31 Literature and the Condition of Postmodernity: Lyotard, Fredric Jameson
Dr. Sohel Aziz
The term ‘postmodernism’ is usually applied to the period in literature and literary theory beginning from the 1960s, though some regard postmodernism as the prevailing intellectual mood since World War II that ended in 1945. Numerous philosophers, critics, and belletristic writers can be seen as precursors or early representatives of the cultural and aesthetic approach that would come to be called postmodernism, among them, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Jorge Louis Borges, and Roland Barthes are prominent. Unlike other avant-garde or “progressive” movements before it, postmodernism rejects the metaphysical underpinnings of Western thought and culture at the very deepest level. Postmodernism is characterized by a strikingly radical scepticism toward all aspects of Western culture, the impetus for which many practitioners of postmodern theory themselves trace back to the writings of the nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s spiritual descendants seek, in so many words, a new kind of meaning independent of the prevailing cultural “myth” of objective truth.
Defining “Postmodernism”
Arnold Toynbee, in 1947, first used the term “postmodernism” to describe a contemporary Western world in crisis, in which people struggled to make sense of a century characterised by conflict and mass genocide, and this lead to the questioning of traditional moral values and beliefs. However, by the 1970s the term underwent a change in meaning to refer to the extension and development of cultural modernism – the artistic and literary style that had enjoyed a period of massive influence between the wars, and experienced a revival of interest in the 1960s. Later still, postmodernism took a wider definition with which it is now associated. Steve Padley in Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature defines it as “a critical apparatus through which contemporary society and culture could be examined, though not interpreted, or explained, along conventional theoretical, historical or philosophical lines”.
For a better understanding of postmodernism as a movement, it may be viewed against the background of modernism , when writers like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and many more made a collective effort to revive Western Literature without advancing the realist tradition or the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century. After the devastation of the First World War and accompanying technological progress, modernists still hoped to establish a critical literature and culture that exhibits the desire for order, albeit new forms of order, in its aesthetics, while postmodernism, coming in the wake of another World War, abandons the search for totality altogether and sets out, to particularize, question and subvert. Postmodernism offers no suggestion of anything like a comprehensive substitute world-view. Mary Klages in Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed makes this difference between modernism and postmodernism clearer by providing the literary characteristics of Modernism and later that of postmodernism in the following way:
From a literary perspective, the main characteristics of modernism include:
- an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on how seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on what is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of- consciousness writing
- a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner’s multiply-narrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism
- a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as in T. S. Eliot or e cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce)
- an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random- seeming collages of different materials
- a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways
- a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation
- a rejection of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.
Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self- consciousness, fragmentation , discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, with an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.
But, while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn’t lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let’s not pretend that art can make meaning, then, let’s just play with nonsense.
Postmodernism means to make a clean break with the past in the sense that the past and its way of looking at the world become the subject of satirical, often sarcastic play with historical figures, texts and ideologies. Postmodernism represents a final disillusionment with Western cultural preconceptions and indulges in a merciless rethinking of history, pedagogy, and aesthetics in literature, the visual arts and architecture. This disillusionment, peaked in the culturally and politically rebellious years of the 1960s, during which the prestige of United States, a putative champion of traditional Western values, was called into question by a protracted, brutal, and ultimately unsuccessful interventionist war in Southeast Asia. Similarly, postmodernism in the days after the end of the Cold War (1945-1989) offered no direction, but asserted only its prerogative to question infinitely and to subvert.
Features of Postmodernism and Postmodern Literature
Since some critics resist the label “postmodernist” and still others deny there actually exists a movement or school of postmodernism, it is best to identify the common features usually in play when scholars use the term. First, the postmodernists can be said to see language as the multilayered medium within which we must search for meaning, all the while aware of the impossibility of absolute knowledge. Meaning, as deconstructionists like Derrida insist, is a matter of contrast within linguistic contexts; it is created by difference, not by the identity of the sign (word) with that which the sign represents.
