1. Chapters in British Literature and Culture Postmodernism

2. Enlightenment and its antecedents Francis Bacon (1561-1626) scientific methodology: empirical methods instead of speculation (induction, applied science, empiricism)

3. Charles Darwin, 1809-1882 The Origin of Species (1859) man as a part of the biological universe

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 Universe is structureless and irrational ‘ God is dead ’

5. Henri Bergson, 1859-1941 Time and Free Will Consciousness: a flow of memories

6. Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939 The Unconscious (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) The split self: Ego Id Superego

7. modernism (early 20th c.): breaks with artistic traditions and conventions, experimentation with time the experiment becomes conventional No clear barrier between modernism and post-modernism (cultural history: palimpsest)

8. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987. Modernism Postmodernism Form (closed) Anti-form (open) PurposePlay Design Chance Hierarchy Anarchy Finished Art Object Process/Performance Distance Participation Totalization Deconstruction Depth Surface DeterminacyIndeterminacy

9. Postmodernism vague and fashionable term meaning and value: disputed no (little) perspective (How to define our own age?) poststructuralism and deconstruction ”meaning is neither inherent in language, nor in the world of things but is ‘constructed’ by conventional frameworks of thought and language” (Gray, 1992) individuality, human character, freedom: constructs of a particular culture and time (vs. universal truths, absolute authenticity relativised) Most often reproduced image

11. Man no longer the centre of the universe – no centre

12. Pale blue dot

13. Rhizome Structure, sign and play (Jacques Derrida, 1966) ”even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.” Centerless system (Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995)

14. Postmodern Centerless system Threats of extinction of humanity (nuclear holocaust, despoiling the environment/planet, overpopulation) breaking up of traditional communities => sense of despair and disillusionment (vs. 60s)

15. result of meaninglessness: play with styles and values a sense of disjunction or deliberate confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a kind of cool detachment A postmodern insistence on process rather than product: a “postmodern” cultural artifact is one that consistently questions itself and the context that it seems to fit within. Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.

16. JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD THE POSTMODERN CONDITION (1979) Discourse of science as opposed to narrative discourse Grand narratives “incredulity toward metanarrative”

17. Postmodernism […] leaves us without direction. The postmodern artwork foregrounds the complexity of our epoch, thereby remaining an elitist diversion for a leisure class of overeducated white folks who “get the joke.” Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox. Lanham and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012, 145

19. popularity? entertaining capacity? these may overlap: cf. Opening Ceremony of London Olympic Games

20. Fiction and reality ”We are all in flight from the real reality.” Modernist fiction – epistemological uncertainties: How do we know? Postmodernist fiction – ontological uncertainties: Which is the real world? Historical fiction: Real compared to what? language: not a passive reflection (imitation) of the world, but active modelling. History (and also nature) is conveyed as it is organized in accordance with cultural conventions.

21. postmodern texts look at themselves as texts (Ø illusion, isolated from author and extratextual reality) often reveal the instability of language meanings are constructions ontological uncertainty: which is the real world? freedom of interpretation (limitless?) Postmodernism, celebrates the freedom of possibility, but it also seems to make agency or concrete decision impossible.

22. How far is it relevant in the 21st century? post-postmodernism? re-evaluation of traditional values and communities (religion, nation) Alan Kirby: Digimodernism 1990s: decomposing postmodernism (hybrid) 21st c. new cultural paradigm PoMo obsolete (once fresh), creative period over

23. Return of the grand narrative aftershock of 1960s radicalism, intellectual millenarism (all post-s / the past is dead) PM: rhetoric of disruption (everything has to be new, break in human experience) heroic age of theory Incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard) progress, enlightenment, Christianity

24. Habermas: modernity continued all through PM as an unfinished project now PM (used to be fresh) is obsolete 2000 aftermath of PM’S creative period 2000: West forced to reflect on the foundations of its own civilization „seek to make sense of the grand narratives”

25. Return of modernism? http://www.stuckism.com/ 1999 new paradigm: remodernism manifesto: ”Modernism has progressively lost its way, until finally toppling into the bottomless pit of Post Modern balderdash” PM’s failure to answer or address any important issues of being a human being

26. Hypermodernity / Supermodernity? Gilles Lipovetsky Hypermodernity (2004) social and historical: ethos of consumerism (hyperconsumption) modernity speaks of limitless individualism, freedom from social obligations, emancipation from oppressive duties, the pursuit of pleasure and personal autonomy in HM all these become concrete experience premodern structuring principles (family, church) stripped from HM world (?) no rhetoric of ends and posts (not millenarian), not countercultural, not nihilistic (human rights, love, others’ well-being)

27. Charles Jencks: critical modernism: dialectic between modernism and its criticism, modernism2 Linda Hutcheon: values (modernism: trad. values not accepted, lack, pomo: values no longer seeked for) F Jameson: PM comes in the 1950s with the institutionalization of modernism – by 2000 PM also has its canon institutionalized and dead

28. Computerization of text > new form of textuality evanescence and anonymous, social and multiple authorship (Wikipedia) triggered by the redefinition of textuality and culture by the spread of digitalization reality TV, Web2.0, videogames, radio shows: reader/viewer intervenes

29. Barthes „From Work to Text”: ”the text is experienced only in an activity of production” (as music traditionally) Reading is linear, but: clicking your way around the internet: adjacency without necessarily a logics, rather a history

30. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Cildren (1981) ‘But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what- happened-next: ”At this rate” – Padma complains – ”you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.” pressures of ‘what-happened-nextism’ ‘Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings.’ (cf. Fowles)

31. A. Kirby: Digimodernism prestige of publishing goes down; internet includes all; greater stratification and hierarchy will be needed vast expansion in the activity of reading, yet ”decline in qualitative reading as they become ever less capable of engaging mentally with complex and sophisticated thought expressed in written form”

32. text (sms) exists in the act of creation; lowest form of recorded communication Youtube etc: user or author? „viewser” – engagement with TV democratic? Democracy presupposes education

33. PM: objectivity does not exist, truth is social construct Facebook e-friendship between accounts (well designed, so the e-textualization often invisible) for many: indistinguishable from actual friendship

34. Digimodernist Culture modernism: cinema; PM: tv; DM: videogame supersubjectivity: you play through your gaming self/selves (self-identification neccessary) digimodernist textuality (live, right-now): dm endlessness _> inconclusiveness