Perhaps, none of the literary terms has been subjected to such a fierce discussion, which is around the term "postmodernism". Unfortunately, widespread use has robbed it of specific meaning; However, it seems possible to distinguish three main meanings in which this term used in modern criticism:
1. works of literature and art created after World War II, not related to realism and made using non-traditional image techniques;
2. works of literature and art, made in the spirit of modernism, "brought to the extreme";
3. in an expanded sense - the state of man in the world of "developed capitalism" in the period from the end of the 50s. XX century to the present day, a time called by the theoretician of postmodernism J. - F. Lyotard "the era of the great meta-narratives of Western culture."
Myths that have been the basis of human knowledge since time immemorial and legitimized by common use - Christianity (and in a broader sense - faith in God in general), science, democracy, communism (as faith in the common good), progress, etc. - suddenly lost their indisputable authority, and with it humanity lost faith in their power, in the expediency of everything that was undertaken in the name of these principles. This disillusionment, the feeling of being "lost" led to a sharp decentralization cultural sphere Western society. Thus, postmodernism is not only a lack of faith in Truth, which led to a misunderstanding and rejection of any existing truth or meaning, but also a set of efforts aimed at discovering the mechanisms of "historical construction of truths", as well as ways to hide them from the eyes of society. . The task of postmodernism in the broadest sense is to expose the impartial nature of the emergence and "naturalization" of truths, i.e. ways of their penetration into the public consciousness.
If modernists considered it their main task to support the skeleton of the collapsing culture of Western society at all costs, then postmodernists, on the contrary, often gladly accept the “death of culture” and take away its “remains” to use as material for their Game. So, Andy Warhol's numerous images of M. Monroe, or Cathy Acker's rewritten "Don Quixote" are an illustration of the postmodernist trend bricolage, which uses particles of old artifacts in the process of creating new, albeit not "original" (since nothing new can be, by definition, the author's task is reduced to a kind of game) - the resulting work blurs the lines both between the old and the new artifact, and between "high" and "low" art.
Summing up the discussion about the origins of postmodernism, the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch writes: "What was developed by modernity in higher esoteric forms, postmodernity carries out on a wide front of everyday reality. This gives the right to call postmodernity an exoteric form of esoteric modernity"
The key concepts used by the theorists of postmodernism in literature are "world as chaos", "world as text", "intertextualism", "double code", "author's mask", "parodic mode of narration", "failure of communication", "fragmentation". narration", "metaraskazka", etc. Postmodernists claim a "new vision of the world", a new understanding and image of it. Theoretical basis poststructuralism is, in particular, a structuralist-deconstructivist complex of ideas and attitudes. Among the techniques used by postmodernists, it is necessary to mention the following: refusal to imitate reality in images (generally accepted is associated with the usual, and is a great delusion of mankind) in favor of the Game with form, conventions and symbols from the arsenal " high art"; cessation of the pursuit of originality: in the age of mass production, any originality instantly loses freshness and meaning; refusal to use the plot and character of the character in order to convey the meaning of the work; and, finally, the rejection of meaning as such - since all meanings are illusory and deceptive. Modernism, having created a historical background for the current under discussion, it later began to degenerate into absurdism, one of the manifestations of which is considered "black humor". Since the postmodernist's approach to the perception of reality is synthetic, the postmodernists used the achievements of a variety of artistic methods for their own purposes. Thus, the ironic attitude to everything without exception saves postmodernists, as once romantics, from fixation on something unchanging, solid. They, like existentialists, put the individual above the universal, the universal, and the individual above the system. As John Barth, one of the theorists and practitioners of postmodernism, wrote, "the main The hallmark of postmodernism is the global assertion of human rights, which are more important than any state interests." Postmodernists protest against totalitarianism, narrow ideologies, globalization, logocentrism, and dogmatism. They are principled pluralists, who are characterized by doubt in everything, the absence of firm decisions, since they associate many variants of the latter.
Based on this, postmodernists do not consider their theories as final. Unlike modernists, they never rejected the old, classical literature, but actively included its methods, themes, images in their works. True, often, although not always, with irony.
One of the main methods of postmodernism is intertextuality. On the basis of other texts, quotes from them, borrowed images, a postmodernist text is created. Related to this is the so-called "postmodern sensibility" - one of the foundations of the aesthetics of postmodernism. Sensitivity not so much to life phenomena as to other texts. The postmodern method of "double code" is associated with texts - mixing, comparing two or more textual worlds, while texts can be used in a parodic way. One of the forms of parody among postmodernists is pbstish (from the Italian Pasticcio) - a mixture of texts or excerpts from them, potpourri. The original meaning of the word is an opera from fragments of other operas. The good thing about this is that postmodernists are resurrecting obsolete artistic methods- baroque, gothic, but their irony prevails over everything, their boundless doubt.
Postmodernists claim not only to develop new methods of artistic creativity, but also to create a new philosophy. Postmodernists talk about the existence of a "special postmodern sensibility" and a specific postmodern mentality. At present, in the West, postmodernism is understood as an expression of the spirit of the era in all areas of human activity - art, literature, philosophy, science, politics. Postmodernist criticism is subjected to traditional logocentrism and normativity. The use of concepts from various fields of human activity, the mixing of literary themes and images are characteristic features of poststructuralism. Postmodernist writers and poets often act as literary theorists, and literary theorists sharply criticize theories as such, opposing them to "poetic thinking."
The artistic practice of postmodernism is characterized by such style features, as a conscious focus on eclecticism, mosaicism, irony, playful style, parodic rethinking of traditions, rejection of the division of art into elite and mass, overcoming the border between art and everyday life. If the modernists did not claim to create a new philosophy, and even more so - a new worldview, then postmodernism is incomparably more ambitious. Postmodernists are not limited to experiments in the field of artistic creativity. Postmodernism is a complex, multifaceted, dynamically developing complex of philosophical, scientific-theoretical and emotional-aesthetic ideas about literature and life. The most illustrative areas of its application are artistic creation and literary criticism, the latter often being an integral part of the fabric of a work of art, i.e. a postmodernist writer often analyzes both the works of other authors and his own, and often this is done with self-irony. In general, irony and self-irony are one of the favorite techniques of postmodernism, because for them there is nothing solid, deserving the respect and self-respect that was inherent in people of previous centuries. In the irony of postmodernists, some features of the self-irony of romantics and the modern understanding of the personality of a person by existentialists, who believe that human life is absurd, manifest themselves. In the postmodern novels of J. Fowles, J. Bart, A. Rob-Trieux, Ent. Burgess and others, we meet not only a description of events and characters, but also lengthy discussions about the very process of writing this work, theoretical reasoning and self-mockery (as, for example, in novels " Clockwork orange"Anthony Burgess, Paper Men" by William Golding).
