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In Series 13 of The Simpsons, Moe redecorates his bar so that it attracts a younger, cooler, more chic and intellectual crowd. He changes everything in bar and puts up a series of paintings and films of eyeballs. This confuses his usual customers:
Carl: I don’t get all this eyeball stuff, what are they supposed to represent? Uh, eyeballs?
Moe: It’s Po-mo!...Postmodern!...yeah, alright, weird for the sake of weird.
This dialogue from The Simpsons captures what is generally conceived as post-modernism: an indulgence in the absurd and irreverent, scepticism towards objective values and objective reality, a reluctance to offer clear representations in art, an attempt to capture the fragmentary and ridiculous and impossible nature of human existence.
But what is postmodernism? Perhaps better said, when is postmodernism? Critics have provided a number of answers, each of them capturing an aspect of the period (or phenomenon), and each of them open to critique. On the one hand, postmodernism might be seen as a artistic epoch, one in which the ”stable” presentation of reality in previous artistic movements – the idea that texts ”reflect” the world – is rejected. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller tells the story of the reader reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Postmodern works often foreground and question the nature of art itself. On the other hand, postmodernism has been seen as a philosophical attempt to wrestle with modernity. Francois Lyotard sees postmodernism as a period in which all ‘grand narratives’ (for example: Christianity, rationalism, liberalism, Marxism) have collapsed, and people are forced to make sense of life without an overall meaning. Jacques Derrida argues that language itself cannot represent reality, cannot really even represent itself, and that we are really left to play around in a series of symbols without ultimate meaning. Jean Beaudrillard argues that television and celebrity culture has entirely warped our sense of reality. Michel Foucault’s account of history, culture, and power, calls into question all of the foundational assumptions of the ways we understand the world. Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is really a sense of dislocation and uncertainty brought about in what he calls ‘Late Capitalism’. Some critics now argue that postmodernism is over, and that we have actually entered into post-postmodernism: whatever that might be.
In this course, we will explore what it is that postmodernism a) claims to be, and b) is claimed to be. Our focus will, of course, be literary. We will begin with the earliest movement out of ”modernism”, the dominant literary form of the first half of the twentieth century. Then we will look at different views of postmodernism, and then we will try to critique these views.
We will look at a wide range of texts, from literary criticism to philosophy, from poetry and drama to literary fiction and metafiction – the latter being perhaps postmodernism’s most recognisable form. The vast majority of the reading will be provided. I will provide a reading list in the coming week, but the only texts you will need to buy are Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabakov. |
