What is so great about post-modern literature? it is not height of literature or anything like that

what is so great about post-modern literature? it is not height of literature or anything like that.

>hasnt read Gaddis

HAW HAW

why are DFW and TP held in the highest distinction of writers today?

they're novel and popular

Come back when you've read William Gaddis, William Gass, John Barth, John Hawkes, Joseph McElroy, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, Harry Mathews, David Markson, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. Then, and only then, are you allowed to say anything at all about postmodernism.

there is nothing great about it. it's literal rapture at the loss of transcendence. this quote sums it up:

>They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals–but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God’s actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year.

just did a quick flip through of all of these books and i can confirm that postmodernism is not height of literature or anything like that :^)

Those -- dying then,
Knew where they went --
They went to God's Right Hand --
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found.

The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small --
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all.

christ that was hard to read

This is so unbelievably wrong that it's worth pretending you never saw these definitions.

Modernist lit breaks the rules because they've never been broken.

Postmodern lit abandons rules, and allows for free expression. A book which happens to conform to common practice is no more or less sincere than a book which seems to follow no convention.

Anyone else prefer modernism to postmodernism?

I've read most of them and they can't compare with modernists. What is your point?

yeah. many postmodern works are obscurantist drivel to me.

i tried reading gravity's rainbow and hated it.


pleb4lyfe

what do you like?

the ikea catalog

i dont hate all postmodernism. i just dont like pynchon, dfw, or most postmodern art. some of my favorite books are postmodern.

It's a weird question to ask whats great about po-mo lit. It either speaks to you or it doesn't. It's not really relevant to anything really, just a personal thing.

The reason why you even hear about it so much is cuz its just a phase in the 20th century that you gotta learn for school and your professors in college are literally ancient fossils so its still kinda meaningful to them. It's not relevant in the 21st century anymore. It's just a storytelling trope in video games these days.

Besides, look at it from old peoples point of view, They literally thought the industrial revolution was gonna have man living like the fucking Jetsons on the goddamn Surface of Mars by the 80's. That was the promise of Modernism. Instead we got two World Wars, hundreds of millions dead and nations locked in Ideological conflict and genocide, and we went to the moon once and haven't been back since the fucking 60's.

Imagine all shit pic related promises does not happen, there is no such thing as Singularity, interstellar travel is impossible because wormholes can't happen irl, you will never be a Ghost in the Shell and/or Humans just abandon the idea of making AI.

Postmodernism is all about living in the wake of broken promises and ideals that were just lies. Some Po-mo works are great works, not because they are po-mo but because they are just great books. period. Fallout is literally post modernism, the game.

>are DFW and TP held in the highest distinction of writers today?
No.

>Fallout is literally post modernism, the game.
Vidya players must be tortured.

I don't get the love for Federman. I usually love postmodernism but Double or Nothing just didn't do anything for me. The wacky typography seemed to be just wacky rather than interesting in any deep way.

It's important to remember Fred Jameson's distinction between postmodernISM and postmodernITY. The former is a stylistic trend, mostly active in literature and that genre of meta-Hegelian auto criticism we now call "theory" of the 70s-90s, and which is largely on its way out, displaced in both cases by a return to positivism, through the quantification of style in terms of profitability (the so-called Young Adult Literature) and a kind of will to attribution, to citation, which has transformed theory into a masturbatory hunt for contradictory citations, motivated in part, I think, by a reanimation of Freudo-Lacanian concepts spurred on, as it were "unconsciously," by the kernel of psychoanalytic thought lying dormant under contemporary feminist discourses. The latter, on the other hand, postmodernity, is less a style than a "cultural dominant," in the Althusserian sense of social formation, itself a complementary development to the globalization of capital, and one which, make no mistake, is here to stay for a quite a while.

It reflects the current state of society. Until the end of WW2, the world was clamoring for some form of order. Every ideology and political act was justified by the order that they brought to society.

After WW2, there was no guiding goal for ideology. So ideologies became all about minimizing suffering. No one cared too much about droughts, famines, and plagues in other corners of the world before the War; they were accepted as events that just happened.

This slowly morphed into minimizing local suffering, even in the most developed & wealthy corners of the world. So you had postmodernism, which tried to pacify everyone's existential angst. This is also how the hippie subculture and New Age came along: they looked towards Eastern philosophies to reduce suffering.