Post Modernism

Post Modernism (1965-present): 1. responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between 'high' culture and commonly lived life 2. responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism 3. acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle 4. reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence as rhetorical constructs 5. American and British writers of the 1960s and 1970s "metafiction" (Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, and Angela Carter), produced texts that simultaneously questioned and violated the conventions of traditional narrative. 6. The emergence and proliferation of feminist, multiethnic, multicultural, and postcolonial literature since the 1970s is the most dramatic and significant manifestation of the de-centering and de-marginalization defining both postmodernity and postmodernism 7. Postmodern literature arose after World War II as a series of reactions against the perceived norms of modernist literature. 8. Postmodern writers include: Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, David Foster Wallace 9. a time marked by the cold war and the excesses of consumption. 10. It differs from Modernism by blurring the conventional boundary between "high" and "low" culture, by a completely loosened structure in both time and space, and by multiple openings rather than a closure 11. It rejects to conform to popular taste and combines heterogeneous elements, making it cater to a more sophisticated readership.