|
|
|
A Dialogue on postmodernism Postmodernism is a cultural reaction to the naive belief that modern science could provide an underlying foundation to reality, from which architects, physicians, economists and other professional rationalists could build a structured and technically efficient society. Modernism viewed the world as hierarchical, where one grand reality organized and controlled different manifestations of that reality. Modernism maintained the monotheistic view view of reality, but replaced God as the master narrator with the principles of science. Postmodernism returned to a type of polytheistic world view, where various interpretive communities narrate small segments of reality. Postmodernism is antifoundational, suggesting that multiple fragmented communities coexist but with no hierarchical relationship among themselves, and no permanence. Postmodernism views natural laws as stories we tell ourselves to create the illusion of structure. In the postmodern world, discourse ceases to be an expression of rational meaning and becomes instead an act of power in constant conflict. Language is a game whose rules continuously shift, forming an endless play of negotiated meaning. Words as signifiers lack any direct references to signified objects, but instead point to other words. The modern reality posited by science degenerates into a mere caricature of itself, a simulacrum, where the media image overtakes whatever it might represent. That's my own definition derived mainly from Derrida and Baudrillard. If that wasn't enough, here's a list of the major characteristics and components of Postmodernism: --against tradition, authority, and signification itself; a tendency to deny meaningful patterns in a text --deeply experimental: fiction marked by the anti-novel ( whose characteristics include: no attempt at realism, since the novel creates its own sense of reality; lack of plot, minimal characterization, detailed surface descriptions, repetition, experiments with syntax and language, variations of time, multiple beginnings and endings) and by other fragmentary and random forms. --eclectic style, including aleatory approach (randomness, chance, and accident) parody, pastiche --magical realism predominates (mix of real and fantastic, skillful time shifts, convoluted and labyrinthine plots, use of dreams and fairy-tales, surreal descriptions, arcane erudition, horrific and inexplicable plot twists. --profound indeterminacy (ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism) the cultivation of indeterminacy. --self-referentiality, self-reflexivity: tendency to write about writing itself --strong political resonance: an assault on liberal humanism, sense that all cultural and textual practices are marked by strong political subtexts; therefore, deliberately foregrounds both its production and its contradictoriness and its historicity --connected to technology, mass culture, and mass media in a dynamic tension of positive and negative reaction --recognizes the end of individualism, the age of commodity--art becomes a commodity. If you agree with those tenets, you can see that Amis doesn't easily fit into the postmodern mold; although a very strong argument could be made. I think the scale of critical analysis is leaning toward a post-structuralist classification--but it's not a perfect fit either. I'm sure the majority of you couldn't care less anyway.--Tim
Postmodernism: even the briefest viewing of The New Avengers, which I have just been indulging myself with, cannot fail to clarify the meaning of the term. Postmodernism is the 2nd time you do something, or, put another way, a version of something that is resonant when you look back at the original. What screeching 1976 DBSV8s & XJSs, sequined bikinis, pirouetting Purdeys & blokes driving around in Land Rovers wearing net curtains (!) teaches, is that in 1976 it was normal (if knowing), but in 1998 it's hilarious (in part because you recognize the original). In the same way, Joanna Lumley is (almost) acting in TNA & is postmodern in Absolutely Fabulous. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is 'acting' in Terminator & very definitely postmodern in The Last Action Hero. In the same way, your situating M.A.'s W2 studio nr Nottingham Gate St. was postmodern in its oblique - & paradoxically untrendily trendy - reference to the real Notting Hill Gate. No, well that probably doesn't clear it up either...& I'm still trying to sum myself up in a couple of lines Dr. D., but am having having a few problems (although others would have no such difficulty I'm sure!) [I hope TNA is an available reference for Americans...perhaps not, although it is a cult series in France 'Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir.'] *TNA: tape 1, episode 1. --Ed
