1. literature and the other arts
Part 2
Postmodernism in
literature and the other arts

2. Jackson Pollock: No. 5
(1948)

6. (1964)

7. DADAISM

8. (1973)

9. Theoretical background
Previously….
Theoretical background

10. MOST COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT POSTMODERNISM
Denial of the existence of ANY truth
Radical skepticism about ABSOLUTE TRUTH
Representation of the CHAOTIC nature of the contemporary world
Representation of the COMPLEXITY of the world
Postmodernist thought aims at a PLAYFUL restructuring of our ordinary ways of perceiving and representing the world
Postmodernism is about DESPAIR and the MEANINGLESSNESS of life

11. Postmodernism
A conscious problematization of what is “true” and “real”/an inquiry into how “truth” and “reality” are made rather than found.
Questioning the Platonist/metaphysical foundations of Western philosophy

12. Socrates  Plato  Aristotle
METAPHYSICS
Socrates  Plato  Aristotle
WORLD
Appearance
Replica (copy)
Contingent
Perishable
Physical
Material
Reality
Ideal form
Essential
Eternal
Mental
Non-Material
VS.

13. Fredinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Language is a system of differences
STRUCTURALISM
Fredinand de Saussure ( )
Langue Parole
(Language as a system) (Actual utterances)
Sign
Signifier Signified
Referent
Language is a system of differences

14. “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
DECONSTRUCTION
(Post-structuralism)
Jacques Derrida
( )
“Structure Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
(1966)

15. Signifier
Signifier
Signifier
SIGNIFIER
Signifier
Signifier
Signifier
Signifier
Signifier
Signifier
Signifier

16. SIMULACRUM AND HYPERREALITY Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulation
(1981)

17. “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
POST-STRUCTURALISM
(Deconstruction)
Jacques Derrida
“Structure Sign and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
(1966)

18. DISTRUST OF GRAND (META)NARRATIVES
Jean-Francois Lyotard:
The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge
(1979)
Examples of grand metanarratives:
Various historical accounts (e.g., universal, cultural, literary history)
Philosophical world-models (e.g., Western metaphysics)
Redemptive ideologies (e.g., religion, Marxism)
Explicative narratives (e.g., science, psychoanalysis)
Narratives of heroism and love (e.g., romantic novels)

19. CHAOS OR COMPLEXITY?

20. THE METAPHYSICS OF BINARY STRUCTURES
LITERARY WORK
WORK OF ART
WORLD
SIGN
Form
Text
Signifier
Appearance
Content
Reality
Meaning
Signified

21. No point in making binary disctinctions:
THE POSTMODERN VIEW
No point in making binary disctinctions:
REALITY is a kind of APPEARANCE (Baudrillard)
SIGNIFIED is a kind of SIGNIFIER (Derrida)
CONTENT is a kind of FORM
MEANING is a kind of TEXT

22. Georges Braque: Violin and Candlestick (1910)
MODERNISM
POSTMODERNISM
VS.
Georges Braque: Violin and Candlestick (1910)
Jackson Pollock: No. 5 (1948)

23. Arnold Schoenberg: Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909)

24. John Cage: Imaginary Landscapes (1939)

25. MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

26. POSTMODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

28. MODERNISM Rejection of Romanticist and Realist modes of representation
Self-consciousness
Radical subjectivization of the object
Paradigm shift in the perception and representation of the world

29. Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
Romanticism
Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
(1818)

30. Adolf von Menzel: Portait of Karoline Arnold
Realism
Adolf von Menzel: Portait of Karoline Arnold
(1905)

31. Modernism
(1911)

32. DALÍ AND PICASSO PAINTING THE “SAME” EGG

33. MODERNIST FICTION
The story of the Compson family subjectivized through the mode of representation  stream of consciousness
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
(1929)

34. A postmodernist text is not the subjectivized representation of a “story,” a “situation,” an “event,” etc., but a textual world in its own right

35. Reading for the signified
Signifier(s)
Signified

36. Signifier
Signified

37. The reader is forced to face signifiers as signifiers

38. Signifier(s)
Signified

39. Postmodernism emphasizes that
all literary texts are material objects (signifiers)
all literary texts are simulacra

40. Modernism vs. Postmodernism
Brian McHale
(via Roman Jakobson)
MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM
Epistemological Ontological
“Dominant”
Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction (1987)

41. Modernism vs. Postmodernism
Purpose
Design
Finished Work
Semantics
Metaphysics
Play
Chance
Performance
Rhetorics
Irony
Ihab Hassan: The Postmodern Turn (1975)

42. Techniques used in postmodernist literary works
- Irony
- Pastiche
- Intertextuality
- Metafiction
- Metalepsis

43. The Dead Father (1975)
Donald Barthelme
( )

44. John Barth (b. 1930) “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967)
By “exhaustion” I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities—by no means necessarily a cause for despair.

45. (1967)

48. Möbius strip (tangled hierarchy)

49. Maurits Cornelis Escher: Drawing Hands (1948)

50. M.C. Escher: Relativity (1953)

51. Raymond Federman
( )
“Surfiction” (1975)
Surfiction (as in surreal) is “fiction above fiction”: it is a radically non-mimetic form whics has no intention to mirror “reality.”

52. (1985)

53. In Form : Digressions on the Act of Fiction (1985)
Ronald Sukenick
( )
In Form : Digressions on the Act of Fiction (1985)
One of the tasks of postmodern fiction is “to displace, energize, and re-embody its criticism—literally to re­unite it with our experience of the text.”