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Contemporary American Literature

Course 2
2nd Year American Studies
3rd Year English minor
Spring Semester 2012
Prof.dr. Rodica Mihaila

The Postmodernist Novel

What is Postmodernism?
Modernity-Postmodernity (features) the postmodern condition (Lyotard, Habermas,
Baudrillard)
Modernity/Postmodernity Paradigms

Modernity=
- asserts the exclusive either/or binary opposition.
- closure, unity, order, the absolute, the rational
- privileging of the general and the universal (in matters of truth, beauty
and goodness. - and so it could exclude and marginalize
- a monolithic, homogeneous concept of culture

Postmodernity= Defined as contesting the modern paradigm. A major shift

away from modernitys universalizing and totalizing drive, which was first fueled in the
17th c. by Descartes foundational ambitions and his faith in reason.
-shift in the notion of subjectivity (Edward Said: because of Foucault...man is
dissolved in ...the striations of language itself, turning finally into little more than a
constituted subject , a speaking pronoun, fixed indecisively in the eternal, ongoing rush of
discourse p.195
- it questions the modern paradigm: hierarchy and system - it makes disappear the
conforting security - ethical, ontological, epistemologtical - that reason offered within the
modern paradigm (liberating and empowering effect - see post-structuralism and
deconstruction)
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- postmodernity=a heterogeneous category. Despite its inclusiveness its

deconstructing of the modern paradigm comes from the awareness of the value and
significance of respecting difference and otherness - a new cultural politics of difference -
race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion,etc. Multiplicity, diversity, heterogeneity
- asserts the value of the inclusive both/and thinking
- paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, and contingency
- valuing of the local and the particular, the provisional and the tentative
instead of the universal and permanent values in whose name modernity
could exclude and marginalize
Postmodernity/Postmodernism
P. in various art forms - interpreted either as a continuation of the more radical
aspects of Euro-American modernism (paradox, irony) or as rupture with modernisms
ahistorical bent or its yearning for aesthetic autonomy and closure.
Main features: interest in issues of subjectivity and representation (how we image
ourselves to ourselves)
-concern for ideology and history (historiographic metafictions)
-formal self-consciousness, parody, wordplay, etc
-acknowledgement of the impossibility and the undesirability of
reaching any kind of absolute and final truth
-paradoxes: its ironic self-undermining critical stance and its
commitment to doubleness (juxtaposition and equal weighing of self-reflexiveness and
history, the inward-direction of form and the outward-direction of politics)
-the breakdown of the divide between high and popular art - resulting
heterogeneity of discourse
-emphatic self-reflexiveness - precursor in modernist formal autonomy
-abandonment of any reference to a center, a subject, a privileged
reference, an origin - decentering challenge , interogation of
human certainties (Truth, beauty, goodness).
-celebrates the different and the resistant, validates multiplicity,
heterogeneity, and diversity
-in a parodic culture irony reigns - the loss of the certainty and stability
of the Cartesian order (the Cartesian paradigm of modernity)
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Representing the Postmodern (definition)

Impossibility to define it, given its agenda of decentering, challenging, and subverting
the guiding metanarratives of Western culture. (see the challenge of feminist, post-colonial
and African-American theory). Common denominators of the postmodern condition in action
result in certain practices
A. Postmodernism as an aesthetic practice - a term first used in the 1950s, but accepted as
a general post-1960s period label attached to cultural forms that display such characteristics
as : reflexivity, irony, parody, and a mixing of the conventions of popular and high art.
-connections and disconnections on the aesthetic level among modernism, the avant-
garde, and the postmodern:
-modernism found in art a feasible and self-sustaining activity the more self-
counscious and abstract it became. The work of art was a closed entity whose meanings were
fixed and central (required explication or decipherment)
-the avant-garde saw in formal experimentation a way of tranforming the
manner in which society saw itself and people behaved
-postmodernism - combined the two (bringing the insight into the disursive
nature of everything (Derrida))- it applied the model of art as a self-contained discourse to
social discourse as well. As a language, art cannot be considered separately from cultural
languages in general. p.195 Postmodernism is dispersed - a collaborative aesthetic model.
the author asthe romantic creator (as authority) in modernism is
replaced by the demystified postmodern one - an agent in history, asware of the culturally
constituted status of his authorship
By the 1980s, Postmodernism extended to:
B. Postmodernism as a period concept (a mood or term for a cultural epoc - Terry Eagleton,
Jameson, Baudrillard) Linked to the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson), the general
condition of knowledge in an age of informational technology (Lyotard), or a wholesale
substitution of the simulacrum for the real (Baudrillard)
C. As a development in thought - a critique of the assumptions of
Enlightenment or the discourses of modernity and their foundation in notions of
universal reason. (Heiddeger and Nitzsche - against the Cartesian subject-centered Reason.
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Postmodernism = aesthetic (Hassan) ; 1.Ontological uncertainty (), fragmentariness,

indeterminancy, absence of the real (simulacra, simulation instead of representation)
2. heterogeneity(inclusiveness, local, particular, temporal, provisional instead of universal,
general, timeless); hybridization (genres, popular culture)
3. Subversion (anti-essentialism, de-naturalizing, disolves borders): Irony, paradox, pastich,
intertextuality, performative, ludic, carnavalesque;
4. De-centered self; subjectivity, otherness, multiplicity
5. Self-reflexivity; metafiction, narcissism
6. Open-endedness

The American Postmodernist Novel

2 waves of postmodernists: (fabulation, metafiction, self-reflexive) surfiction, critifiction
1. the late 50s & 60s: Barth, Pynchon, William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 59), John
Hawks, Heller, Vonnegut, William Gass, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme,
Kosinski: disorder, deliberate chaos, fragmentation, discolation, (literary
disruptions) self-reflective, absurd and arbitrary, parody, pastish
2. the 70s: Walter Abish, Steve Katz, Gilbert Sorrentino, , Ronald Sukenick:
construction of a fictional illusion and the laying bare of that illusion= fiction that
negates the symbolic power of language