Post Modernism

This board deals primarily with Post Modernism, but what is it? Disillusionment with the West? With Secularization? With the Modern ideal of Western life? What?

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Modernism is a cultural reaction to the industrialization of the late 18th and 19th century, and although it is reflected in literature and art, it began as a cultural change in the consensus of thought.
I'm not sure that there really is a debate, or a rejection to what Modernism and Postmodernism mean. It is true that Modernism and Postmodernism have broad definitions and will ultimately overlap with other literary traditions, however it is incorrect to say that "Modernist believe that systems of thought might lead us to a perfected form of humanity." Modernism and Postmodernism are not an antithesis to each other but rather reactions to cultural movements. Modernism is a reaction to society becoming more industrialized and mechanized in the 18th and 19th century, and postmodernism is a reaction to the modernist reaction.
It would be more correct to state that Modernism is a rejection of realism and an attempt to deal with the impact of modernization, like urbanization, industrialization, and the growing feelings of alienation, and anomie. This rejection of realism also overlaps with surrealism. Some tenets of modernist literature would be:
* A Validation of private experiences through aesthetics and inwardness
* Stream of consciousness subverts chronological narrative
* Radical experiments with form and language
* Predilection for fragmented forms and collages of eclectic material
* Exploration of psychological disorders
* Uses avant-garde techniques to critque/condemn mass culture and fascism
* Challenges bourgeois norms of gender and sexuality
* Critiques bourgeois values: business ethics, utilitarianism, materialism
* Apocalyptic overtones, comic grotesquerie, violent eroticism
To give a few examples of modernist works from American literature one can consider: The Great Gatsby, Tender Buttons, The Sun Also Rises, Tropic of Cancer, The Day of the Locust
Postmodernism on the other-hand is more difficult. Essentially it is a deconstruction of, and reaction against modernism and the academicism and elitism that was perceived to be part of it. Alternatively, postmodernist literature takes on a more self aware tone, embracing ideas like intertextuality (the idea that one texts meaning shapes another) through uses of sampling, pastiche, and parody. A few characteristics of Postmodernist literature would be:
* Self-reflexive focus on the compositional process of writing
* Ironic inclusion of modernist artistic codes and conventions
* Confusion on the ontological level
* Anti-metaphysical focus on the contingency of knowledge and the role of chance
* Subversion of "high" culture/ "mass" culture distinctions
* Ironic Stereotyping replaces psychological characterization
* Interest in cybernetic themes such as entropy, and communication
* late-capitalist issues such as hyperconsumption and media imperialism
A few works to exemplify this would be: Pale Fire, V, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Public Burning, How German Is It, White Noise, Et Tu Babe.

Postmodernism is a rejection of all metanarratives, a move beyond relationality, sameness, predication, "isness", materialism, idealism, and beyond epistemology - beyond knowing altogether

Very few can actually follow through with the basic mission, most are just posers still stuck in modernity

Read Jameson's 'Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism'

Why can they be an embrace to a cultural movement? or can that be considered a reaction as well?

There's no such thing. Movements are a gross over simplification, where the life work of a countless geniuses are boiled into aphorisms.

Read shit and learn to think for yourself. You'll learn more from any book than you will by reading what other people think about a book.

We've other systemized literature. People without the slightest idea of what it takes or means to creatively express your take on the human condition have been placed in the position of power of denoting value to new authors.

Until we learn to ignore these Harold Blooms and Steven Moores, there will be no exciting change in the literary tradition. The Beats and the drug-fueled degenerates writers of the 70s were the last group of "literary" writers to develop outside the formulated influence of liberal art writing programs.

This system controls both the interpretation and development of creative work. And any critique of it will be out right dismissed as being from an outsider.

We've already begun to stagnate. DFW was our swan song, think about that. What else to we have? A whiny, rambling Norwegian that writes about his shitty childhood in epics? or that depressed, anemic Frenchman?

Postmodernism is a reaction to everything. Its mostly for alienated psueds who can't make their own values and so resort to deconstructing and satirizing them.

In their desire for rebellion and newness they become boring and samey themselves.

This. Global capitalism has killed art. At this point you should focus more on political disruptions than art, if this continues the human race will be reduced to inhuman slaves to an ever-expanding technological-capitalist system. There will eventually be no room for true art. This is the disillusionment of the postmodernists.