Related to this is the principle of undecidability and the postmodernists believe in the impossibility of deciding between two or more competing interpretations. For them, our ability to make a decision about the validity of a statement is suspended or remains undecided as all absolute values, like God, Truth, Reason, the Law and so on, become site of questioning, of rethinking , of new kinds of affirmation. They give a new attention to the value of the undecidable. Bennett and Royle in their book Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory say,
The postmodernist thinkers throw a radical challenge to intellectual attitudes dating back to the 18th Century Enlightenment, such as the belief that reason and rationalism held the key to progress in all spheres of human endeavour, including science, philosophy, politics, and culture. The postmodernists are sceptical about the claims of progress in history, especially after the evidence of the two World Wars and recurrent acts of genocide and inhumanity. However, it doesn’t mean that they celebrate irrationality, rather their attitude can be understood as a suspension and deconstruction of the opposition between the rational and the irrational. Bennett and Royle in their book Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory say,
Bennett and Royle also highlight the fragmentation as a characteristic form of postmodernism. They say that the postmodern provides a new kind of critique of the very ideas of fragment and totality which have taken the form of, among other things,
The postmodern challenges the ‘logo-centric’ (the authority of the word, the possibility of the final meanings or of being in the presence of pure ‘sense’) . It challenges the ethnocentric (the authority of one ethnic identity or culture—such as Europe or ‘the West’ or Islam or Hinduism). It challenges the phallocentric (everything that privileges the symbolic power and significance of phallus). As Ihab Hassan remarks, the postmodern may be summarized by a list of words prefixed by ‘de-’ and ‘di-’ : ‘deconstruction, decentring, dissemination, dispersal, displacement, difference, discontinuity, demystification, delegitimation, disappearance’ (Ihab Hassan, 309). In place of the centre, but not in its place, there is alterity, otherness, a multiplicity and dispersal of centres, origins, presences.
The boundary between fact and fiction is often dissolved in postmodernism. Neither historiography nor science writing is exempt from scepticism about its fundamental tenets, and like narrative fiction, both are regarded as human constructs and inventive creations. Borrowing from the terminology of Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science, postmodernists regard the modern, rationalistic, technologically oriented world-view as a “paradigm” that will one day be replaced by the paradigms of a new world-view, just as the heliocentric universe replaced the Ptolemaic system. Relativity underscored the limits of Newtonian physics, and forced the twentieth century to readjust fundamentally the received paradigm for the behaviour of the physical world. Science, it is argued, cannot be regarded as decisive, complete.
Another common assumption in postmodernism is that there is nothing necessarily essential about human beings; the idea of human nature is itself a human construct among many. Thus, the concentration on depicting universal experience in traditional literature is irrelevant and illusionary.
Postmodern art is not “self-sufficient” but exists in relation to other texts and consciously refers to other works of art (intertextuality). It borrows and manipulates freely, without any of the traditional deference for the works of high culture (or their creators).
Clearly, any literature that assails injustice, as postmodernist literature so often does, is not nihilistic or devoid of values, however much it wishes to be free of conventions and traditional attachments. However, the postmodern approach is one which more often than not exposes rather than explicitly condemns. For the same reason, postmodernism accepts and embraces mass culture and goes out of its way not to turn up its nose. Andy Warhole’s pop art images are the visual counterpart to the literary use of “cultural icons”.
As for specific techniques, the novels of postmodernism are often self-consious “meta-narratives”—they do not tell a story without commenting on the narrative enterprise and paradoxically questioning their own claims to narrative and epistemological validity. (The British author John Fowles is a master of this sort of postmodernist inversion and ambiguity, though his inversions are final ones, occurring at the end of the narrative, with alternative conclusions, as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969.) In the works of many other writers, narrative ambiguity permeates the text bewildering many readers. Conventional perspective is also absent. Postmodernist literature shirks the omniscient third-person narrative voice and often “floats” perspective among several narrators. This kind of literature also often excerpts or “samples” from other documents (of various kinds) and playfully manipulates history and historical figures, as in the works of Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, Ian Watson, and others.
