Eng426 20th century english literature

Literary Postmodernism

Postmodernist disillusionment and its celebration of the existential nature of life were noticed around 1960 to 1990 in literary representations. Its characteristics include de- centeredment, pastiche, allegory, ambiguity, irony, parody, dark humour, fragmentation, especially in dialogue, questionable narrators, meta-narratives, isolated characters, and the blurring of the divide between reality (life) and fiction. It is clear that modernism and postmodernism share a lot in common but they are different.
Postmodernism did not just succeed modernism, it replenished it. It came at a time when people had lost faith in all forms of positive thinking (Matz, 2004). The skepticism that accompanied modernism had changed the way people think and approached life. Although the modernists attempted to show how the society and the individual grow farther from each other, their literature sensitized the people into a sad and isolated position. All faith in any idealism as a form of redemption or answer to the lingering questions of existence was lost. Literature turned the society’s view in a way that what had been good about modernity suddenly felt good no longer and the inventions of modernity became the same tool that birthed the estrangement in the atmosphere
Modernists were shocked and horrified by the ways machine replaced and displaced men in the modern world. They were not in support of the changes that technology, machines and industrialization brought to their world. However, instead of feeling alienated and helpless by these changes, postmodernists accept and embrace these technologies and machines. They are interested in representing these technologies and machines and the social, political and economic consequences of these innovations.
Instead of the alienated and isolated characters who find it difficult to communicate and enter into relationships in modernist texts, postmodernist characters are comfortable and at ease with their loneliness. They enjoy this alienation and do not feel strange about it. Postmodernist texts show a world that is fragmented, incoherent and uncertain. Neglected and marginalized members of the society are also given prominence in some postmodernist writing, for example the colonized and women.
As against the stream of conscious/ess technique of the narration of the modernists where the workings of the mind of the characters are seen as more important than the external realities or communication, in the narratives of the postmodernists, characters are allowed to speak for themselves, there are at least two narrators whose stories or versions of a story are at times contradictory and it is not always easy to point out who the true narrator of the story is.
In modernist literature, unrealistic issues and events live only within a character’s mind as a form of sickness or hallucination for example in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith lives in his unrealistic world and in his mind the human nature is upon him. Modernists will find an explanation for this unrealistic hallucination or sickness and Septimus’s is the shell shock he suffered as a soldier in the First World War. But in a postmodern literature like Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Jean Brodie’s obsession to bring up her chosen girls to become de crème la crème in her prime is exhibited outside her mind, she lives it and practices it and this obsession is left unresolved even though it is illogical and lacks any rational explanation. This kind of strange obsession or event can also be seen in Ian McEwan’s Atonement where a young girl’s over imaginative mind leads her to accuse her sister’s friend of rape and this sets the course for the novel.
While modernists clamour for a new and independent way of writing literature and representing reality, postmodernists revisit and reform the past and blend it with the new. The concept of pastiche is a postmodernist one and it connotes the mixing of texts, genres, style and works of art. Postmodernists posit that every text is a product of a wide range of experiences(texts) and that interpretation is problematic because all the underlying texts of a text have some impact on the new text that is produced.