Jesus Christ this

Everything fucking prestigious award has gone to shit. Ben Lerner won a MacArthur Grant. Ben Lerner. A professor or creative writing at Brooklyn College. The poster child of the kind of book you're supposed to write.

>Ohhhhh, he's on a prestigious grant to study in Europe, but he's so depressed and smokes weed. And he cuses too!

What profound fucking literary break through is someone whose spent half their life on a goddamn college campus gonna make? This guy had a fucking semester, a goddamn teacher at 27. What were Hemingway, Melville, Kerouac, or Wilde doing when they were twenty seven?

>creatively express your take on the human condition

On the subject of gross over-simplifications...

that idea comes from hegel - the idea that language and concepts make us understand the world in a certain way

foucault wanted to reject the dominant language use by making new absurd ones, inspired by surrealism, i have no idea if ulysses has anything to do with this tho.

I gave exactly zero fucks in English class and tended to argue with the professor, but straight A's nonetheless. Considering that my style and tendencies are about as routine as a colonoscopy. I also haven't read the assigned books since high school. I can bang out a six page essay in half an hour, show up to class half an hour late, and get full credit.

How is the MFA different from what the rest of academia seems to be building to, which is everyone sucking eachother's dicks ?

like someone said earlier, i don't really believe in grouping writers together into movements. It simplifies ideas.

>Also what makes Ulysses Modern and not Post Modern? because it was written in 1922 and not in 1950?

Great books often come to exemplify the thoughts and struggles at the times. Many of the writers we study today are placed into those groups because they showed this consciousnesses towards the issues, morals, and experience of the time in which they lived. But not all writers do. Robert Walser fits into no category. But he is admired and studied today because his work contains themes more universal and detached from the atmosphere he experienced.
Gaddis was ahead of his time, but i don't consider him the first Post Modernist Author. Nathaniel West covered the same general themes 22 years earlier with about 800 fewer pages.

wow ur so smart

Give me an example of postmodernism that goes beyond materialism.

MFAs don't make you write essays. They make you write books, short stories, and poems.

Now you might just be a genius, have a novel written in a refined, smooth style that any publisher would be willing to take a chance on. But most people aren't. People who go into MFA programs have a passion for writing, at least most of the time. They're serious about it. And the reality of the business is that writers with a MFA on the query letter get published, easily. That's one thing.

Another thing is that every writer wants to be good. And if they're in an MFA program, and if it's being taught by George Saunders or someone else they happen to be a fan of, then they'll take every piece of advice he throws their way, regardless if it works for them or not. Or what if they spend three years listening to the same type of advice from the same type of people reading the same type of stories? wouldn't that have some effect?

Not everyone will put up with that shit, but many do. All because today's educational institutions have so much power over who gets published.

when exactly did literature degenerate into a weird masturbatory simulacrum of literature? how did we end up like this? It's a huge scam in which the con artists scam themselves.

I've read Infinite Jest and My Struggle Vol 1+2 and Knausgaard is far superior to DFW. DFW wanted to write sincerely, Knausgaard fucking did it.

thank you for this, it is both comforting and inspirational

>The idea of creative writing being taught doesn't let the student learn this. This role is filled by the teacher. Who see what THEY consider mistakes, things to do differently. The writer loses faith in his own judgement, relies too much on others, and adapts to conform to the "CORRECT" way to write.

A lie.

Because University education became a business. Some people want to be writers, so Universities started programs to get their money to fund that new college basketball stadium.

We've also become more dependent as we spend longer in school. With every Masters or PHD degree comes a person in their mid to late twenties who doesn't know what it truly means to take direction of their own life. They don't give those degrees to risk-takers. What this does to the certain narcissism/bravery that has to be had to attempt something innovating in something like writing can only be speculated on. You know no one with a degree will even consider this. But, looking at the scarcity of exciting, new ideas the last 25 years of MFA graduates has brought us, i don't think it does anything good.

Postmodernism is not a "movement" but rather an artistic, cultural, and aesthetic paradigm characterized by:

Exhaustion of creativity and a resort to pastiche, parody, sample, and remix.

Spatialization of the imagination; a move away from temporality and towards an eternal, ahistorical presentism. Lyotard's oft-cited collapse of metanarratives is the underside of this.

Self-referentiality, metafiction, and autocritique.

Decentralization of subjectivity combined with collapse of national identity.

>The Beats and the drug-fueled degenerates writers of the 70s were the last group of "literary" writers to develop outside the formulated influence of liberal art writing programs.