Postmodern authors often use a technique of a collage for the narrative and compositional construction of their works. The collage breaks the linearity of narration, enables the stylistic and generic hybridity and offers a multiple, pluralistic and often relativistic vision of the world. In a traditional modernist collage the elements of the collage (different styles, characters, narrative voices, etc.), can be understood only in their relation to other parts (chapters, styles, characters, from other parts of the book). On the other hand, the elements creating a postmodern collage are mostly self-sufficient and can themselves create meaning of their own, though, of course, the full understanding of such a work requires a reading of all parts, elements or segments of the text.
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924—1998) and The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Lyotard is best known for his highly influential formulation of postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition—commissioned by the government of Quebec and published in 1979. Lyotard famously defines the postmodern as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives,’ where metanarratives are understood as totalising stories about history and the goals of the human race that ground and legitimise knowledges and cultural practises. The two metanarratives that Lyotard sees as having been most important in the past are (1) history as progressing towards social enlightenment and emancipation, and (2) knowledge as progressing towards totalisation. Modernity is defined as the age of metanarrative legitimation, and postmodernity as the age in which metanarratives have become bankrupt. Through his theory of the end of metanarratives, Lyotard develops his own version of what tends to be a consensus among theorists of the postmodern – postmodernity as an age of fragmentation and pluralism. He says that postmodernity marks the end of metanarratives or ‘grand narratives’—like Christianity, or Marxism, or the Enlightenment—which attempt to provide a framework for everything. Such narratives follow a teleological movement towards a time of equality and justice: after the last judgement, the revolution, or the scientific conquest of nature, injustice unreason and evil will end. Lyotard argues that the contemporary world-view, by contrast, is characterized by ‘micro narratives’. Contemporary Western discourse is characteristically unstable, fragmented, dispersed—not a world-view at all. Little narratives or micro narratives present local explanations of individual events or phenomena but do not claim to explain everything. Little narratives are fragmentary, non-totalizing and non-teleological. Lyotard claims that in the West grand narratives have all but lost their efficacy, that their legitimacy and powers of legitimation have been dispersed. Legitimation is now plural, local and contingent.
The Postmodern Condition is a study of the status of knowledge in computerized societies. It is Lyotard’s view that certain technical and technological advancements have taken place since the Second World War (his historical pin-pointing of the beginning of postmodernity) which have had and are still having a radical effect on the status of knowledge in the world’s most advanced countries. As a defining element with which to characterise these technical and technological advancements, Lyotard chooses computerization. Lyotard identifies the problem with which he is dealing – the variable in the status of knowledge – as one of legitimation. For 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? According to Lyotard, in the computer age the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government. 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? Lyotard points a suspicious finger at multinational corporations. Using IBM as an example, he suggests a hypothetical in which the corporation owns a certain belt in the Earth’s orbital field in which circulate satellites for communication and/or for storing data banks. Lyotard then asks that who will have access to them and who will determine which channels or data are forbidden?
The method Lyotard chooses to use in his investigations is that of language games. Lyotard writes that the developments in postmodernity he is dealing with have been largely concerned with language. Lyotard’s use of language games is derived from Ludwig Wittgenstein. The theory of language games means that each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put. For both Wittgenstein and Lyotard, language games are incommensurable, and moves in one language game cannot be translated into moves in another language game.
Lyotard’s choice of language games is primarily political in motivation, and relates to the close links between knowledge and power. In examining the status of knowledge in postmodernity, Lyotard is examining the political as well as epistemological aspects of knowledge (legitimation), and he sees the basic social bond – the minimum relation required for society to exist – as moves within language games.