Introducing theoretical passages into the fabric of a work, postmodern writers often directly appeal to the authority of structuralists, semiotics, and deconstructivists, in particular, mentioning Rolland Barthes or Jacques Derride. This mixture of literary theorizing and artistic fiction is also explained by the fact that writers are trying to "educate" the reader, declaring that under the new conditions it is no longer possible and stupid to write in the old way. The "new conditions" presuppose the breaking of the old positivist causal ideas about the world in general and about literature in particular. Through the efforts of postmodernists, literature acquires an essayistic character.
Many postmodernists, in particular, the writer John Fowles and the theorist Rolland Barth, are characterized by a tendency to pose political and social problems, as well as a sharp criticism of bourgeois civilization with its rationalism and logocentrism (R. Barth's book "Mythologies", in which modern bourgeois " myths", i.e. ideology). Rejecting the logocentrism of the bourgeoisie, as well as all bourgeois civilization and politics, postmodernists oppose to it the "politics of language games" and "linguistic" or "textual" consciousness, free from all external frameworks.
In a broader worldview, postmodernists talk not only about the dangers of any kind of restrictions, in particular, about logocentrism that "narrows" the world, but also about the fact that a person is not the center of the cosmos, as, for example, the Enlighteners believed. Postmodernists oppose and prefer chaos to space, and this preference is expressed, in particular, in the fundamentally chaotic construction of the work. The only specific given for them is the text, which allows you to enter any arbitrary values. It is in this connection that they speak of the "authority of writing", preferring it to the authority of logic and normativity. For postmodernist theorists, in essence, an anti-realistic tendency is characteristic, while postmodernist writers widely use realistic methods of depiction along with postmodernist ones.
Especially important in the aesthetics and practice of postmodernists are the problems of the author and the reader. The postmodernist author invites the reader to be an interlocutor. They may even parse the text along with the intended reader. The author-narrator strives to make the reader feel like his interlocutor. At the same time, some postmodernists tend to use tape recordings for this, and not just text. Thus, John Bart's novel "The One Who Lost in the Fun Room" is preceded by the subtitle: "Prose for Print, Tape Recorder and Live Voice". In the afterword, J. Barth talks about the desirability of using additional channels of communication (except for printed text) for an adequate and deeper understanding of the work. That is, he seeks to connect oral and written speech.
A postmodernist writer is prone to experimentation in written speech, to revealing its hidden communicative possibilities. The written word, which is only a "trace" of the signified, is inherent in polysemy and semantic elusiveness, therefore it contains in itself the potential opportunity to enter into the most diverse semantic chains and go beyond the traditional linear text. Hence the desire to use a non-linear organization of the text. Postmodernism uses the polyvariance of plot situations, the interchangeability of episodes, using associative rather than linear logical-temporal connections. He can also use the graphic potential of the text, combining texts of different style and semantic load, printed in different fonts, within the same discourse.
Writers - postmodernists have developed a whole range of artistic means of depiction. These techniques are based on the desire to depict the real world as little as possible, to replace it with a text world. At the same time, they rely on the teachings of J. Lacon and J. Derrida, who pointed out that the signifier can only be a "trace" of a real object or even an indication of its absence. In this regard, they said that between reading a word and imagining what it means, there is a certain time gap, i.e. we first perceive the word itself as such, and only after some, albeit a short time, what this word means. This cult of the signifier, of the word, is deliberately directed by the postmodernists against the aesthetics and literature of the realists. And even against the modernists, who did not renounce reality, but spoke only about new ways of modeling it. Even the surrealists considered themselves the builders of a new world, not to mention the brave futurists, who aspired to be "sumps" and "water carriers" of this new world. For postmodernists, however, literature and the text are an end in itself. They have a cult of the text itself, or, one might say, of "signifiers" who are torn away from their signifieds.
One of the most important methods of postmodern writing is defined by theorists as "non-selection", i.e. arbitrariness and fragmentation in the selection and use of material. With this technique, postmodernists seek to create an artistic effect of unintended narrative chaos, corresponding to the chaos of the external world. The latter is perceived by postmodernists as meaningless, alienated, torn and disordered. This technique is reminiscent of surrealist methods of writing. However, as already noted, the surrealists still had faith, albeit illusory, in the possibility of changing the world. The artistic techniques of postmodernists are aimed at dismantling traditional narrative connections within the work. They deny the usual principles of its organization inherent in realists.
The style and grammar of the postmodern text are characterized by the following features, called "forms of fragmentary discourse":
1. Violation of grammatical norms - the sentence, in particular, may not be fully completed (ellipse, aposiopesis);
2. Semantic incompatibility of elements of the text, combining incompatible details into a common one (merging tragedy and farce, posing important problems and all-encompassing irony);
3. unusual typographic design of the proposal;
However, despite the fundamental fragmentation, postmodern texts still have a "content center", which, as a rule, is the image of the author, more precisely, the "mask of the author". The task of such an author is to set up and direct the reactions of the "implicit" reader in the right perspective. The whole communicative situation of postmodern works rests on this. Without this center, there would be no communication. It would be a complete communication failure. In essence, the "mask" of the author is the only living, real hero in a postmodernist work. The fact is that other characters are usually just puppets of the author's ideas, devoid of flesh and blood. The desire of the author to enter into a direct dialogue with the reader, up to the use of audio equipment, can be regarded as a fear that the reader will not understand the work. And writers - postmodernists take the trouble to interpret their work to readers. Thus, they act in two roles at once - the artist of the word and the critic.
From what has been said above, it is obvious that postmodernism is not only a purely literary, but also a sociological phenomenon. It has developed as a result of a complex of reasons, including technological progress in the field of communication, undoubtedly affecting the formation of mass consciousness. Postmodernists take part in this formation.
It is also obvious that postmodernists wittingly or unwittingly seek to blur the line between high and mass culture. At the same time, their works are still focused on the high reader. artistic culture, because one of the main techniques of postmodernism is the technique of literary allusion, association, paradox, various kinds of collages. Postmodernists also use the technique of "shock therapy", aimed at destroying the habitual norms of reader perception, which was formed cultural tradition: the fusion of tragedy and farce, the posing of important problems and all-encompassing irony.
Conclusions to Chapter 1
The salient features of postmodernism are literary movement are the following features:
· citation. everything has already been said, so nothing new can be by definition. The author's task is reduced to a play of images, forms and meanings.
· context and intertextuality. " The ideal reader" should be well erudite. He should be familiar with the context and capture all the connotations embedded in the text by the author.
· text layering. The text consists of several layers of meanings. Depending on their own erudition, the reader may be able to read information from one or more layers of meaning. From this follows the focus on the widest possible range of readers - everyone in the text will be able to find something for themselves.
· rejection of logocentricity; virtuality. There is no truth, what is taken for it by human consciousness is only truth, which is always relative. The same characterizes reality: the absence of objective reality in the presence of many subjective worldviews. (It is worth recalling the fact that postmodernism flourished in the era of virtual realities).
