Termez state pedagogical university

Postmodernism

In his glossary of literary terms, Dr. L. Kip Wheeler of Carson-Newman College, characterizes postmodernism: “While modernism mourned the passing of unified cultural tradition, and wept for its demise in the ruined heap of civilization, so to speak, postmodernism tends to dance in the ruins and play with the fragments.”

A search for a definition of postmodernism leads many to the conclusion that the term is indefinable. Some proffered descriptions of postmodernism negate the possibility of definition by explaining that postmodernism pushes to an extreme the modernist idea that life and thought have no central core of reality or meaning. Epistemology becomes reliant on the individual mind, and a plurality of epistemologies is considered not only possible but desirable. Only cultural constructs provide what is accepted as reality and truth.

Postmodernism may be placed in time: the years following World War II to the last decade of the 20th century. During the 1990s and the early 21st century scholars began to speak of being in a post postmodern era.

Postmodern literature exhibits some of the same traits as modern literature but pushes these traits to extremes beyond those of the modern era. For example, modernism’s attempts to reproduce the way the human mind works with a stream of consciousness technique lead to postmodern mixing of points of view and deliberate playing with chronology, often for the purpose of questioning realism’s ontology. Harold Pinter’s use of reverse chronology in his 1978 play Betrayal, for example, exemplifies a postmodern manipulation of time. In a postmodern world, realism and the possibility of absolute truth, moral truth or empirical truth, do not exist. One hundred years after the Victorians grappled with a faith-doubt conflict, the postmodern world embraced nihilism (a philosophy which denies the existence of an objective reality, intrinsic meaning in life, and absolute moral values) in reality and morality.

As a means of exploring the construct of reality, postmodernism employs metafiction, fiction about the process of creating fiction. A literary work in

which both the author and the reader are conscious of the artifact as a creation of the author’s mind mirrors the process of the mind constructing reality.


Descriptions of modernism and postmodernism including a comparative chart are available from Dr. Martin Irvine at Georgetown University.