to the architect and theorist Charles Jencks. In the book The Language of Postmodern Architecture, he noted that although the word itself was used in American literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s to refer to ultramodernist literary experiments, the author gave it a fundamentally different meaning. Jencks in his article “The Rise of Postmodern Architecture” offers the ideas of art plurality and the rejection of patterns: the more options for reading the meaning (the image of the building), the more significant the meaning itself. [www.philosopherkings.]
The ideas of the French post-structuralists who migrated to the United States, and, above all, Jacques Derrida (who worked for some time at Yale University), helped to better understand the processes taking place in American art, gave a new impetus to discussions about postmodernism. In 1975, the Oktober magazine began to appear, edited by Rosalind Krauss, which plays a major role in promoting the discoveries of representatives of the new French philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and in uniting the efforts of American intellectuals to comprehend the phenomenon of postmodernism. The theory of postmodernism receives a systematic design in the works of the American scientist I. Hasan. Over time, the conceptual paradigm of postmodernism in the United States influenced not only literature and art, but also the entire complex of the humanities, including psychoanalysis, criminology, psychology, law, sociology, business and management, and political science. Poststructuralism as the theoretical basis of postmodernism served as a methodological basis for rethinking the history of literature, art and culture of America as a whole from new points of view - ethnic, racial, sexual minorities, etc.; gave impetus to the development of a feminist approach to American history and culture. By the beginning of the 90s. Postmodernism has become the dominant trend in the development of the spiritual culture of society as a whole in the United States. [ www. Prezi.com ]

American literary postmodernism is represented by such key figures as J. Barth, T. Pynchon, D. Barthelme, R. Sakenick, R. Federman. Moreover, most of these authors are not only practitioners, but also theorists of this art. In American postmodernism, traditional forms and motifs are transformed not as a result of natural evolution, but as a result of the dominance of the concept of general chaos and decay. Postmodernist writing depicts an incredible mixture of times, cultures, languages, fact and fiction; modernity coexists with the traditions of Shakespearean drama, the Enlightenment, romanticism, realism, beatnikism. At the same time, everything loses its immanent meaning and identity, is mixed up, passes one into another, parodied, reduced to a farce. In fact, the distinction between "one's own" and "alien" text, the plans of the present and the past, disappears. Postmodernism has never been a retreat from reality here, even if such a retreat is an indirect response to contemporary concerns. American postmodernism very often finds itself directly involved in the world of big politics and history and seeks to directly reflect it. However, it reflected social reality in a fundamentally different way than the works of realist writers that preceded postmodernism. Postmodernism put a kind of mirror before the country, but not an ordinary one, but concentrating, and sometimes grotesquely distorting proportions - like in a laugh room. At the same time, such "immutable" concepts as "freedom," "democracy," "the American way of life" were revised, and authorities - social, political, religious, even the supreme authority of God - were debunked. A direct appeal to social life and history in order to reveal their absurdity is one of the leading lines among the eclectic diversity of currents of American postmodernism. In criticism, it was called differently: "bop-prosody", "absurdism", "literature of disintegration", "school of black humor", etc. Already after the fact, it received the name of "mega-literature" or "megaprose". The line of "black humor" in a transformed form was also present in the US literature of the last third of the 20th century, however, the period of its unconditional dominance fell on the early 1960s. [ www. Studbooks.net ]