Lyotard argues that even as the status of knowledge has changed in postmodernity, so has the nature of the social bond, particularly as it is evident in society’s institutions of knowledge. In his analysis of the state of knowledge in postmodernity, Lyotard firstly distinguishes between two types of knowledge – “narrative” knowledge and “scientific” knowledge. Narrative knowledge is the kind of knowledge prevalent in “primitive” or “traditional’ societies, and is based on storytelling, sometimes in the form of ritual, music and dance. Narrative knowledge has no recourse to legitimation – its legitimation is immediate within the narrative itself, in the “timelessness” of the narrative as an enduring tradition – it is told by people who once heard it to listeners who will one day tell it themselves. There is no question of questioning it. Indeed, Lyotard suggests that there is an incommensurability between the question of legitimation itself and the authority of narrative knowledge.
In scientific knowledge, however, the question of legitimation always arises. Scientific knowledge is legitimated by certain scientific criteria – the repeatability of experiments, etc. If the entire project of science needs a metalegitimation, however (and the criteria for scientific knowledge would itself seem to demand that it does) then science has no recourse but to narrative knowledge (which according to scientific criteria is no knowledge at all). This narrative has usually taken the form of a heroic epic of some kind, with the scientist as a “hero of knowledge” who discovers scientific truths. The distinction between narrative and scientific knowledge is a crucial point in Lyotard’s theory of postmodernism, and one of the defining features of postmodernity, on his account, is the dominance of scientific knowledge over narrative knowledge. Lyotard sees a danger in this dominance, since it follows from his view that reality cannot be captured within one genre of discourse or representation of events that science will miss aspects of events which narrative knowledge will capture. In other words, Lyotard does not believe that science has any justification in claiming to be a more legitimate form of knowledge than narrative. Part of his work in The Postmodern Condition can be read as a defence of narrative knowledge from the increasing dominance of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, Lyotard sees a danger to the future of academic research which stems from the way scientific knowledge has come to be legitimated in postmodernity (as opposed to the way it was legitimated in modernity).
In modernity the narrative of science was legitimated by one of a number of metanarratives. According to Lyotard, postmodernity is characterised by the end of metanarratives. So what legitimates science now? Lyotard’s answer is – performativity. This is what Lyotard calls the “technological criterion” – the most efficient input/output ratio. It was during the industrial revolution, Lyotard suggests, that knowledge entered into the economic equation and became a force for production, but it is in postmodernity that knowledge is becoming the central force for production. Lyotard believes that knowledge is becoming so important an economic factor, in fact, that he suggests that one day wars will be waged over the control of information.
Lyotard calls the change that has taken place in the status of knowledge due to the rise of the performativity criterion the mercantilization of knowledge. In postmodernity, knowledge has become primarily a saleable commodity. Today students no longer ask if something is true, but what use it is to them. Lyotard believes that computerization and the legitimation of knowledge by the performativity criterion is doing away with the idea that the absorption of knowledge is inseparable from the training of minds.
Lyotard does not believe that the innovations he predicts in postmodern education will necessarily have a detrimental effect on erudition. He does, however, see a problem with the legitimation of knowledge by performativity. This problem lies in the area of research. Lyotard argues that legitimation by performativity is against the interests of research. He does not claim that research should be aimed at production of “the truth”; he does not try to re- invoke the metanarratives of modernity to legitimate research. Rather, he sees the role of research as the production of ideas. Legitimation of knowledge by performativity terrorises the production of ideas. What, then, is the alternative? Lyotard proposes that a better form of legitimation would be legitimation by paralogy. The etymology of this word resides in the Greek words para – beside, past, beyond – and logos in its sense as “reason.” Thus paralogy is the movement beyond or against reason. Lyotard sees reason not as a universal and immutable human faculty or principle but as a specific and variable human production; “paralogy” for him means the movement against an established way of reasoning. In relation to research, this means the production of new ideas by going against or outside of established norms, of making new moves in language games, changing the rules of language games and inventing new games. Lyotard argues that this is in fact what takes place in scientific research, despite the imposition of the performativity criterion of legitimation. This is particularly evident in what Lyotard calls “postmodern science” – the search for instabilities [see Science and Technology]. For Lyotard, knowledge is not only the known but also the “revelation” or “articulation” of the unknown. Thus he advocates the legitimation of knowledge by paralogy as a form of legitimation that would satisfy both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown.
