[0:00]Postmodernism in literature. So defining postmodernism can be a little bit difficult, but I'm going to give you my definition and then hopefully, as I go through a little history of postmodernism and some of the characteristics that it has in literature, you'll get to understand why I'm defining it in the way that I am.
[0:20]So postmodernism is a cultural movement that denies an absolute, objective truth. Reality or the truth is formed on an individual basis from how one interprets the world around them.
[0:34]Because all truth is then subjective, because we each create our own, there is no standard to measure truth or reality against, okay?
[0:42]So to give you a little bit of perspective, postmodernism starts around the late uh 1950s or to 1960s and is continuing on to the present day.
[0:54]We really haven't left postmodernism yet. Now, for a bit of history, we kind of have to go back and look at modernism, all right?
[1:00]So if you remember modernism started around the time of the Industrial Revolution and the World Wars around the turn of uh the 20th century, okay?
[1:11]So just as those big cultural changes um caused many people to challenge their preconceived notions about institutions, society, religion and truth, the proliferation of media in all of its forms, um that kind of really started in the late 1950s um and 1960s, kind of has led to postmodernism.
[1:33]And the main question that kind of started coming around that time was, what is real? All right, so for as an example, just as two people can witness the same event and interpret it in different ways, so can two people engage with a text/image and see it differently.
[1:50]And it's really this inability to reconcile different perceptions that is at the heart of postmodernism and is what leads to its sense of fragmentation and disjointedness.
[2:01]So postmodernism isn't just a way of viewing art, whether that's uh, you know, a piece of artwork or a film or a piece of literature.
[2:11]It's really a way to of thinking about life. How do you reconcile such two uh different perceptions of things that are going on around us?
[2:19]All right, now, one other area where postmodernism really broke away from modernism um is really with Western thought.
[2:28]So even though modernism challenged the notion of what truth is (thereby laying the groundwork for postmodernism), modernism still embraced Western society's values and beliefs.
[2:51]However, postmodernism's biggest break with modernism is over Western values, because in postmodernism, truth is relative, that means there is no reason to cherish Western values over other ideologies.
[3:05]Okay? So the dismissal of kind of this cultural allegiance a little bit to the Western um civ in a way, is what opens up postmodernism to other influences not typically predominant in Western thought before.
[3:20]So one other thing where postmodernism kind of breaks a little bit with modernism as well is that altogether postmodernism is more of a movement about the individual self rather than society.
[3:35]So sometimes modernism is more about um the self in society and trying to reconcile that and make sense of that or understand what society is going through and what has happened to it, if you kind of look at the reaction to the Industrial Revolution or the World Wars.
[3:50]That was something that was very um much on the mind of the modernist, but the postmodernist have kind of rejected that and are really just focused on the self because if we all live on our own little reality and have our own truth, there's not much purpose in trying to conform to someone else's truth or reality, or in other words, trying to conform to society's uh version of reality.
[4:11]All right, so that's a brief history kind of of the thought of postmodernism. How does this come about in literature, okay?
[4:18]So, I'm going to give you four characteristics of postmodern literature. Now, something can be postmodern in literature and have all four of these or maybe just one or two of them.
[4:29]Um, it's not like every single work will have all of these, but the four characteristics I'm going to focus on are randomness, fragmentation, playfulness and self-reflection.
[4:39]So randomness kind of comes from the belief that there's no absolute meaning in anything, so postmodern writers will sometimes focus on chaos or disorder in their stories.
[4:50]And a lot of times that's reflected in the fact that there may not be a clear resolution to the story or a clear point.
[4:57]Instead, the reader is just left to come up with their own response to the story. The second characteristic is fragmentation.
[5:04]Um, in writing, fragmentation can be seen when there are strange jumps in time or setting, um, or weird changes in a character's personality that kind of seem to come up a little bit out of nowhere at times.
[5:17]So this technique is meant to emphasize the disjointedness of how we sometimes perceive life to be. Now, the third characteristic is playfulness.
[5:25]Now, in postmodernism, playfulness is not meant to be kind of like fun and whimsical.
[5:31]Rather, um they're employing what's called dark humor or irony, which is often used to point out the futility of something or even sometimes the less savory side of human nature or the randomness of it or um uh basically just pointlessness.
[5:49]All right, the fourth characteristic is self-reflection because postmodernism places a lot of emphasis on the self and our individual perceptions of the world around us.
[5:57]Postmodern writing will often have a quality of reflection about it--of analyzing one's thoughts or views and wondering how they differ from someone else's.
[6:21]And um usually that will take the form of wondering how they're viewing something differs from how another character, um or how society is viewing um a situation.
[6:39]All right, I hope this helps you understand postmodernism a little bit more.
