Postmodernism:-
·
The
term applied to the literature and art after WW II(1939-45)- when the effects
of western morale of the WWI were greatly exacerbated by the experience of
1) Nazi Totalitarianism
2) Mass extermination
3) The Fear of total distruction by atomic
bomb.
4) Progressive devastation of the natural
environment
5) Over populaton
·
Postmodernist
writing reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the
meaninglessness of human existence.
·
It
involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme of the
counter traditional experiments of Modernism, but also diverse attempts to
break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn
conventional.
·
Postmodernist
critical school includes deconstruction, whose practitioners explore the
undecidability of texts and cultural criticism which erases the boundary
between “high” and “Law” culture.
·
It
overthrows the elitism of modernist ‘high art’ by recourse to the models of “Mass Culture” in film, television, news
paper cartoons, and popular music,
·
Postmodernists
rejected to instill in their work patterns of allusion, symbol and myth.
·
Postmodern
literature – Jarge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland
Barthes
·
Paralleled
in other arts like Pop art, Op art, films of Jean Luc Godard.
· Beckett’s ‘Absurd’ is to subvert the
foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience to reveal the
‘meaninglessness’ of existence.
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· Postmodernism in art is paralleled
with Post structuralism in linguistics- as it subverts the foundations of
language in order to reveal play of conflicting indeterminacies or of relations
and constructions of power in contemporary society.
The useful articles for further reading :