· irony. Since truth has been abandoned, everything must be treated with humor, for nothing is perfect.
· text-centric: everything is perceived as a text, as a kind of coded message that can be read. From this it follows that the object of attention of postmodernism can be any sphere of life.
Thus, Friedrich Schlegel ("On the Study of Greek Poetry") states that " absolute maximum negations, or absolute nothing, can be given in any representation to the same small extent as the absolute maximum of affirmation; even at the highest level of the ugly, there is still something beautiful.
The true world of postmodernism is a labyrinth and twilight, a mirror and obscurity, simplicity that makes no sense. The law that determines the relationship of a person to the world should be the law of the hierarchy of the permissible, the essence of which is the instantaneous explanation of the truth based on intuition, which is elevated to the rank of the basic principle of ethics. Postmodernism has not yet said its final word.
Abstract on the topic:
"Postmodern Literature of the End of the 20th Century"
IN Lately it became popular to announce that at the beginning of the new century, postmodernism finally passed all possible stages of its self-determination, having exhausted the possibilities of existence as a phenomenon of modern culture with signs of universality. Along with this, the manifestations of postmodernism in the last third of the twentieth century. are often considered as an intellectual game, loved by the elite creative intelligentsia both in the West and in Russia.
Meanwhile, researchers who turned to the issue of postmodernism in a situation of apparent dominance of the postmodern worldview and the emergence of a huge number of works devoted to postmodernism come to the conclusion that “numerous publications turned out to be inconsistent and contradictory: the new aesthetic phenomenon was fluid, vague and defying definition.” D. V. Zatonsky, referring to theoretical and artistic texts in order to identify and formulate general conclusions about postmodernism, called the term itself an “unintelligible word”, the use of which does little to streamline the picture of the world in the usual sense of the word. One way or another, we have to admit, following the scientist, that the most significant reason for the spread of postmodernism was the state of general crisis, and its significance lies in the fact that it called into question the traditional "system of the existence of spirit and culture."
Indeed, the formation of postmodernism is primarily associated with those profound changes in the picture of the world that accompany the post-industrial, information and computer stage of the development of modern civilization. In practice, this turned into a deep and often irrevocable disbelief in the universal significance of both the objective and subjective principles of cognition of the real world. For many, the events and phenomena of the modern world perceived by consciousness have ceased to have the character of images, signs, concepts that contain any objective significant meaning or spiritual and moral meaning, correlated with the idea of real progressive historical development or free spiritual activity. According to J.-F. Lyotard, now the so-called "zeitgeist" "may express itself in all sorts of reactive or even reactionary attitudes or utopias, but there is no positive orientation that could open before us any new perspective." In general, postmodernism was "a symptom of the collapse of the previous world and, at the same time, the lowest mark on the scale of ideological storms" with which the twenty-first century is fraught. This characterization of postmodernism can find many confirmations in theoretical works and literary texts.
At the same time, the definition of postmodernism as a phenomenon stating a general crisis and chaos that opened after the collapse of the traditional system of understanding and cognition of the world sometimes does not allow us to see some significant aspects of the postmodern period of the state of mind. We are talking about the intellectual and aesthetic efforts undertaken in line with postmodernism to develop new coordinates and define the outlines of that new type of society, culture and worldview that have emerged at the present post-industrial stage in the development of Western civilization. The case was not limited to the general denial or parody of cultural heritage. For some writers, called postmodernists, it has become more important to determine those new relationships between culture and man that develop when the principle of progressive, progressive development of society and culture in a society that exists in the era of information and computer civilization loses its dominant value.
As a result, in works of literature, a coherent picture of life based on the plot as the unfolding of events has often been replaced not so much by the traditional genre plot principle of selecting and arranging material in the spatio-temporal dimension and linear sequence, but by creating a certain integrity built on a combination of different layers of material. , united by characters or the figure of the author-narrator. In fact, the specifics of such a text can be defined by using the term "discourse". Among the numerous concepts that reveal the concept of "discourse", one should single out its understanding, which allows one to go beyond linguistics. After all, discourse can be interpreted as a "supra-phrasal unity of words", as well as "any meaningful unity, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual." In this case, the discourse is a system of socio-cultural and spiritual phenomena fixed in one form or another, external to the individual and offered to him, for example, as a cultural heritage consecrated by tradition. From this point of view, the writers of postmodernism conveyed quite thrill the fact that for a modern person living in a world of formed, “ready-to-use” diverse social and cultural material, there are two ways left: a conformist acceptance of all this or an awareness of one’s state of alienation and lack of freedom. Thus, postmodernism in creativity begins with the fact that the writer comes to understand that any creation of works of a traditional form degenerates into the reproduction of one or another discourse. Therefore, in some works of modern prose, the description of a person's stay in the world of various types of discourses becomes the main thing.
In this regard, the work of J. Barnes is characteristic, who in the novel "England, England" (1998) suggested reflecting on the question "What is real England?" for a person of the post-industrial era living in a "consumer society". The novel is divided into two parts: one is called "England", and in it we get acquainted with main character Martha, who grew up in a simple family. When she meets her father, who once left the family, she reminds him that as a child she used to put together the Counties of England puzzle, and she was always missing one piece, because. his father hid him. In other words, she represented the geography of the country as a set of external outlines of individual territories, and this puzzle can be considered a postmodern concept that reveals the level of knowledge ordinary person about your country.
This is how the fundamental question “What is reality” is defined in the novel, and the second part of the novel is devoted to a certain project to create the territory of “Good Old England” next to modern England. Barnes proposes to present the entire culture of England in the form of a socio-cultural discourse consisting of 50 concepts of "Englishness". These included the royal family and Queen Victoria, Big Ben, Parliament, Shakespeare, snobbery, The Times, homosexuality, Manchester United football club, beer, pudding, Oxford, imperialism, cricket, etc. Additionally, the text gives an extensive menu of real "English" dishes and drinks. All this is placed in a specially designed and specially created socio-cultural spatial analogue, which is a kind of grandiose reconstruction or reproduction of "old England" on a certain island territory chosen for this purpose. The organizers of this project proceed from the fact that historical knowledge is not like an accurate video recording of real events of the past, and modern man lives in a world of copies, myths, signs and archetypes. In other words, if we want to reproduce the life of English society and cultural heritage, it will not be a presentation, but a representation of this world, in other words, “its improved and enriched, ironized and summarized version”, when “the reality of the copy will become the reality that we will meet on our way." Barnes draws attention to the fact that the postmodern state modern society manifests itself, among other things, in the fact that in the sphere of culture, i.e. spiritual life of a person, certain technologies are now also being used, the world of culture is being designed and systematically created in the same way as it is done, for example, in the field of industrial production.
