How Gashly…
The beautiful version: PostModern Handout
The incase you don’t have Microsoft Word version…
A quick look at the disturbing world of postmodernism…
- Modernism: Cultural movement out of a Victorian intellect that was conservative/ constricted.
- Modernist ideas are viewed in the exact same way, like a straight line.
- Postmodernism: Uses the same subjective attitude as modernism but is clouded in intent, plays with meaning and incoherence.
- Think: Order, boundary & balance.
- A jagged line, postmodernism uses fragmented plots and many questions/considerations.
- Think: Chaos, irony & clutter.
Jean-François Lyotard
Metanarratives – large-scale theories and philosophies
Micro-narratives – Small stories that explain a particular part of life
Defines modernity as the age of metanarrative legitimation, and post modernity
Views post modernity as an age of fragmentation and pluralism
Work is characterized by a persistent opposition to universals, meta-narratives, and generality.
To Lyotard, this is a question of both knowledge and power. Knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?
With vast amounts of knowledge stored digitally in databases, who decides what knowledge is worth storing (what is legitimate knowledge) and who has access to these databases?
Jean Baudrillard
He breaks down modernity and post modernity in an effort to explain the world as a set of models.
He states that we live in a world of images but images that are only simulations.
We have lost contact with the “real” in various ways, that we have nothing left but a continuing fascination with its disappearance.
His vision is dystopic, and one of supreme nihilism and melancholia.
When reading his work on post modernity, one sometimes gets the sense that we have already lost.
The fact that movies and television (the media) keep turning to history and to various “retro” recreations of the past is merely a symptom for the loss of history.
”Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea.”
Baudrillard argues that the parodic, self-conscious and self-reflexive elements of pop-cultural forms only aid in their capitalist complicity
- Jacques Derrida
Much of his writing is concerned with the deconstruction of texts and probing the relationships of meaning between them.
He proposes that it is incorrect to infer that anything reasoned can be used as a stable and timeless model.
Much of his writing is virtually indecipherable, and meant to be so. This is because his aim is to demonstrate the dynamic and endless play of meaning in language.
Michel Foucault
Known for studies in social institutions (psychiatry, medicine, human sciences, prison system) as well as work on human sexuality.
Work on power, knowledge and discourse is widely discussed and is a foundation of postmodernism.
His thoughts were complicated because they constantly changed overtime.
Knowledge should transform the self.
Thinks that what most people see as permanent truths in society are in actuality, change. This upsets the conventional understanding of history.
Key Elements
Irony: Silly word plays within the serious context.
Pastiche: Multiple styles/elements pasted together to homage/parody styles.
Metafiction: A fictionalization of historical events, disregard for the suspension of ones disbelief, and narrative shift/comments by the author.
Maximalism: Widely criticised, disorganized language play and elaboration of detail for the sake of language play.
Temporal Distortion: Fragmented/non-linear narratives.
Hyper reality: Inability to distinguish from reality.
Paranoia: belief that there is an ordering system behind chaos.
- Example Analysis
p. 125 “An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, “There they go, there they go.” He meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”
§Two narratives one personal (about Vonnegut’s experience writing a book about the worst moments in his life) and one is impersonal (story of Billy pilgrim) making the narratives non-linear.
p. 1. “All this happened, more or less.”
§The author is disturbing the sense of belief by stating that his work is fiction (Metafiction).
