Eng426 20th century english literature

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is largely a reaction or response to the assumptions of modernism. Scholars do not always agree on its definition but “it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyper reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning” (Aylesworth, 2005).
As a movement, it began in the arts and architecture and just like modernism, abandons the realist mode of the 19^th century. Postmodernism as a concept improves on modernism and shares many characteristics with modernism including: absence of universal or absolute truth, anti-authority and anti-tradition, disregard for rationality, the belief that human life is complex and disjointed but could also be celebrated as it cannot be changed. For postmodernists, nothing is based on logical reasoning or an established widely accepted or acceptable universal truth as everyone has lost faith in truth, rationality or an ordered world where events are to happen normally but rather what is depicted is a world where things happen anyhow and anytime. There is no certainty, security or structure. This reality for them cannot be changed as everything is fragmented, de-centered and unstructured. For them this situation should not be approached mournfully or tragically as modernists do but should be played with. This is what brings about the artistic playfulness that postmodernists are known for.
In this respect, Samuel Beckett is regarded as a transitional playwright, whose writing could be read as modern and postmodern, especially Waiting for Godot. The way he allows his characters to “play” about everything is a significant feature. Like other postmodernists, he approaches life playfully deploying techniques irony, parody, and dark humour. In postmodernist literature there is little or no difference between fiction and nonfiction, postmodernists clamour for equality in gender, religion, class and race among others. Morality as well as truth is relative.
A major feature of postmodern thought is that universality is unacceptable and that “all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic” and this cannot be ignored in understanding how human relations function (Harvey, 1989). Differences along gender, sexuality, religion, class and race lines are all important. Postcolonialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and feminism are all offshoots of postmodernism.

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