"England, England" is a space where the archetypes and myths about this country are presented as a spectacle and where only clouds, photographers and tourists are authentic, and everything else is the creation of the best restorers, actors, costume designers and designers using the most modern technology to create effect of antiquity and historicity. This product of the modern show business of the era of the "consumer society" is a "repositioning" of the myths about England: the England that they want to see was created Foreign tourists for their money, without experiencing some of the inconveniences that accompany guests when traveling through real country- Great Britain.
In this case, the literature of postmodernism highlighted one of the phenomena of the postindustrial world as a world of realized utopia of universal consumption. Modern man found himself in a situation where, placed in a sphere mass culture, he acts as a consumer, whose “I” is perceived as a “system of desires and their satisfaction” (E. Fromm), and the principle of unhindered consumption now extends to the sphere of classical culture and the entire cultural heritage. Thus, the concept of discourse as a sociocultural phenomenon gives Barnes the opportunity to show that the picture of the world within which a modern person exists is essentially not the fruit of his own life experience, but is imposed on him from the outside by certain technologists, “Concept developers”, as they are called in novel.
At the same time, it is very characteristic that, while recreating some of the essential aspects of the postmodern state of the modern world and man, the writers themselves perceive their work as a series of procedures for creating texts outside the classical tradition of prose. We are talking about understanding creativity as a process of individual processing, combination and combination of individual already formed layers of material, parts of cultural texts, individual images and archetypes. In the second half of the twentieth century. It is this postmodern type of activity that temporarily becomes dominant in protecting, preserving and realizing the primordial human need and ability for cognition and creativity.
In this case, the internal interconnections of text fragments, images and motifs in the postmodern text are reproduced as a discourse, which is generally characterized as one of the evidence of the so-called “post-historical state” of artistic consciousness in the last third of the 20th century. In postmodernism, there is a consistent replacement of the real historical perspective of the transition from the past to the future by the process of deconstruction. individual painting world, whose integrity is entirely based on discourse, in the process of recreating which this picture of the world acquires a certain connection for the reader, sometimes opening the way for him to a new understanding of this world and his position in it. In other words, postmodernism draws new sources of artistry in recreating a picture of the world from various historical, socio-cultural and informational fragments. Thus, it is proposed to evaluate the existence and spiritual life of the individual not so much in social circumstances, but in modern historical and cultural context.
At the same time, it is the informational and cultural aspect of the selection and organization of material that makes up the specifics of postmodernist texts, which look like a multi-level system. Most often, three levels can be distinguished: artistic (figurative), informational and cultural. At the informational level, the use of extra-artistic text fragments, which are commonly called documents, is extremely characteristic of postmodernism. Narratives about the heroes and their lives are supplemented by heterogeneous material already processed and ordered for understanding. In some cases, parts of the texts may be any genuine formalized samples or their imitations: for example, diaries and diary entries, letters, files, trial records, data from the field of sociology or psychology, excerpts from newspapers, quotations from books, including including from literary works of poetry and prose, written in a variety of eras. All this is assembled into a literary text, contributes to the creation of the culturological context of the narrative and becomes part of the discourse that accompanies the description, which has the genre features of a novel at the plot-plot level and reveals the problems of the individual fate of the hero.
This information and cultural layer most often represents the postmodern component of the artistic narrative. It is at this level that the combination of material from different eras occurs, when images, plots, symbols from the history of culture and art are correlated with a system of norms, values and concepts at the level of modern theoretical knowledge and humanitarian issues. For example, in W. Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" excerpts from scientific, philosophical, theological literature of different eras are given as epigraphs to individual chapters. Other examples of the intellectual saturation of postmodern prose with informational, cultural and theoretical material are various types of prefaces of the authors, which have the character of independent essays. Such, for example, are “Notes on the margins of the Name of the Rose” by W. Eco or “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to the novel by J. Fowles “The Worm”, “Intermedia” between two chapters in the “History of the World in 10 ½ chapters” by J. Barnes. Following the model of a scientific treatise, J. Barnes ends his "History of the World" with a list of books that he used to describe the Middle Ages and the history of the creation of the canvas french artist Gericault "The Raft of the Medusa", and his novel "Flaubert's Parrot" is provided with a fairly detailed chronology of life French writer.
In these cases, it is important for the authors to prove the possibility of fruitful spiritual activity and intellectual freedom based on literary work. For example, A. Robbe-Grillet believes that a modern writer cannot, as before, turn outwardly solid and real everyday life into a source of creativity and give his works the character of a totalitarian truth about the norms and laws of virtue and complete knowledge about the world. Now the author "does not oppose individual provisions of this or that system, no, he denies any system." Only in his inner world can he find a source of free inspiration and a basis for creating an individual picture of the world as a text without the all-encompassing pressure of the principle of pseudo-plausibility of form and content. Living in the hope of an intellectual and aesthetic liberation from the world, the modern writer pays the price by "feeling himself as a kind of shift, a crack in the usual orderly course of things and events ...".
Not without reason, in W. Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" for the narrator, the computer becomes a symbol of unprecedented freedom in handling the material of creativity and, thereby, the intellectual liberation of the individual. “Oh happiness, oh dizziness of dissimilarity, oh my ideal reader, overwhelmed by the ideal “insomnia” ... “The mechanism of one hundred percent spirituality. If you write with a quill pen, squeaking on greasy paper and dipping it into the inkwell every minute, thoughts run ahead of each other and the hand does not keep up with the thought; if you type on a typewriter, the letters get mixed up, it is impossible to keep up with the speed of your own synapses, a dull mechanical rhythm wins. But with him (perhaps with her?), the fingers dance as they please, the brain is combined with the keyboard, and you flutter in the middle of the sky, you have wings like a bird, you compose a psychological critical analysis of the sensations of the wedding night ... ". "Proust is like a child's spill compared to such a thing." Access to an unprecedented variety of knowledge and information from the most diverse areas of the socio-cultural past and present, the possibility of their simultaneous perception, free combination and comparison, the combination of pluralism of values and norms with their conflict and totalitarian pressure on human consciousness - all determine the contradictory foundations of the postmodern method of creating artistic picture life. In practice, postmodern manifestations of methodology creative process look like a clearly defined repertoire of various ways, techniques and "technologies" of processing the source material to create a multi-level text.
