What is Postmodernism?

1
What is Postmodernism?

• A complicated term
• A set of ideas emerged as an area of academic
  study since the mid-1980s
• It is hard to define
• it is a concept that appears in a wide variety
  of disciplines or areas of study
• It's hard to locate it temporally or
  historically
• It's not clear exactly when it begins

2
Philosophy of Postmodernism

• All truth is limited, approximate, and is
  constantly evolving (Nietzsche, Kuhn, Popper).
• No theory can ever be proved true - we can only
  show that a theory is false (Popper).
• No theory can ever explain all things
  consistently (Godel's incompleteness theorem).
• There is always a separation between our mind
  ideas of things and the thing in itself (Kant).
• Physical reality is not deterministic
  (Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics,
  Bohr).
• Science concepts are mental constructs (logical
  positivism, Mach, Carnap).
• Metaphysics is empty of content.
• Thus absolute and certain truth that explains
  all things is unobtainable.

3
Human Condition in Postmodernism

• Postmodernism may be considered a reaction
  against that confidence in reason.
• There is no God up there we are alone here.
• The concept of finite is a barrier that can never
  be leapt..
• There is nothing above us
• There is no transcendent reality.
• There is no objective truthavailable to us.
• We are finite, limited people in a particular
  space and time.
• There is no way to have access to objective truth
  
• There is no possibility to really know anything.
• The brain may beconsidered only an organism that
  can be known through anexperiment in a
  laboratory.
• Human beings have only got Language.

4
Another Postmodernism's definition

• Postmodernism is the belief that
• Most theoretical concepts are defined by their
  role in the conjectured theoretical network. (A
  subset are 'operationally' defined by a fairly
  direct tie to observations.)?
• The theoretical network is incomplete.
• It follows that theoretical concepts are 'open',
  or what logicians call 'partially interpreted'.
  Research continues precisely because they are
  open the research task is to 'close' them,
  although never completely.

5
Features of Postmodernism
Socioeconomic part

• Multinational capital
• Reproduction
• Information / Service

Poetics

• Decentred subject
• Caricature
• Labyrinth
• Intertextuality

6
Postmodernism from a literary perspective

• An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in
  writing (and in visual arts as well) an emphasis
  on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself)
  takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An
  example of this would be stream-of-consciousness
  writing.
• A movement away from the apparent objectivity
  provided by omniscient third-person narrators,
  fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut
  moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated
  stories are an example of this aspect of
  modernism.
• A blurring of distinctions between genres, so
  that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S.
  Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic
  (as in Woolf or Joyce).
• An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous
  narratives, and random-seeming collages of
  different materials.
• A tendency toward reflexivity, or
  self-consciousness, about the production of the
  work of art, so that each piece calls attention
  to its own status as a production, as something
  constructed and consumed in particular ways.
• A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in
  favor of minimalist designs and a rejection, in
  large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in
  favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.
• A rejection of the distinction between "high"
  and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of
  materials used to produce art and in methods of
  displaying, distributing, and consuming art.

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Language

• We produce ourselves in language
• We use different types of language according to
  the different situations we have to face.
• Language is the only way to characterize a
  character in a text.

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Texts and Intertestuality

• There is nothing outside the text
• All texts are the product of Intertestuality

9
Example of Postmodern Texts

• Nice Work
• by David Lodge

• Possession
• by A.S. Byatt