Rayat Shikshan Sanstha’s S. M. Joshi College Hadapsar, Pune-28

1. Rayat Shikshan Sanstha’s S. M. Joshi College Hadapsar, Pune-28 Department of English Topic- Postmodernism in English Literature Presented By- Prof. Ajit D. Bhosale

2. ModernityModernismPostmodernism

3. Timeline • Early modernity:Renaissance to Industrial Revolution • Modernity: Industrial Revolution (18th CenturyEnlightenment) Modernism: (1910-1930) • Post- Modernity:Period of mass media (From 1960s toPresent) Postmodernism(1980s-

4. Modernity • For many historians and literary theorists, the Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason in the 18th century) is synonymous with modernity(Bressler:96). • At the center of this view of the world lie two prominent features: a belief that reason is humankind's bestguide to life and that science, above all other human endeavors, could leadhumanity to a new promised land(Bressler:96).

5. Eg: Philosophically, modernity rests onthe foundations laid by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician. "I think, therefore I am" thus becomes the only solid foundationuponwhich knowledge and a theory ofknowledge can be built(Bressler:96). • ThankstoBacon, thescientific method has become part of everyone's elementary and high school education. It is through experimentation, conducting experiments, makinginductive generalizations, and verifying the results that one can discover truths about the physical world(Bressler:96-97).

6. Thanks to Newton, the physical worldis no longer a mystery but a mechanism that operates according to a system of laws that can be understood by any thinking, rational human being who is willing to apply the principles of the scientific method to the physical universe(Bressler:97). • Anything the enlightened mind set as its goal, these scholars believed, was attainable. Through reason and science, all poverty, ignorance, and injustice would finally be banished (Bressler:97).

7. For several centuries, modernity's chief tenets—thatreality can be known and investigated and thathumanitypossesses an essential nature characterized by rational thought—became thecentral ideas upon which many philosophers, scientists, educators, and writersconstructed their worldviews (Bressler:98).

8. Briefly put, modernity'score characteristics are as follows: • The concept of the self is a conscious, rational, knowable entity. • Reality can be studied, analyzed, and known. • Objective, rational truth can be discovered through science. • The methodology of science can and does lead to ascertaining truth. • The yardstick for measuring truth is reason. • Truth is demonstrable. • Progress and optimism are the natural results of valuing science and rationality • Language is referential, representing the perceivable world(Bressler:98).

9. Newtonian Order Modernity • God, Reason and Progress • There was a center to the universe. • Progress is based upon knowledge, and man is capable of discerning objective absolute truths in science and the arts. TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

10. What Is Language? Language & Truth as • People are the same everywhere • There are universal laws and truths • Knowledge is independent of culture, gender, etc. • Language is a man-made tool that refers to real things / truths

11. Purpose of Literature Liberal Humanism: View of Literature • Good literature is of timeless significance. • The text will reveal constants, universal truths, about human nature, because human nature itself is constant and unchanging. TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

12. ModernitytoModernism Rooted in the philosophy and ideals of the Enlightenment, modernity, with its accompanying philosophical, political, scientific, and ethical ideas, provides much of the basis forintellectual thought from the 1700s to themidpoint of the twentieth century. World War I, however, marks a dramatic shift, especially in the arts. Growing out of the devastation of the war, the arts began to reflect society's concerns,emphasizing decay, loss, and disillusionment(Bressler:101).

13. The term modernism is given to this aesthetic movement dated from 1914 to 1945 that questioned the ideals of British Victorianism and reflected both the material and thepsychological devastation of two world wars (Bressler:101). Writers such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and many others began to question some of modernity's core beliefs such as the objective status of reality and the fixednature of aesthetic forms (Bressler:101-102).

14. Using unconventional stylistic techniques such as stream of consciousness and multiple-narrated stories, artists and writers emphasized the subjective, highlighting how "seeing" or "reading" actually occurs rather than investigating the actual object being seen or read. Characterized by a transnational focus, literary artists blurred the established distinctions among the various genres, rejecting previously established aesthetic theories,

15. choosing to highlight unconscious or subconsciouselements in their works by using the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.Decentering the individual and introducing ambiguity and fragmentation, modernism began to see life as a collage rather than a map (Bressler:102).

16. Some of the important characteristics o f the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following: 1) A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, onwe see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique). 2) A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as: omniscient external narration,fixed narrative points o f view and clear-cut moral positions.

17. 3) A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novelstend to become more lyrical and poetic, forinstance, andpoems more documentary and prose-like. 4) A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuousnarrative,and random-seeming collages o f disparate materials. 5) A tendency towards ‘reflexivity’, so that poems, plays, andnovels raise issues concerning their own nature, status, androle.