However, the appearance in the 1980s a number of works of prose allows us to see that such features as quotation, fragmentation, eclecticism and playfulness, far from exhaust the possibilities of literary postmodernism. Such features of postmodern prose as the creation of a cultural, philosophical and artistic narrative (for example, a historical novel or a detective story) that do not correspond to rooted traditional ideas about prose genres have found their dominant significance. For example, “The Name of the Rose” (1980) and “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1989), “illustrated novel” “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (2004) by U. Eco, historical novel- "Fantasy" by J. Fowles "Worm" (1985), "History of the World at 10 ½ chapters” (1989) by J. Barnes, autobiographical trilogy by A. Robbe-Grillet “Romaneschi” (1985-1994). These works show that the choice of the postmodernist methodology of creativity is largely due to the desire to get away from the image of the virtual picture of the world imposed on a person from the outside in line with the rooted genre discourse, when the content and plot are determined by the generally accepted aesthetic, ideological and moral canons of modern society and mass culture. Therefore, Robbe-Grillet refused to mislead readers simply by extracting from the material of reality a form of "innocent and honest story." The writer, for example, sees untapped opportunities for creativity in the fact that in the imagination of an author writing about the war of 1914, historically accurate military episodes may well be combined with images of heroes from medieval epic tales and chivalric novels. According to J. Barnes, the artistic deconstruction of the world is necessary because, as a rule, “we invent our own story in order to bypass the facts that we do not want to accept” and, as a result, “we live in an atmosphere of universal triumph of untruth.” Only art, as a result of human creative activity free from outside pressure, can overcome the rigid plot of an ideologized picture of the world, reviving old themes, images and concepts through their individual rethinking, combination and interpretation. In The History of the World, the author set the task of overcoming the superficial plot and approximateness of the generally accepted panorama of the historical past and present. The transition from one “elegant plot” to another over a complex stream of events can only be justified by the fact that by limiting his knowledge of life to selective fragments connected into a certain plot, modern man moderates his panic and pain from the perception of chaos and cruelty of the real world.
On the other hand, it is the transformation of real historical or contemporary events and facts into a work of art that remains the most important asset of a creative person. Barnes sees a significant difference in the understanding of fidelity to the “truth of life” in classical art and now, when the practice of imposing a wrong view of the world on people has taken root in modern mass culture through literature, newspapers and television. He draws attention to the obvious differences between the picturesque scene depicted on the painting by Géricault "The Raft of the Medusa" and the real terrible facts of the maritime disaster of this ship. Freeing his audience from the contemplation of wounds, abrasions and scenes of cannibalism, Géricault created outstanding work art that carries a charge of energy that liberates the inner world of the audience through the contemplation of the powerful figures of suffering and hopeful characters. In the modern post-industrial era, in the state of postmodernity, literature is put essentially eternal question: Will art be able to preserve and increase its intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic potential for comprehending and depicting the world and man.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that in postmodernism of the 80s. attempts to create literary texts containing a modern concept of life turn out to be associated with the development of humanistic problems, which was one of the main assets of classical literature. Therefore, in the novel by J. Fowles "The Worm", the episodes of the emergence in England of the 18th century. one of the unorthodox religious movements is interpreted as a story about how "how the sprout of personality painfully breaks through the hard stone soil of an irrational society bound by traditions." Thus, in recent decades 20th century postmodernism reveals a clear tendency to return to the field of art and creativity of a person as an intrinsically valuable person, freed from the pressure of society and generally accepted ideological and worldview canons and principles. postmodernism creativity cultural text
Used Books
1. Kuzmichev I. K. Literary criticism of the twentieth century. Crisis of methodology. Nizhny Novgorod: 1999.
Zatonsky DV Modernism and postmodernism. Kharkov: 2000.
Foreign literature. 1994. №1.
Vladimirova T. E. Called into communication: Russian discourse in intercultural communication. M.: 2010.
Bart R. Selected works: Semiotics: Poetics. M., 1989.
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"Hidden Gold of the 20th Century" is a publishing project by Maxim Nemtsov and Shasha Martynova. During the year, they are going to translate and publish six books by major English-speaking authors (including Brautigan, O'Brien and Bartelmy) - this will close the next gaps in the publication of modern foreign literature. Funds for the project are raised through crowdfunding. For "Gorky" Shashi Martynova prepared a short introduction to literary postmodernism based on the material of the authors under her charge.
The 20th century, the time of planetary delights and blackest disappointments, gave postmodernism to literature. From the very beginning, the reader treated postmodern “unbridledness” in different ways: this is not at all marshmallows in chocolate and not a Christmas tree to please everyone. The literature of postmodernism in general is the texts of freedom, the rejection of the norms, canons, attitudes and laws of the past, the goth child / punk / hippie (continue the list yourself) in a respectable - “square”, as beatniks said - family of classical literary texts. However, pretty soon the literary postmodern will be about a hundred years old, and during this time, in general, people have got used to it. He has grown a considerable audience of fans and followers, translators tirelessly hone on him professional excellence, and we have decided to summarize some of the key features of postmodern texts.
Naturally, this article does not pretend to exhaustive coverage of the topic - hundreds of dissertations have already been written on postmodernism in literature; however, an inventory of a postmodernist writer's toolbox is a useful thing in the household of any modern reader.
Postmodern literature is not a "movement", not a "school" and not " creative association". It is rather a group of texts, united by the rejection of the dogma of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to literature. by the most early examples postmodern literature in general, you can consider "Don Quixote" (1605-1615) by Cervantes and "Tristram Shandy" (1759-1767) by Lawrence Sterne.
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear about postmodern literature is the pervasive irony, sometimes understood as "black humor." For postmodernists, there are few things in the world (if any) that cannot be denounced. That is why postmodernist texts are so generous with mockery, parodic antics, and similar amusements. Here is an example for you - a quote from the novel "Willard and his bowling prizes" (1975) by Richard Brautigan:
“Better,” said Bob. - That's all that's left of the poem.
“Escaped,” said Bob. - That's all that's left of the other one.
"He's cheating on you," Bob said. - "Breaking". "With you, I forgot all the hardships." Here are three more.
“These two are amazing,” said Bob. “My grief is immeasurable, for my friends are good for nothing.” "Bite off cucumbers."
- What do you say? Do you like it? Bob asked. He forgot that she couldn't answer him. She nodded, yes, she likes it.
- Do you still want to listen? Bob asked.
He forgot that she had a gag in her mouth. (Translated by A. Guzman)
Postmodern literature is not a "movement", not a "school" and not a "creative association"
The whole novel is declared as a parody of sadomasochistic literature (you will find nowhere more serious) and at the same time a detective story. As a result, both sadomasochism and Brautigan's detective turn into a piercing watercolor of loneliness and the inability of people to understand and be understood. Another great example - cult novel Miles on Gapalin (Flann O'Brien) "Singing Lazarus" (1941, translated into Russian 2003), the worst parody of the Irish national and cultural renaissance of the turn of the century, written by a man who spoke excellent Irish, knew and loved Irish culture, but who had a deep disgust at the way the revival of culture was embodied by hysterics and mediocrity. Irreverence, as a natural consequence of irony, is a trademark of postmodernists.