Fredric Jameson and Postmodernism
In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson inaugurated a materialist critique of the postmodern in literature, architecture, and the arts. The collection of essays by the same name, published in 1991, established Jameson as a leading theorist of postmodernism. Though most of the postmodern theorists attack the form of totality or ‘grand narratives’ of modernity, but it is Fredric Jameson who still finds value in talking about totality. He is a literary and art critic who accepts the basic Marxist analysis of society. He therefore works within a master narrative, though he does not accept it naively or uncritically. Rather he tries to change the Marxist theory to bring it up to date and make it fit the postmodern world.
Totality is still a valuable idea, Jameson claims, because we should try to understand how all the pieces of our world and our experience fit together. We will never fully succeed. But in making the effort we will change ourselves and our world for the better. Why? Knowledge gives us power. The more we make sense out of our world, the more we can make wise choices and act upon them to improve our world. If we don’t try to make the pieces fit together in our minds, we let things go on the way they are. And the way they are is not very satisfying. A few people around the world are very rich and powerful. Some people (mostly in the highly industrialized countries) are pretty comfortable and perhaps have an illusion of power (when they vote or buy stock in a company). Most people in the world are poor or on the margin of poverty, suffering in various physical and emotional ways, and quite powerless to do anything about it.
As a Marxist, Jameson assumes that people want, and should have, the greatest possible control over their own lives. He realizes that many postmodernists disagree. They fear that when we strive for control we inevitably try to dominate others, to eliminate difference and diversity by imposing our own views on others. But he is willing to take that risk. He believes that it is possible to seize control over our own destinies without violating the freedom of others. To do this, we must understand not just various parts of our world, but the totality of it. We must see the “big picture” as fully as possible. We will never understand it entirely. And there is always a danger that by describing the “big picture,” as master narratives do, we will falsify some part of it. A master narrative is an abstraction. It always has a certain fictional quality when it claims to tell the whole truth in a single story. But, Jameson suggests, a Marxist analysis can bring us closer to the whole truth than any other story. In that sense it is an especially useful fiction, because it can give us more freedom to control our own lives than any other story.
A Marxist analysis of the totality of our world starts with a basic premise: our lives are shaped, above all, by the mode of production that exists in our society. Mary Klages sums up Jameson’s views in the following words:
According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind of art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence). This first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century (about the Second World War); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism. The third, the phase we’re in now, is multinational or consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism.
Modernism was the culture of monopoly capitalism. Postmodernism is the culture of multinational late capitalism. Jameson titled his major book on the subject Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). This does not mean that everything in our culture today is postmodern. There are still many leftover elements of modern culture with us (for example, many of the ideas we study in the university that tell us we should still desire unity). There may also be newly emerging seeds of some future cultural forms beyond postmodernism. But postmodernism is the dominant force in our culture. It is a force that everything—and everybody—must deal with. Just as capitalism tries to bring all the forces of production under its control, so postmodernism is trying to bring all of culture under its control. In fact postmodernism is the cultural arm of today’s capitalism. It is capitalism’s most powerful tool for dominating our lives. And it is quite successful. The features of modern culture are rapidly being replaced by the postmodern. When we study postmodernism we are looking at the trends that our culture is following. Jameson admits that his theory of postmodernism is basically a kind of prophecy about the future. He looks at present trends to describe what the future will probably be more and more like, around the world, for a long time to come.
Late capitalism and postmodernism have both good and bad qualities, he says. In some ways they limit human freedom and happiness. In other ways they increase freedom and happiness. So we should not simply praise or condemn postmodernism. Rather we should analyze it as carefully as possible, because it is our best clue to the true nature of our society. What we need to understand most about postmodernism is the complicated link between the mode of production in late capitalism and the forms of culture today. If we can begin to put the pieces of the puzzle of contemporary reality together, we can begin to think more intelligently about our reality. We can decide what we like about it, what we want changed, and how to work together to make those changes.