18. The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation (Barry:82).

19. Death of the Old Order Underpinningelements of Modernism • Early 1900s: • World War I • Worldwide poverty & exploitation • Intellectual upheaval: • Freud: psychoanalysis • Marx: class struggle • Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche • Picasso, Stravinsky, Kafka, Proust, Brecht, Joyce, Eliot PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM

20. The Bending of Time & Space Relativism • Einstein: relativity, quantum mechanics • Refutation of Newtonian science • Time is relative • Matter and energy are one • Light as both particle and wave • Universe is strange E=mc2 PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

21. Breaking the Rules Practice of Modernist Art • Cubism • Surrealism • Dadaism • Expressionism PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM

22. A World with No Center Modernist Literature “Things fall apart,The centre cannot hold,Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” --Yeats, “The Second Coming” PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM

23. MatthewArnold “DoverBeach” (1867). The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

24. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

25. Breaking the Rules Modernist Literature • Emphasis of subjectivity • Movement away from “objective” third-party narration • Tendency stream of consciousness • Obsession with the psychology of self • Rejection of traditional aesthetic theories • Experimentation with language PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM

26. LiteraryExamples: (ImagistPoem) “In a Station of the Metro” Theapparition of thesefaces in thecrowd; Petals on a wet, blackbough. (Ezra Pound) (stream of consciousness) The sun becameextraordinarily hot becausethe motor car had stoppedoutsideMulberry’sshopwindow; oldladies on thetops of omnibuses spread theirblackparasols; here a green, here a redparasolopenedwith a little pop. MrsDalloway, comingtothewindowwith her armsfull of sweetpeas, looked at the motor car. Septimuslooked. Boys on bicylessprangoff. Trafficaccumulated. (V.Woolf, Mrs.Dalloway:11)

27. After its high point, modernism seemed to retreat considerably in the 1930s, partly, no doubt, because of the tensions generated in a decade of political and economic crisis, but a resurgence took place in the 1960s (a decade which has interesting points of similarity with the 1920s, when modernism was at its height). However, modernism never regained the pre-eminence it had enjoyed in the earlier period (Barry,82-83).

28. Timeline You are here Your Place in History • Modern Period 1914 1939 1945 1960 2000 now Postmodern period TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

29. Postmodernism • Postmodernist thinkers reject modernity's representation of discourse(the map) and replace it with a collage. Unlike the fixed, objective nature ofa map, a collage's meaning is always changing. Whereas the viewer of amap relies on and obtains meaning and directionfrom the map itself, theviewer of a collage actually participates in the production of meaning.

30. Unlike a map, which allows one interpretation of reality, a collage permitsmany possible meanings: the viewer (or "reader") can simply juxtapose avariety of combinations ofimages, constantly changing the meaning ofthe collage. Each viewer, then, creates his or her own subjective pictureof reality(Bressler:99).

31. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present, the voices of theFrench philosopher Jacques Derrida, the French cultural historian Michel Foucault, the aesthetician Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the ardent American pragmatist Richard Rorty, professor of humanities at the University of Virginia, declare univocally the death of objective truth.

32. These leading articulators of postmodernism assert that modernity failed because itsearchedfor an external point of reference—God, reason, science, among others—onwhich to build a philosophy. For thesepostmodern thinkers, there is no such point of reference because there is no ultimatetruth or inherently unifyingelement in the universe and thus no ultimate reality (Bressler:100).

33. Overall, postmodernism's corecharacteristicscan be stated as follows: • A skepticism or rejection of grand metanarratives to explain reality • The concept of the self as ever-changing • No objective reality, but many subjective interpretations • Truth as subjective and perspectival, dependent on cultural, social, and personalinfluences • No "one correct" concept of ultimate reality • No metatheory to explain texts or reality • No "one correct" interpretation of a text

34. When such principles are applied to literary interpretation, the postmodernist realizes that no such thing as themeaning—or, especially, the correctmeaning—of an aesthetic text exists. Like looking at a collage, meaning develops as the reader interacts with the text, for meaning does notreside within the text itself. And because each reader's view of truth is perspectival, the interpretation of a text that emerges when a reader interactswith a text will necessarily be different from every other reader's interpretation. For each text,then, there exists an almost infinite number ofinterpretations or at least as manyinterpretations as there are readers (Bressler:101).