Descartes spent too much time in bed, subject to a haunting hallucination that he was thinking. You are unhealthy with a similar affliction. ("The Dolkey Archive", Flann O'Brien, trans. Sh. Martynova)
The second is intertextuality and the techniques of collage, pastiche, etc. associated with it. A postmodern text is a prefabricated constructor from what was in culture before, and new meanings are generated from what has already been mastered and appropriated. This technique is very common among postmodernists, whoever you take. Masters Joyce and Beckett, modernists, however, also used this toolkit. Lyrics by Flann O'Brien, Joyce's reluctant heir (it's complicated, as they say), are a link between modernity and postmodernity: " hard life"(1961) - a modernist novel, and" At the Two-Birds Sailed" (1939, in the Russian-language edition - "About Waterfowl") is still some kind of postmodern. Here is one of the thousands of possible examples - from "The Dead Father" by Donald Barthelme:
Children, he said. Without children, I would not have become a Father. Without childhood, no Fatherhood. I myself never wanted it, they forced it on me. A kind of tribute, which I could do without, the generation and then education of each of the thousands, thousands and tens of thousands, the inflation of a small package to a large package, over a period of years, and then a certificate that large packages, if the male sex, wear their caps with bells, and if not him, then they observe the principle of jus primae noctis, the shame of sending away those who are undesirable to me, the pain of sending those who are desirable to the lifestream of a big city, so that they never warm my cold ottoman, and the leadership of hussars, maintenance public order, keeping postcodes, keeping trash out of the drain, would rather stay in your office comparing Klinger's editions, first print, second print, third print, and so on, would it fall apart on the fold? […] But no, I had to devour them, hundreds, thousands, fififofam, sometimes together with shoes, you bite a child’s leg well, and right there, between your teeth, you have a poisoned sports slipper. And hair, millions of pounds of hair scarred the intestines over the years, so why not just throw children into wells, leave them on mountain slopes, accidentally shock toy railways? And worst of all were their blue jeans, in my meals dish after dish of badly washed blue jeans, T-shirts, saris, “tom-macans”. Probably, it would be possible to hire someone to peel them for me first. (Translated by M. Nemtsov)
Another good example of “an old fairy tale in a new way” is Donald Bartelmy’s Russian-language novel The King (published posthumously, 1990), in which the legends of the Arthurian cycle are creatively rethought in the setting of World War II.
The mosaic nature of many postmodernist texts was bequeathed to us by William Burrows, and Kerouac, Bartelmy, Sorrentino, Dunleavy, Eggers and many others (we list only those who were translated into Russian in one way or another) used this technique vividly and in various ways - and use it.
Third: metafiction, in fact - writing about the very process of writing and the deconstruction of meanings associated with it. O'Brien's already mentioned novel Two Birds Sailed is a textbook example of this technique: in the novel we are told about the author who composes a novel based on Irish mythology (please: double postmodernism!), and the characters of this nested novel weave against the author intrigues and conspiracies. The novel “Irish Stew” by the postmodernist Gilbert Sorrentino (not published in Russian) is arranged according to the same principle, and in the novel by the English writer Christine Brooke-Rose “Textermination” (1992), only the characters of classical works of literature, gathered in San Francisco at the Annual Congress of Supplication for Genesis.
The fourth thing that comes to mind is a non-linear plot and other games with time. And baroque temporal architecture in general. V. (1963) by Thomas Pynchon is a perfect example. In general, Pynchon is a great lover and craftsman of turning pretzels out of time - remember the third chapter of the novel "V.", from reading which the brain of more than one generation of readers is twisted into a DNA helix.
Magic realism - the merging and mixing of life-like and non-lifelike literature - can be considered postmodern to one degree or another, and in this respect, Marquez and Borges (and even more so Cortazar) can also be considered postmodernists. Another excellent example of such interweaving is the novel by Gilbert Sorrentino with a rich title of translation options "Crystal Vision" (1981), where the whole work can be read as an interpreter for a deck of tarot cards and at the same time as everyday chronicles of one Brooklyn block. Numerous implicitly archetypal characters in this novel are characterized by Sorrentino only through direct speech, their own and addressed to them - this, by the way, is also a postmodernist device. Literature does not have to be authentic - this is what the postmodernists decided, and it is not very clear how and why to argue with them here.
The mosaic nature of many postmodern texts was bequeathed to us by William Burroughs
Separately (fifthly), it is necessary to say about the inclination towards technoculture and hyperreality as about the desire to go beyond the reality given to us in sensations. The Internet and virtual reality are, to a certain extent, products of postmodernity. In this sense, perhaps the best example is Thomas Pynchon's recently published Russian novel The Edge of the Blow (2013).
The result of all that has happened in the 20th century is paranoia as a desire to discover order behind chaos. Postmodernist writers, following Kafka and Orwell, are attempting to re-systematize reality and the suffocating spaces of Magnus Mills (Cattle Drive, Scheme full time”and the upcoming release in Russian“ All Quiet on the Orient Express ), O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1939/1940) and, of course, the whole Pynchon - about this, although we have just a couple of examples out of many.
Postmodernism in literature in general is a territory of complete freedom. The toolkit of postmodernists, compared to what their predecessors managed, is much wider - everything is allowed: an unreliable narrator, and surreal metaphor, and abundant lists and catalogs, and word creation, wordplay and other lexical exhibitionism, and the emancipation of the language in general, breaking or a distortion of syntax, and dialogue as a narrative engine.
Some of the novels mentioned in the article are being prepared for publication in Russian by Dodo Press, and you can personally participate in this: the Hidden Gold of the 20th Century project is a substantive continuation of the conversation about literary postmodernism of the 20th century (and not only).
In a broad sense postmodernism- this is a general trend in European culture, which has its own philosophical base; it is a peculiar attitude, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a trend in literature and art, expressed in the creation of specific works.
Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.
Conceptualism or social art.
Conceptualism, or sots art- this trend is consistently expanding the postmodern picture of the world, involving more and more cultural languages(from socialist realism to various classical tendencies, etc.). Intertwining and comparing authoritative languages with marginal ones (obscenities, for example), sacred with profane, semi-official with rebellious ones, conceptualism reveals the closeness of various myths of cultural consciousness, equally destroying reality, replacing it with a set of fictions and at the same time totalitarianly imposing on the reader their idea of the world, truth, ideal. Conceptualism is mainly focused on rethinking the languages of power (be it the language of political power, that is, social realism, or the language of a morally authoritative tradition, for example, Russian classics, or various mythologies of history).
Conceptualism in literature is represented primarily by such authors as D. A. Pigorov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, and in a transformed form by Evgeny Popov, Anatoly Gavrilov, Zufar Gareev, Nikolai Baitov, Igor Yarkevich and others.