Taking cue from Baudrillard’s concept of simulation or the simulacrum, Fredric Jameson goes on to focus on the problem of representation or expression of western thought of opposition between surface and depth which involves
“the idea that the words which we write or speak express something inside’ our heads (thought and feelings). The words are the surface, whereas our thoughts or consciousness represent depth. Similarly, the idea of the self, the very possibility of being human, has conventionally relied on such an
opposition: the subject or self is constituted as a relation between surface and depth, inside and outside.
Fredric Jameson provides a useful account of four depth models that, he argues have dominated the West in the twentieth century:
- Marxism: it crucially depends on the notion of ideology. This involves the idea that we do not see the reality of the world around us but only what we have been indoctrinated into
- Psychoanalysis: Freud’s theories are based on the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, whereby the unconscious is held to be the truth behind or beneath the distorted representation which we call consciousness.
- Existentialism: existentialism relies on a distinction between, on the one hand, authentic existence and, on the other hand, inauthenticity: authenticity is the truth of selfhood underlying the distortions effected by a state of
- Semiotics: Saussurean notions of language presuppose a distinction between the signifier on the one hand and the signified on the other. The word or sound-image indicates an underlying idea or mental
In each case, the authentic or real is understood to be hidden or disguised, while the surface phenomenon, the facade, is an inauthentic distortion or arbitrary offshoot of underlying truth. With the postmodern all of these surface-depth models are shaken up. The postmodern suspends, dislocates and transforms the oppositional structures presupposed by major Western modes of thought—by classical Marxist, psychoanalysis, existentialism, semiotics.
Jameson also distinguishes between parody and pastiche. Postmodern parody was theorized especially by Linda Hutcheon, Margaret A. Rose, and partly Frederic Jameson. The postmodern does not accept traditional view of parody, as the main aim of postmodern parody is not to mock the parodied author or style for its own sake, but this parody lacks this mocking, ridiculing aspect and by using irony it emphasizes a difference between the past forms of art and sensibilities, a distance between the past and present. Postmodern parody becomes self-reflexive because it draws our attention not only to the parodied works of art, but implicitly also to the whole process of depiction of reality through the literary works, that is a process of linguistic representation. By re-writing, transforming and changing the motifs and styles from the parodied literary works, postmodern parody gives an alternative vision of reality, history, of different social, ethnic and other minority groups, which forms a playful and creative alternative to the official version of history or reality as depicted in traditional literary works or through traditional narrative techniques and styles. This alternative is not aimed to be an official alternative to real history, but a playful and artistic reconsideration and relativization of it. That is also the reason why postmodern authors often parody histories, religious books, biographies of authors, myths, works of traditional and popular literature (historical novels, love and detective novels, thrillers, spy and crime fiction, pornography, horrors, etc.)
In a postmodern literary work, postmodern parody is closely connected with pastiche which is almost similar to a postmodern literary work consisting of different styles, genres, narrative voices and devices each of which has its important role in the composition of the book. But the original meaning of this word as used in arts was rather derogatory. The artists referred to as pasticheurs were understood as the authors uncreatively and mechanically imitating other works of art, styles, or ways of writing. However, in postmodern literature and its interpretation, this term has rather a positive meaning. Though, the older works of art, styles and authors are first imitated , but at the same time, through the use of parody and irony they are further transformed, re-written and put in a different linguistic context. Thus, pastiche can be loosely called a blank parody, as Frederic Jameson suggests, although Jameson’s understanding of pastiche is close to Linda Hutcheon’s understanding of postmodern parody and he himself defines pastiche as a kind of parody. Postmodernism rejects strict definitions and in a postmodern but also other works of art, it is difficult to delineate strictly parody and pastiche since they often overlap and are rather inseparable.
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Reference
- Bennett, Andrew, Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. New Delhi: Pearson Eduactaion, 2008. Print.
- Hassan, Ihab. ‘Beyond Postmodernism? Theory, Sense, and Pragmatism’. Making Sense: The Role of the Reader in Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Gerard Hoffman. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1989. Print.
- Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. London, New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.
- Padley, Steve. Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.