1) They discover postmodernist themes, tendencies, and attitudes within literary works of the twentieth century and explore their implications.
2) They foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify the notion of the 'disappearance of the real', in which shifting post modern identities are seen, for example, in the mixing of literary genres (the thriller, the detective story, the myth saga, and the realist psychological novel etc).
3) The foreground what might be called 'inter textual elements' in literature, such as parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all of which there is a major degree of reference between on text and another, rather than between the text and a safety external reality.
4) The foreground irony, in the sense described by Umberto Eco, that whereas the modernist tries to destroy, the past, the postmodernist realises that the past must be revisited, but 'with irony' (Modernism/Postmodernism, E.D. Peter Brooker, p.227).
5) They foreground the element of 'narcissism' in narrative technique, that is, where novels forcus on and debate their own ends and processes, and thereby 'de-natrualise' their content.
6) They challenge the distinction between high and low culture, and highlight texts which work as hybrid blends of the two.
A major 'moment' in the history of postmodernism is the influential paper 'Modernity - an Incomplete Project' delivered by the contemporary German theorist Jurgen Habermas in 1980. For Habermas the modern period begins with the Enlightenment, that period of about one hundred years, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. when a new faith arose in the power of reason to improve human society. Such ideas are expressed or embodied in the philosophy of Kant in Germany, Voltaire and Diclesot in France, lake and Hume in Britain.
In Britain the term 'The Age of Reason' was used (till recently) to designate the same period. The so-called Enlightenment 'project' is the fostering of this belief that a break with tradition, blind habit, and slavish obedience to religious precepts and prohibitions, coupled with the application of reason and logic by the disinterested individual, can bring about a solution to the problems of society. This outlook is what Habermas means by 'modernity'. The French Revolution can be seen as a first attempt to test this theory in practice. For Habermas this faith in reason and the possibility of progress survived into the twentieth century, and even survives the catalogue of disasters which makes up this century's history. The cultural movement known as modernism subscribed to this 'project', in the sense that it constituted a lament for a lost sense of purpose, a lost coherence, a lost system of values. For Habermas, the French post-structuralist thinkers of the 1970s, such as Derrida and Foucault, represented a specific repudiation of this mind of Enlightenment 'modernity'. They attacked in his view, the ideals of reason, clarity, truth and progress, and as they were thereby detached from the quest for justice, he identified them as 'young conservatives'.
Lyotard
The term 'postmodernism' was used in the 1930s. but its current sense and vogue can be said to have begun with Jean. Francois Lyotard's The postmodern condition: A Report of knowledge. Lyotard's essay 'answering the Question: What is Postmodernism'?, first published in 1982, added in 1984 as an appendix to The Post Modern Condition and included a Brooker's Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, takes up this debate about the enlightenment, mainly targeting Habermas, in a slightly oblique manner. Lyotard opens with a move which effectively turns the debate into a struggle to demonstrate that one's opponents are the real conservatives (a familiar 'bottom line' of polemical writing on culture). 'From every direction', he says, 'we are being urged to put an end to experimentation', and after citing several other instances he writes (obviously of Habermas):
I have read a tinker of repute who detends modernity against those who he calls the neo-conservatives. Under the banner of post-modernism, the latter would like, he believes, to get rid of the uncompleted project of modernism, that of the Enlightenment.
Habermar's is simply one voice in a chorus which is calling for an end to 'artistic experimentation' and for 'order....unity, for identity, for security' In a word, there voices want 'to liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes'. For Lyotard the Enlightenment whose project Habermas wishes to continue is simply one of the would-be authoritative 'overarching', 'totalising' explanations of things - like Christianity, Marxism, or the myth of scientific progress. These 'Metanarratives' ('Super-narratives), which purport to explain and reassure, are really illusions, fostered in order to smother difference, opposition, and plurality. Hence Lyotard's famous, definition of postmodernism, that it is, simply, 'incredulity towards meta narratives'. 'Grand Narratives' of progress and human perfectibility, then, are no longer tenable, and the best we can hope for is a series of 'mini narratives', which are provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative and which provide a basis for the actions of specific groups in particular local circumstances. Post modernity thus 'deconstructs' the basic aim of the Enlightenment, that is 'the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject.