Finally! I've got a definition i can relate to, that isn't so intensely abstract that i'm still wandering around in a literary twilight- crepuscular-and not-even-then zone. Thank-You-Ed! for a well-developed, concrete answer [complete with images and examples and not cop-out examples,e.g. modern authors- like English-Lit profs always give] I now comprendo" pomo,"& conceptionalize it in the 200MB of grey matter on my most-internal HD (i have a low RAM count too, sadly enough) okay, i just wanted you to know why i'm so g.d. appreciative. the following, being i've been up against: Here is what A HANDBOOK TO LITERATURE by Hugh Holman, Kenan Professor of ENGLISH AT U. OF North Carolina, 4th edition said:( I remember you chastized me for not researching Durkheim[I thought it was a German city like Dresden]so I looked up pomo many times) Post-modern: the tendency of the modernist to create intricate FORMS, interweave SYMBOLS elaborately,to create within themselves an ordred universe, have given way since the 1960's to a denial of order, to the presentation of highly fragmented universes in the created world of art, and to critical theories that are forms of phenemology. Myth has given way to experiencing aesthetic surfaces. Traditional forms such as THE NOVEL, have given way to denials of those forms such as the ANTI-NOVEL. The typical protangonist has become not a hero but an anti-hero has. writeres auch as Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, Barthelme, and Pinter are "post-modern," in that they carry the philosophical assumptions of the modernnist about the worold into the very realm of art itself. It goes onto give examples of writers in Great Britain, [in the Post-Modernist Period in Eng. Lit] where "The Empire continued to shrink into an island kingdom and struggles between Catholics and Protestants intensified and demanded more of the attention of the English...inflation continued to function as a great social equalizer of classes.."; Anyway, he says" a spiritual malaise sharply defined by Margaret Drabble in her novel The Ice Age (1977) and Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis, and Lawrence Durrell continued to produce work typical of their younger days." He mentions Anthony Powell, Doris Lessing, and Cecil Day-Lewis[poet laureate] who was replaced by Sir John Betjamen,and playwright Tom Osborne. I swear, Ed, i reread this exposition 10 maybe 15 x, and didn't know anymore about pomo than when i started . now I have an idea! A few things to clear up,though>>>I haven't seen "TNA," the Brit TV series but does it stand for "tits'n ass?," like it does here . There's a number in that Broadway musical{?one word?}. Is pomo, accordingly, a "take," satire, on an era where an art form, stylistic genre was taken seriously like the "film noir,"the comedid film starring Mike Myers?[guy in SNL] who plays a rockstar fr/ the '70's' who wakes up from a 20 year acid trip coma in the late '90's to act "70 Kool,Man!"and wears bell-bottoms and pasley shirts? with Hugh Grant's Main Squeeze, who's become an -actress since he was booked on BJ charges with that black hooker{Ms. Divine} on Hollywood Blvd."[forgot her name.. oh yeah, Liz Hurley!] anyway, it was a riot! Okay, the French tv show, "Chapeau & Boites Cuir" meaning "Bowler Hat and Leather boots":what's that about? And, lastly: yeah, i always get Nottingham and Nottingate mixed up, i watched "Tales of Robin Hood & His Merry Men " on tv as a child, and only knew "The Sheriff of Nottingham Forest"[bad guy] and get it confused with the tube station in W11; thanks at least, for clearing up Postmodernism for me. Whew!!{{{Ed}}} XX-julie clinch p.s. i still don't know what 1976 DBSV8s & XJSs are, (cars?) or pirouetting Purdeys(??) & blokes driving around in Land Rovers[sic]{cars again} wearing net curtains (!)" teaches" ??<?? --Jules
TNA was just my acronym for The New Avengers (a 70s Brit crime series - one of the type of references Austin Powers (M Myers) was using). Chapeau Melon etc. was the French dubbed version of the same series. DBSs are Aston Martins, XJSs are Jaguars & Purdey is the female lead (Joanna Lumley, took over from Diana Rigg of the earlier series The Avengers - hence TNA was already a bit postmodern). She was a model & shows about as much T&A as you could on Brit TV in the 70s... I don't claim of course that ironic reference to the past is all that PM is about, but it is representative of PM as a broadly held modern attitude (upon which Tim overlays a comprehensive raft of more particular features of this movement alone). . . . One other aspect of popular culture I was also thinking looks very PM is rap music. A search for a new identity, rejecting the old but 'modern' paradigm, a headlong - again knowing - pursuit of a previously discredited concept of wealth for its own sake, the use of 'samples' (snatches of older music included in the song), & a retrograde to archetypal pre-oppressive times seem all classic themes. I like the fact that M.A. looks askance at PM as more of a personally, variously, arrived at modern phenomenon than a movement - this is instructive, but then again he is a novelist not a philosopher. By the way, isn't the best one word summation of PM simply irony? & haven't modernism & postmodernism been leapfrogging each other through most of man's sentient past? --Ed
|
This site is featured in
Site maintained by James Diedrick,
author of
Understanding Martin Amis, 2nd edition (2004).
|
Home | Discussion Board | Disclaimer | Understanding Martin Amis | James Diedrick | Albion College |