If I'm wrong, tell me why.

This is all my cynical speculation. But it seems like MFA programs would undermine the type the self-guidance and self evaluation writers need to develop a cohesive style and direction.

Think about it. There's never been anything like this throughout history, where you pay money so that someone can teach you the RIGHT way to write a novel. The purpose of education is to share knowledge, to teach systems and concepts.

There's never been programs like this, where the end degree basically "certifies" that you're qualified to convey yourself through this specific mode of expression. The ideas, institutions, and values of the institution in power has never had this large an amount of power over artistic development of an entire generation. Not because it's tyrannical, but because it's submitted to without thought.

Why hasn't this been at least discussed?

Gaddis is interesting. This is how I see him and his influence.

Gaddis dealt extensively with the Entropy of the human condition.

Alan Watts simplified this phenomena as the cause of the meaningless man felt following the secularization after WWI and WWII. He views our collective loss of faith as a loss of purpose, which he believes is key to satisfaction and happiness.

In The Recognitions, Gaddis portrays this secularization as an artistic struggle, stating that classicist painters, many of whom subscribed to Christianity, “were very safely encased in a frame of reference, working in a frame of absolutes for their talents or their genius, in works largely for the Church.” The characters throughout The Recognitions, especially Wyatt, struggle with this disintegration from theist subscription. This concept gives way to a collective entropy, general chaos and disorder in our search for meaning.

Alchemy becomes a metaphor for the search for a method to achieve reintegration, redemption. But entropy is constant, and so the Self is constantly changing. Any course of redemption is rendered inapplicable as the “materials” themselves change. In short: The individual is fluid, constantly changing; and because of that there can be no path to reintegration.

The Recognitions is sprawling and complex. Gaddis didn’t meant for it to be understood beyond a certain extent, because all the energies, variables, causes, and effects in any given system can only be measured to a certain extent. The incompleteness and confusion that comes once we finish the Recognitions serves as a metaphor for what cannot be known about man.

Gaddis and later Post-Modernists, especially Pynchon, describe worlds that do not follow any solid plot or leave us with any satisfying resolution, thus describing the impossibility of satisfaction that must come with Entropy (remember Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, disintegrating into the world itself).

But occasional redemption is found. Wyatt, after he learns that the table of Seven Deadly Sins is really the original, says “Thank God there was the gold to forge.”

Think about that. Most of Alchemy dealt with finding a method to make gold from different substances. It was the purpose of Alchemy. By saying this, he implies there is something to be attained beyond. What is that? The process of Alchemy itself; the belief in a magic within all things, between God and Earth, perfection. Not god or anything supernatural, but the system underlying alchemy, providing a framework to build his meaning upon. He turns away from the physical and moves inward, integrating himself with himself.

what big ideas have i missed out on? Metafiction? How long has Milan Kundera been around?

What has significantly challenged the institutional concept of the literary tradition in the last 25 years? Because i can't think of anything.

Why Gaddis was such a big qt?

All i see is regurgitation. I doubt you fully grasp everything you just said.

I like how you left enough space for a specific book by a specific someone

and i doubt you haven't sucked your dads dick, that doesn't make it true.

Capitalism is the best thing to happen to the human race so far. If art is left behind b/c of it so be it, there's enough great art to be consumed for infinity. If anything a new art is being realized through technology, seeing how far it can go for its own sake. The ironic part about you people complaining about an element missing from modern life is purely motivated by a demand to consume in itself. Always people wanting to be told about themselves by someone else, this is all that this thread proves.

>capitalism is better than nomadism
[citation needed]

you're giving too much credit to this confused comment, user

>when exactly did literature degenerate into a weird masturbatory simulacrum of literature?

when it got meta, if you are on a meta mindset you can't do anything without larping

basically this. meta is murder

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissection

Easier to talk about the post-modern NOVEL - any 'ism is going to be a broad Church.