Baudrillard
Another major theorist of postmodernism is the contemporary French writer Jean Baudrillard, whose book simulations (1981) marks his entry into this field. Baudrillard is associated with what is usually known as 'the loss of the real', which is the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV, and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. The result is a culture of 'hyper reality', in which distinctions between there are eroded. His propositions are worked out in his essay 'Simulacra and Simulations reprinted in abridged form in Brooker, 1992. He begins by evoking a past era of 'fullness', when a sign was a surface indication of an underlying reality, but merely of other signs? Then the whole system becomes what he calls a Simulacrum. He then substitutes for representation the notion of simulation. The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series of steps, which will try to illustrate by comparing them to different kinds of paintings.
First the sign represents a basic reality: Let's take as an example of this representations of the industrial city of Salford in the work of the twentieth-century British artists L.S. Lowry. Mid-century life of working people in such a place was hard, and the paintings have an air of monotony and repetitiveness-cowed, stick-like figures fill the streets, coloures are muted, and the horizon filled with grim factory-like buildings. As signs, then, Lowry's painting seem to represent the basic reality of the place they depict.
The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts the reality behind it. As an example of this let's take the glamourised representations of cities like Liverpool and Hull in the painting of the Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw. These paintings show the cities at night, wet pavements reflecting the bright lights of dockside shops, the moon emerging from behind clouds, and a forest of ships' marts silhouetted against the sky. Life in these places at that time was presumably grim, to, but the painting offer a romantic and glamourised image, so the sign can be said to misrepresent what it shows.
The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath. To illustrate this, take a device used in the work of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte, where, in the painting, an easel with a painter's canvas on it is shown standing alongside a window: on the canvas in the painting is painted the exterior scene which we can see through the window. But what is shown beyond the window is not reality, against which the paint within the painting can be judged, but simply another sign, another depiction, which has no more authority or reality than the painting within the painting (which is actually a representation of a representation).
The fourth and last stage for the sign is that it bears no relation to any reality at all. As an illustration of this stage we have simply to imagine a completely abstract painting, which is not representational at all, like one of the great purple mood canvases of Mark Rothko, for instance. These four paintings are not exactly the examples of the four stages of the sign, but the four stages that can be thought of as analogous to the four different ways in which these paintings signify or represent things.
Jeremy Hawthorn's concise Glossary of contemporary literary theory defines the two terms. Both, he says, give great prominence to fragmentation as a feature of twentieth century art and culture, but they do so in very different moods.
" The modernist features it in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an earlier age when faith was full and authority intact. In the wasteland the persona says, as if despairingly of the poem, "There fragments I have shored against my ruins". In instances like this there is a tone of lament, pessimism, and despair about the world which finds its appropriate representation in these 'fractured' art forms.
" For the postmodernist, by contrast, fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it.
" An important aspect of modernism was a fierce asceticism which found the over elaborate art forms of the nineteenth century deeply offensive and repulsive. This asceticism has one of its most characteristic and striking manifestations in the pronouncements of modernist architects.
" By contrast, postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and popular' art which was important in modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness and in 'bad taste' mixtures of qualities. It disdains (the modernist asceticism as elitist.
A knowledge of modernism is necessary to understand post modernism. 'Modernism' is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism is the name given to movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism was that earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture. One of the major epicenters of this earthquake seems to have been Vienna, during the period of 1890-1910, but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually even in Britain, in art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. Its after-shocks are still being felt today, and many of the structures it toppled have never been rebuilt. Without an understanding of modernism, then, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century culture.
The period of high modernism was the twenty years from 1910 to 1920 and some of the literary 'high priests' of the movement (writing in English) were T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stephane Mallarme, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following:
1) A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we 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 of view and clear-cut moral position.
3) A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose like.
4) A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.
The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation. 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 1960. However, modernism never regained the pre-eminence it has enjoyed in the earlier period.
Derrida brings to a text the knowledge that the marks on a page are not random markings, but signs. A sign has a dual aspect as signifier and signified, signal and concept, or mark-with-meaning. To account for significance, Derrida turns to a highly specialized and elaborate use of Saussure's notion that the identity either of the sound or of the signification of a sign does not consist in a positive attribute, but in a negative (or relational) attribute-that is, its "difference" or differentiality, from other sounds and other significations within a particular linguistic system. This notion of difference is readily available to Derrida, because inspection of the printed pages shows that some marks and sets of mark repeat each other, but that others differ from each other. In Derrida's theory 'difference' itself supplements the static element of a text and it can be taken as to mean 'negativity'. 'Difference puts into motion the incessant play of signification that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page.
Derrida calls what is distinctive in the signification of a sign "trace". This means what "appears" or "disappears".
