Postmodern literature
This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth.
In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000),[5] and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011).
[8] Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced the aesthetics of postmodernism include August Strindberg,[9] Luigi Pirandello,[9] and Bertolt Brecht.
[14] Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique [fr] (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]".
[citation needed] For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971.
He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters.
More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on.
Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance.
Magic realism is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings").
Don DeLillo's White Noise, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and this is also the era when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history, charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Paul Maltby who argues that it was not until the 1980s that the term "postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing.
[27] A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Carole Maso, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem—and publications such as McSweeney's, The Believer, and the fiction pages of The New Yorker, herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism.
For example, it contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure.
Also, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Borges.
David Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is non-fiction.
[44] Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek: ποιούμενον, "product") is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation.
Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story.
Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt, describes a week in the life of a poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves remarkably prophetic.
Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook; John Fowles's Mantissa; William Golding's The Paper Men; Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew; and S. D. Chrostowska's Permission.
[33][45][46][47][48] Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung), and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures.
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to feature a metafictional, "Janus-headed" outlook in the way the novel seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that.
[14] Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner.
Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable.
[14][33][51] A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier's "The Ceiling", Dan Chaon's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel's "Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver's "The Mourning Door".
Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Underworld, White Teeth, The Corrections, 2666, and 2005 dopo Cristo by Babette Factory.
In Z213: Exit, a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos, one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature,[64][65] an almost telegraphic style is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions.
[66] Patricia Lockwood's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process.
Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett's Texts for Nothing...
[68]In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose', the novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon: [P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of operating.
About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth.
[70]Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle.