Post modern novels are/feature:
-BIG
-full of fantastical detail that still seems mundane
-Characters are inscrutable. Don't develop or change
-The narrative voice refernces itself, keeps telling the reader they're reading a book etc
-HEAVY on cliche but its ironic so...good, I guess?
-About tennis
-Endless, endless minuatiae thats intended to take the reader out of his experience as a reader and re-inforce the idea that he's reading a book

This is coming from a lay reader obvs, an academic would be able to tell you lots more about how post modern novels are self referential and distrustful of narrative etc

so what type of novels would guys like to see get released nowadays? Would you prefer something pynchonian, something surreal, some derivative of realism? I know this is a bad question in a lot of ways but I couldn't imagine what kind of novel I'd buy of a contemporary writer, as in like not DeLillo or McCarthy, etc. I think I'd really enjoy someone like a Vollmann. Experienced, well traveled, been through some shit, but well read and book smart too. There's gotta be someone out there who no one knows of sitting on a classic... Probably that guy Evan Dara

i only buy genre fiction page turners. Too many unread classics to waste time on contemporary shite about the immigrant experience or whatever the fuck type of books win literary prizes

internet based

You come off as a fedora

the unbearable lightness of being

You're right and you can tell right away the books which are written under these conditions. They're very well crafted yet they feel empty. There's no substance to them.

>About tennis
kek

Tbqh this.
>DUDE GRAVITY'S RAINBOW ITS SOOOOO HARD THERES NO PLOT ITS ALL MEANINGLESS LIKE ITS SO POSTMODERN
Like nigger, did you even read the book? There's a clear plot and theme as well as in depth allusions. It's a literary novel like any other.
"Postmodernism" is an excuse for people to categorize things that don't really need to be categorized.

>About tennis
lmao
m
a
o

Is partly correct, insomuch as the fact that the degree to which any of the cultural zeitgeist and collective works of art produced in the last ca. 100 years could be adequately encapsulated within two terms (or movements) is debatable.

However, that is not to say that modernism and post-modernism aren't REAL concepts with specific meanings. I am not going to comment on the accuracy of describing the Art and social values of the last century using these terms, I am simply going to give my best summation of what these terms mean, or at least how I've come to understand them:

Modernism arose initially as a response to the death of Romanticism in light of the industrial revolution. One could make varying arguments as to whether modernism contributed to the demise, or was simply symptomatic of it, but it finds it roots in the logical consequences of the works of many mid-to-late 19th century philosophers (such as Nietzsche) and the growing social awareness that meaning is not inherent to life, that ethics/morals are not necessarily grounded in objective truths (a big deal at the time), and that in essence there is fundamentally no way to prove that something has value beyond what is ascribed to it. It is worth noting that with any movement, the lines between what produced the movement, and what is a product of the movement are blurred.

The first World War proceeded to cement these ideas by showing post-enlightenment Western society the degree to which mankind is still capable of cruelty and destruction. It went even further by showing that all mankinds progress, and all the developments of the industrial age served to improved the efficiency with which we could kill each other. This would also be the first major war where photographs would be circulated across society to show the horrors of war.

As a result of these factors modernism became the dominant social/cultural mood: that life is short and devoid of meaning, that nature is cruel, death is inevitable, and that each artist struggles with their own existential crisis. Before modernism, Art was very much focused on highlighting the beauty of Nature or God or Man, but with modernism Art became an expression of the struggle to exist. It became the artist screaming into the void.

Post-modernism arose in the mid 20th century and is the logical conclusion of Modernism. Post-modernism is about no longer struggling with existential dread, but embracing it. Post-modernism is taking 'nothing matters' to it's most logical extreme. It's saying that no artist can claim that life is meaningless and yet attribute meaning to their work, therefore their own work must be meaningless. This is why postmodern art involves doing things like urinating in a jar and displaying it.

>pic related is modern art
>post modern art: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/IKB_191.jpg/1024px-IKB_191.jpg

P.S. I don't personally enjoy or subscribe to either art style, just describing them.

Forgot to attach pic.

I think you're over generalizing.

I don't claim I'm going to be a great author but I graduated college with a degree in economics and Middle Eastern politics and then instead of working for the CIA, I moved to a place with incredibly low cost of living and started studying literature and film while working part time.

Right now I have several concepts for stories that I'm working on that include themes like buying a woman and putting her in sexual slavery, a steady self destruction through hedonism, excessive drug use and thrill seeking and then in another story I want to deal with the collapse of western civilization, humanizing a Ted Kaczynski type character, an overarching sense of doom and the swan song for a justice system.

Then I'm interested in colonialism, differing arguments about human nature, the universe indifferent to the existence of life, world systems analysis.

Like, look. There has to be at least another hundred people doing this type of thing and one of us has to be talented enough to break through.

We're very early into this century, give it some time.

Good shit user. What is to be done? Will you save the art form?

