postmodernism

postmodernism, the term applied by some commentators since the early 1980s to the ensemble of cultural features characteristic of Western societies in the aftermath of artistic Modernism. In this view, ‘postmodernity’ asserts itself from about 1956 with the exhaustion of the high Modernist project, reflected in the work of Beckett among others, and the huge cultural impact of television and popular music. Many disputants maintain that literary works described as ‘postmodernist’ are really continuations of the Modernist tradition, but some general literary features of the period have been identified as typical, including tendencies to parody, pastiche, scepticism, irony, fatalism, the mixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural allusions, and an indifference to the redemptive mission of Art as conceived by the Modernist pioneers. Postmodernism thus favours random play rather than purposeful action, surface rather than depth. The kinds of literary work that have been described as postmodernist include the Theatre of the Absurd and some experimental poetry. Most commonly, though, it is prose fiction that is held to exemplify the postmodernist mood or style, notably in works by American novelists such as Nabokov, Barth, Pynchon, and Vonnegut, and by the British authors Fowles, A. Carter, Rushdie, J. Barnes, Ackroyd, and Winterson. Outside the English-speaking world, the fictions of Borges and the later work of Italo Calvino show similar tendencies. Distinctive features of this school include switching between orders of reality and fantasy (see magic realism), resort to metafiction, and the playful undermining of supposedly objective kinds of knowledge such as biography and history.