Postmodernism is a trend that can be defined as neo-baroque. The Italian theorist Omar Calabrese, in his book Neo-Baroque, outlined the main features of this movement:
aesthetics of repetition: dialectics of the unique and repeatable - polycentrism, regulated irregularity, ragged rhythm (thematically beaten in "Moscow-Petushki" and "Pushkin House", the poetic systems of Rubinstein and Kibirov are built on these principles);
aesthetics of excess- experiments on stretching boundaries to the last limits, monstrosity (corporality of Aksenov, Aleshkovsky, monstrosity of characters and, above all, the narrator in Sasha Sokolov's "Palisandria");
shifting emphasis from the whole to a detail and / or fragment: redundancy of details, "in which the detail actually becomes a system" (Sokolov, Tolstaya);
randomness, discontinuity, irregularity as the dominant compositional principles, combining unequal and heterogeneous texts into a single metatext (“Moscow-Petushki” by Erofeev, “School for Fools” and “Between a Dog and a Wolf” by Sokolov, “Pushkin House” by Bitov, “Chapaev and Emptiness” by Pelevin, etc.).
unresolvability of collisions(forming, in turn, a system of "knots" and "mazes"): the pleasure of resolving the conflict, plot collisions, etc. is replaced by the "taste of loss and mystery."
The emergence of postmodernism.
Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by J. Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is the complete rejection of the old, the creation of the new at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dissipation of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.
Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra (Deleuze). The world turns into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or by other people.
In this regard, we should also mention the concept of intertextuality, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotations taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands to infinity.
Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure, where there are no oppositions, no beginning and no end.
The main concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. Remake is a new version already written work (cf.: texts by Furmanov and Pelevin). Narrative is a system of ideas about history. History is not a change of events in their chronological order, but a myth created by the consciousness of people.
So, the postmodern text is the interaction of the languages of the game, it does not imitate life, as the traditional one does. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.
M. Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodern principle of paralogy and on the concept of “paralogy”, highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western. Paralogy is “contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of intelligence as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of a binary situation, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of some one beginning, moreover, the possibility of the existence of an opposing one is recognized. The paralogic lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously, interact, but at the same time, the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:
focusing precisely on the search for compromises and dialogic interfaces between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting point” between the fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.
at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive character, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to contradictory integrity.
The category of simulacra is somewhat different. Simulacra control people's behavior, their perception, and ultimately their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the "death of subjectivity": the human "I" is also made up of a set of simulacra.
The set of simulacra in postmodernism is opposed not to reality, but to its absence, that is, to emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become a source of reality generation only under the condition of realizing their simulative, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of the initial disbelief in their reality. The existence of the category of simulacra forces its interaction with reality. Thus, a certain mechanism of aesthetic perception appears, which is characteristic of Russian postmodernism.
In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation - Integrity according to the definition of M. Lipovetsky: “... even the most radical variants of the decomposition of integrity in the texts of Russian postmodernism are devoid of independent meaning and are presented as mechanisms for generating some “non-classical” models of integrity.”
The category of Emptiness also acquires a different direction in Russian postmodernism. According to V. Pelevin, emptiness “does not reflect anything, and therefore nothing can be destined on it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, and so much so that no tool that has entered into a confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Due to this, Pelevin's emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.
Opposition Personal - Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.
Memory - Oblivion- directly from A. Bitov is realized in the provision on culture: "... in order to save - it is necessary to forget."
Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky deduces another, broader one - the opposition Chaos - Space. “Chaos is a system whose activity is opposite to the indifferent disorder that reigns in a state of equilibrium; no stability any longer ensures the correctness of the macroscopic description, all possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out to be at the same time all that it can be. To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of "Chaosmos", which takes the place of harmony.
In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism (in the surrealistic utopia of freedom from Sokolov's School for Fools) and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, whether it be A. Bitov's "dialectic of the soul" coexist with postmodern skepticism. or "mercy to the fallen" by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.
A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - the author - the narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their permanent affiliation is the archetype of the holy fool. More precisely, the archetype of the holy fool in the text is the center, the point where the main lines converge. Moreover, it can perform two functions (at least):
A classic version of a borderline subject, floating between diametrical cultural codes. So, for example, Venichka in the poem "Moscow - Petushki" tries, being already on the other side, to reunite in himself Yesenin, Jesus Christ, fantastic cocktails, love, tenderness, the editorial of Pravda. And this turns out to be possible only within the limits of the foolish consciousness. The hero of Sasha Sokolov is divided in half from time to time, also standing in the center of cultural codes, but without dwelling on any of them, but as if passing their flow through him. This closely corresponds to the theory of postmodernism about the existence of the Other. It is thanks to the existence of the Other (or Others), in other words, the society, in the human mind that all kinds of cultural codes intersect, forming an unpredictable mosaic.
At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism, which has reached out from Rozanov and Kharms to the present.
Russian postmodernism also has several options for saturating the artistic space. Here are some of them.
For example, a work can be based on a rich state of culture, which largely substantiates the content (“Pushkin House” by A. Bitov, “Moscow - Petushki” by V. Erofeev). There is another version of postmodernism: the saturated state of culture is replaced by endless emotions for any reason. The reader is offered an encyclopedia of emotions and philosophical conversations about everything in the world, and especially about the post-Soviet confusion, perceived as a terrible black reality, as a complete failure, a dead end (“Endless Dead End” by D. Galkovsky, works by V. Sorokin).
Postmodernism
The end of World War II marked an important turn in the worldview of Western civilization. The war was not only a clash of states, but also a clash of ideas, each of which promised to make the world perfect, and in return brought rivers of blood. Hence - the feeling of the crisis of the idea, that is, disbelief in the possibility of any idea to make the world a better place. There was also a crisis of the idea of art. On the other hand, the number of literary works has reached such a quantity that it seems that everything has already been written, each text contains links to previous texts, that is, it is a metatext.
In the course of the development of the literary process, the gap between the elite and pop culture became too deep, the phenomenon of “works for philologists” appeared, to read and understand which you need to have a very good philological education. Postmodernism has become a reaction to this split, connecting both areas of the multi-layered work. For example, Suskind's "Perfumer" can be read as a detective, or maybe as philosophical novel, revealing the questions of genius, artist and art.
Modernism, which explored the world as the realization of certain absolutes, eternal truths, gave way to postmodernism, for which the whole world is a game without a happy ending. As a philosophical category, the term "postmodernism" has spread thanks to the works of the philosophers Zhe. Derrida, J. Bataille, M. Foucault and especially the book French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979).
The principles of repetition and compatibility are transformed into a style of artistic thinking with its inherent features of eclecticism, a tendency to stylization, quoting, rewriting, reminiscences, and allusions. The artist does not deal with "pure" material, but with culturally assimilated, because the existence of art in previous classical forms is impossible in post-industrial society with its unlimited potential for serial reproduction and replication.
The Encyclopedia of Literary Movements and Currents provides the following list of features of postmodernism:
1. The cult of an independent personality.
2. Craving for the archaic, for the myth of the collective unconscious.
3. The desire to combine, mutually supplement the truths (sometimes polar opposites) of many people, nations, cultures, religions, philosophies, the vision of everyday real life as a theater of the absurd, an apocalyptic carnival.
