What is postmodernism?

the cultural condition of late-capitalism

Something we can simply move beyond without paying much attention to it

1. An artistic movement, 2. an umbrella term referring to philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, 3. and this:

Something that people are afraid of because it says things that are difficult/undesirable to believe but true.

Basically a catch-all term for all ideologies that reject modernism and try to dismantle its institutions and achievements.

not in the sense you're asking

stop posting your garbage, no one wants to read it

You can't have post-modernism without the context of modernism

Read the wikipedia page, it's a meme.

>and try to dismantle its institutions and achievements.
untrue

no

I think I worded it wrong. The term includes people who try do that.

I like it a lot desu

Have you created anything else?

not on that scale that's as close to finished

The inversion, perversion, or utilization of traditional or non-traditional genre convention (or not) in order to make a point (or not).

So, basically, pure retardation?

>everything has been written
>there's no more substance
DUUUDE LET'S GO META LMAO

Yeah. I think some PoMo stuff is fun to read and a good writing exercise but not really a great """genre""".

PoMo's general conventions are too vague to really mean anything, well, meaningful.

My master's thesis was on " ThePublic Burning", one of the only worthwhile PoMo pieces.

PoMo is pretty stupid because it asks us to ignore reality and then pay attention to reality but not really but also do etc etc.It's more of a philosophical exercise than a real genre.

"Menalaiad" is the quintessential trash PoMo. It is difficult to read for the sake of being difficult to read.

bullshit GR and M&D are fantastic books

GR is good, yeah. I like Pynchon, don't get me wrong. But when it comes to M&D, which is also good, I would rather just read Chaucer tbfh.

But it is hard to argue that most of PoMo is trash. You gotta remember that there are many more books than just the "greats".

I agree. Also, I always wondered why PoMo insists so much on form, meta elements, genre conventions, etc... and then it falls back so often to the historical novel. Just look at the list of postmodern novels on wikipedia: 70% of them are historical novel. And history is substance, history is meaning. Pretty hypocrite, don't you think so?

Why do so many of you guys rag on postmodernism as a concept but then ejaculate over Pynchon and Wallace?

*I meant to say "that it's hard to argue that most pomo /isn't/ trash".

The issue with most PoMo writing is that the writers are trying to remove themselves from reality while also directly referencing reality.

People would argue, however, that history does not have substance based on the idea that all of history isn't recorded and is subjected to subjective bias. "History is written by the victor" all all that jazz.

So, I suppose, based on your subjective understanding of history one COULD argue that history is meaningless.

The good PoMo authors are like really good harmonica players.

The harmonica is gay, but one can be good at the harmonica.

kek

That's a useful answer, thanks.

Harmonica players with a really good understanding of musical history.

Don't forget, post-modernism may include some pretty dumb stuff, but by virtue of being the current movement also includes everyone past 1960 who thought Ulysses was pretty good. And good writers who learned from the Modernists have rather a lot to draw from.

Does one immediately become an aspiring postmodernist if he read Ulysses once?

Still choosing to play the harmonica.

Not if he's a modernist. Otherwise, yes. The categories are so broad that the overwhelming bulk of important people in the last 100 years are either modernists or post-modernists simply by definition, are they not? And before then, it is simply impossible to read Ulysses.

What did he mean by this: the literary movement

A phase of a world-spanning civilizations' developing self-consciousness.

Leaving the gold standard of absolute, objectively understood truth. Perhaps to rediscover it later on.

>the overwhelming bulk of important people in the last 100 years are either modernists or post-modernists
That's not true. Out of the US there has been much more than modernism and postmodernism.

The hipster's modernism

I don't actually study or read about this, I just make it up from experience. Maybe you could either fill me in a little or point me to a good overview of something? I'm on a wikipedia page and the smaller movements I've heard of (Dadaism, Imagism, The Harlem Renaissance, Surrealism, and I'm including minimalism) seem to me not at all obviously outside of modernism. Or what works are you thinking of?

but the question is have we ever known it at all?

Decentralization of truth

>It's just a phase Mom
It is only a transitional period, a necessary one, but it is not an end point.

I would say no. People thought they did and acted accordingly. People still do this. It would be nice to think that we simply acquire more precise vocabularies, better equipment, better understanding.

To me at least the most interesting development in this sense is antiphilosophy, how to do philosophy without the need for the production of truth. But I'm fond of a lot of thinkers Veeky Forums would call obscurantists and charlatans, so of course I would say that.

Still tho. It makes sense to me. Certain wisdom traditions have psychological aspects to them that to me seem more or less timeless; it would be hard to imagine those being suddenly refuted by a new advance in scientific of medical technology.

Of course, we will always be saying some things to ourselves - now we know, we used to be so primitive, etc., etc. Maybe this is neverending as well.

Us humans sure are an interesting bunch. We're becoming enlightened, I think. Tortuously slowly, but it's happening. Postmodernism is a good look. As modernism was. Painful, maybe, because you always feel like the floor is being pulled out from under your feet. But it was only belief that put the floor there in the first place.

Apologies for the crypto-pedantry also.

'autistic screeching' comes to mind

youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw

...

What is required reading for learning about and understanding postmodernism?

Start with Nietzsche. He's the demolitions expert.

At last, I understand.

what? stop writing or posting to this image board?

youtube.com/watch?v=01wGv0ZxNEg

not even once

I want to understand it so I that may eventually refute it.

Well, Dadaism and Surrealism, along with Futurism, Simbolism and OuLiPo, are usually described as Avant-garde movements, especially confined to the first half of the 20th century, and they're characterised by the presence of a specific manifesto under which writers were grouped together. Movements of the second half of the 20th century are not that strictly defined and well organized, and sure as Jesus they're not ideological. That said, take Italy for example (since I'm Italian and I'll speak for my country): Neorealism is widely known as a film movement, the best of Italian cinema, but that's incomplete. Few people know that Neorealism was primarily a literary movement risen from the scenery and the living conditions of the post-war period, which, in Italy in particular, was devastating and unprecedented. This historical moment, following the madness of Fascism, Futurism, and the experimental vitality of their art, spawned a new drift towards realism - so, I would say, the opposite direction of Postmodernism. The vast majority of Italian novelists from the last century were related to Neorealism, and Calvino, later to become close to the postmodern experiences, was at first one of them. Pasolini, possibly the biggest literary genius of the Italian 20th century (and totally neglected overseas except for his movies) was a realist writer. He developed a personal thought throughout the political scenery of the 60s and 70s, criticising the shift from a fascist power to an even worst capitalist power; he wrote about the language of advertising, of television and youth trends. His novel Petrolio (Gasoline) is probably somehow postmodern, but still very different, in the approach and in the form, than the American novels of the same period. Other authors wrote monumental and winding books that could stay on an equal footing with tomes like Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow - I'm thinking about Arbasino and D'Arrigo in particular, which, unfortunately, have not been translated into English yet, due to the huge volume of their work - but their intentions were quite divergent from those of Wallace or Pynchon (i.e.: more actual and current reality, less mental masturbation). And then you have poetry. Montale is the closest one to the modernist idea of poetry (he's often matched with Eliot for his use of the objective correlative), but otherwise you see completely different tendencies, compared to other countries: Italy had Ermetism (similar to Minimalism but better), Crepuscolarism, Expressionism, Gruppo 63 (also known as Neoavanguardia, literally "new vanguard") and so on. A lot of stuff still to be discovered and treated.

it's garbage