35. Whatpostmodernistliterarycritics do 1) They discover postmodernist themes, tendencies, and attitudes within literary works of the twentieth century andexplore their implications. 2) They foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify thenotion of the ‘disappearance ofthe real’, in which shiftingpostmodern identities are seen, for example, in the mixing ofliterary genres (the thriller, the detective story, the myth saga,and the realist psychological novel, etc.) (eclectic). 3. They foreground what might be called ‘intertextualelements’in literature, such as parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all ofwhich there is a major degree o f reference between one textand another, rather than between the text and a safely external reality.

36. 4) They foreground irony, in the sense described by UmbertoEco, that whereas the modernist tries to destroy the past, thepostmodernist realises that the past must be revisited, but‘with irony’(Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker,p. 227.) 5)They foreground the element of ‘narcissism’in narrative technique, that is, where novels focus on and debate their ownends and processes, and thereby ‘de-naturalise’ their content. [metafiction: fictionabout fiction] 6) They challenge the distinction between high and low culture,‘and highlight texts which work as hybrid blends o f the two(Barry:91).

37. Commonliteraryfeaturesbetweenmodernist & postmodernistliterature • An eclectic approach (fragmented forms-collage, montage, bricolage) • Aleatory writing (Dadaists’s poems(1917) made from sentences plucked randomly from newspapers). • Parody and pastiche (abandonment of the divine pretensions of authorship implicit in the omniscient narratorial stance)

38. The nature of the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is summarised in the excellent joint entry on the two terms in Jeremy Hawthorn’s Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory.Both, he says, give greatprominence tofragmentation as a feature of twentieth-centuryartand culture, but they do so in very different moods.The modernistfeatures it in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia foran earlier age when faith was full andauthority intact.

39. For the postmodernist, by contrast, fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophic embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it (Barry:83-84).

40. ModernistLiteraryexamples:“TheWaste Land” (T.S. Eliot,1922) • Allusion: I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  Memory and desire, stirring  Dull roots with spring rain… (1-4) Chaucer’s The General Prologue of Canterbury Tales: When April with his showers sweet with fruit The drought of March has pierced unto theroot And bathed each vein with liquor that has power) (1-3)

41. Collage, montage, pastische: And I will show you something different from either  Your shadow at morning striding behind you  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu, Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.” (28-36)

42. Pastische: • “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.  Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.  What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?  I never know what you are thinking. Think.” (111-114) (Prose+Love poem) • I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.    “What is that noise?”                         The wind under the door.  “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”                         Nothing again nothing. (115-120) (Prose+Riddle)

43. PostmodernLiteraryExamples: parody,irony,intertextuality • Julian Barnes: A History of the World in1/2 10 Chapters There were times when Noah and his sons gotquite hysterical. That doesn’t tally with your account of things? You’ve always been led to believe that Noah was sage, righteous and God-fearing, and I’ve already described him as a hysterical rogue with a drink problem? The two views aren’t entirely incompatible. Put it this way: Noah was pretty bad, but you should have seen the others. It came as little surprise to us that God decided to wipe the slate clean; the only puzzle was that he chose to preserve anything at all of this species whose creation did not reflect particularly well on its creator.

44. Pastische: (Flaubert’s Parrot) (Prose+ biography) If not,then perhaps he in his turn hadborroweda parrot from a museum and used it as a model.I warned himof the dangerous tendency in this species to posthumousparthenogenesis. I hoped to get my replies quite soon. Chronology I 1821-Birth of Gustave Flaubert, second son o f Achille- Cleophas Flaubert, head surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Rouen, and of Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert, nee Fleuriot.The family belongs to the successful professional middle class, and owns several properties in the vicinity o f Rouen. A stable, enlightened,encouraging and normally ambitious background (16-17).

45. Parody, plurality of reality: II 1817-Death o f Caroline Flaubert (aged twenty months),the second child of Achille-Cleophas Flaubert and Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert. 1821-Birth of Gustave Flaubert, their fifth child. (22) III 1842-Me and my books, in the sameapartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar. 1846-When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life.

46. It was like the nauseating smell of cookingescaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up (Flaubert’sParrot: 28). Metafiction: [METAFICTION is fictionaboutfiction:novelsandstoriesthatcallattentiontotheirfictionalstatusandtheirowncompositionalprocedures (D.Lodge, Art of Fiction:206] I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. Thesecharacters I create never existed outside my own mind.

47. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermostthoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I haveassumed someof the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally acceptedat the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. Hemay not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live inthe age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is anovel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. (John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman:97). The End !

48. Bibliography Barry, P. (2002). Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bressler, C. E. (2007). Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. New Jersey:Pearson Prentice Hall. Lodge, D. (1993). The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts. New York: Viking.