>all these retards who don't understand the use and value of periodization trying to discuss literature

get the fuck out you plebeian degenerates

pretty you're critique i oversimplifying the study of literature and art. professors of these things understand that aphorisms and quotes only offer helpful snapshots into a large trends of thought, which exist quite undeniably

Vignettes that on the surface appear "Intellectual", "hip", "deep".

But scratch the surface, and you see it is nothing more than pathetic rantings.

Thank you for that dubs, I really appreciate it, but the reason I post on here in the first place is not to worry about appearances. To tell you the truth I was being candid. With the benefit of hindsight I am shocked I was accommodated as much as I was. The fact that I kept getting As meant I wasn't getting much criticism or feedback, so I just kept on doing the same thing that seemed to work. Which is to say I have zero concept of a genuine molding experience. I feel the market caters to delusional fantasies. I did this and what the fuck does it even mean? Is academia ever to be trusted as an authority on objective qualities? Doesn't the fact that I pay them ridiculous sums of money introduce irreconcilable bias?

I come on here regularly to get shit on. I value honesty of opinion. Do you ever feel that everyone you meet is a liar?

The first generation of degree-based visual artists, conceptualists, all made successful, relevant, and long-lasting art whose legacy continues even today

Are you high?

The first 'modern' artists are those concerned with art for it's own sake rather than any external criteria. Courbet, Manet, weren't screaming into the void, neither was Monet, Cezanne, Picasso, or even Matisse. Some Expressionism was, and Dada too, but Surrealism wasn't. Minimalism wasn't. Most modernism is about asserting new values, often politically, not breaking down over the idea that there isn't value.

Also Romanticism found new expression in modernism, since they were both grappling with the same basic premise of the Enlightenment. The hero as artist is one such idea.

No just right. Whether you personally like conceptualists or not is another matter.

your legacy boner is showing

cao ni ma

postmodernism has already been replaced by new sincerity. look at all of the various ethnic-in-america literature. look at knausgaard. these people have replaced wacky sarcasm, kooky names (suck my cock, pynchon), and metafictional awareness for actual recordings of experience. and YOU FUCKERS dismiss it as either a global conspiracy against the white man or some loser's whining.

new sincerity is here and you idiots don't even see it.

no, but i am you fucking dorkass.

This post --unironically-- really made me think.

Foolish mortals.

That Is normie literature. Not invalidating but it is what it is, safe.

how is spending 12 pages writing about cleaning a bathroom safe? they could have laughed old karl ove out of norway but he took a chance.

Conceptual art derives from literary practices, that's what made it interesting.

I don't want to cast doubt on your remarkable claims, but your writing in this and your previous post is kind of sloppy.

>but it's a post on a swedish flag forum why would I bother about my sentences

Well, you kind of implied you don't have to exert any effort to produce decent copy, so...

I don't know if you hear this often enough from other people, but I'm going to say it anyway: your work sounds really interesting, and I wish you all the best with it

that's being dishonest fucktard. the entire anthology is not about cleaning bathrooms. they all have pretty straightforward plots that could be cut and paste into millions of other books, whether it's dealing with a dead father, finding love, or becoming a parent - by the numbers shit. karl ove is karl ove because of how he writes. he would have found success regardless, of that i am sure. i'm not descrediting safe literature. it is a product of the time we live in and our creative writing institutions, but don't get your panties in a bunch for the suggestion that we can have another type of movement besides new sincerity (the very fucking name screams S A F E).

read up on some of the reasons karl ove gives for beginning his project. one of them is to completely empty himself of his life's material so that his next work will be completely free and outside his own life. now that is a project worth finishing but also one i doubt many writers would be willing to take.

Wouldn't sloppiness serve as proof of my indictment of academia? How was I allowed to pass? What were the professor's smoking?

Wake up sheeple.

Hah, fine. I just think what you're saying about your effort/reward ratio is an exaggeration, which leaves your argument nowhere.

I think I had quite a similar experience to you with classes, where much of the time it felt like a kayfabe circlejerk where everyone mutually agreed to pretend that we were all engaged in something important and to never under any circumstances call into question the value of what anyone was doing. That was how it felt at the time. But I'm not so one-sidedly critical now, looking back.

>-About tennis

Have another (You)

If that is what I think It is It's FUCKED

>Post Modernism

Did somebody say Buddhism?

I'll have to take your word for it, which I won't. You're smarter than that, user.