4. The use of an emphatically playful style to emphasize the abnormality, non-authenticity, anti-naturalness of the way of life prevailing in reality.
5. Deliberately whimsical weave different styles narration (high classic and sentimental or crudely naturalistic and fabulous, etc.; scientific, journalistic, business, etc. styles are often woven into the artistic style).
6. A mixture of many traditional genre varieties.
7. Plots of works - these are easily disguised allusions (hints) to well-known plots of literature of previous eras.
8. Borrowings, echoes are observed not only at the plot-compositional, but also at the figurative, linguistic levels.
9. As a rule, in a postmodern work there is an image of a narrator.
10. Irony and parody.
The main features of the poetics of postmodernism are intertextuality (creating one's own text from others'); collage and montage (“gluing” of equal fragments); use of allusions; attraction to prose of a complicated form, in particular, with free composition; bricolage (indirect achievement of the author's intention); saturation of the text with irony.
Postmodernism develops in the genres of fantastic parables, confession novels, dystopias, short stories, mythological novels, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novels, etc. Genre forms can be combined to reveal new artistic structures.
Günter Grass (The Tin Drum, 1959) is considered the first postmodernist. Outstanding representatives of postmodern literature: V. Eco, H.-L. Borges, M. Pavic, M. Kundera, P. Suskind, V. Pelevin, I. Brodsky, F. Begbeder.
In the second half of the XX century. the genre is activated science fiction, which in its best examples is combined with prognostication (forecasts for the future) and dystopia.
In the pre-war period, existentialism arose, and after the Second World War, existentialism was actively developing. Existentialism (lat. existentiel - existence) is a direction in philosophy and a current of modernism, in which the source of a work of art is the artist himself, expressing the life of the individual, creating an artistic reality that reveals the secret of being in general. The sources of existentialism were contained in the writings of the German thinker of the 19th century. From Kierkegaard.
Existentialism in works of art reflects the mood of the intelligentsia, disappointed with social and ethical theories. Writers seek to understand the causes of the tragic disorder human life. The categories of the absurdity of life, fear, despair, loneliness, suffering, death are put forward in the first place. Representatives of this philosophy argued that the only thing that a person has is his inner world, the right to choose, free will.
Existentialism is spreading in French (A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre and others), German (E. Nossak, A. Döblin), English (A. Murdoch, V. Golding), Spanish (M. de Unamuno), American (N. Mailer, J. Baldwin), Japanese ( Kobo Abe) literatures.
In the second half of the XX century. develops " new novel"("anti-novel") - a genre equivalent of the French modern novel 1940-1970s, which arises as a denial of existentialism. Representatives of this genre are N. Sarrot, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor, K. Simon and others.
A significant phenomenon of the theatrical avant-garde of the second half of the XX century. is the so-called theater of the absurd. The dramaturgy of this direction is characterized by the absence of a place and time of action, the destruction of the plot and composition, irrationalism, paradoxical collisions, an alloy of the tragic and the comic. The most talented representatives of the "theater of the absurd" are S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, E. Albee, G. Frisch and others.
A notable phenomenon in the world process of the second half of the XX century. became "magical realism" - a direction in which elements of the real and the imaginary, the real and the fantastic, the everyday and the mythological, the probable and the mysterious, everyday life and eternity are organically combined. It acquired the greatest development in Latin American literature (A. Karpent "єp, J. Amado, G. Garcia Marquez, G. Vargas Llosa, M. Asturias, etc.). A special role in the work of these authors is played by the myth, which is the basis of the work. A classic example of magical realism is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. Garcia Márquez (1967), where the history of Colombia and all of Latin America is recreated in mythical-real images.
In the second half of the XX century. develops and traditional realism, which acquires new features. The image of individual being is combined with historical analysis, which is due to the desire of artists to understand the logic of social laws (G. Belle, E.-M. Remarque, V. Bykov, N. Dumbadze and others).
Literary process of the second half of the XX century. determined primarily by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as well as powerful development intellectual trend, science fiction, "magical realism", avant-garde phenomena, etc.
Postmodernism was widely discussed in the West in the early 1980s. Some researchers consider Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake" (1939) to be the beginning of postmodernism, others - Joyce's preliminary novel "Ulysses", still others - American "new poetry" of the 1940s and 1950s, others think that postmodernism is not a fixed chronological phenomenon, and the spiritual state and “every epoch has its own postmodernism” (Eko), the fifth generally speak of postmodernism as “one of the intellectual fictions of our time” (Yu. Andrukhovych). However, most scholars believe that the transition from modernism to postmodernism took place in the mid-1950s. In the 60s and 70s, postmodernism covered various national literatures, and in the 80s it became the dominant trend in modern literature and culture.
The first manifestations of postmodernism can be considered such trends as the American school of "black humor" (W. Burroughs, D. Wart, D. Barthelm, D. Donlivy, K. Kesey, K. Vonnegut, D. Heller, etc.), the French "new novel" (A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sarrot, M. Butor, K. Simon, etc.), "theater of the absurd" (E. Ionesco, S. Beckett, J. Gonit, F. Arrabal, etc.) .
The most prominent postmodern writers include the English John Fowles ("The Collector", "The French Lieutenant's Woman"), Julian Barnes ("A History of the World in Nine and a Half Chapters") and Peter Ackroyd ("Milton in America"), the German Patrick Suskind (" Perfumer"), Austrian Carl Ransmayr (" last world”), Italians Italo Calvino (“Slowness”) and Umberto Eco (“The Name of the Rose”, “Foucault’s Pendulum”), Americans Thomas Pinchon (“Entropy”, “For Sale No. 49”) and Vladimir Nabokov (English-language novels “Pale Fire” and others), Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (short stories and essays) and Julio Cortazar (The Hopscotch Game).
An outstanding place in the history of the latest postmodern novel is also occupied by its Slavic representatives, in particular the Czech Milan Kundera and the Serb Milorad Pavić.
A specific phenomenon is Russian postmodernism, represented both by the authors of the metropolis (A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Ven. Erofeev, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Prigov, T. Tolstaya, V. Sorokin, V. Pelevin), and representatives of the literary emigration ( V. Aksenov, I. Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov).
Postmodernism claims to express a general theoretical "superstructure" contemporary art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, fashion. Today they talk not only about “postmodern creativity”, but also about “postmodern consciousness”, “postmodern mentality”, “postmodern mentality”, etc.
Postmodern creativity involves aesthetic pluralism at all levels (plot, composition, figurative, characterological, chronotopic, etc.), completeness of presentation without evaluation, reading the text in a cultural context, co-creation of the reader and writer, mythological thinking, a combination of historical and timeless categories, dialogue , irony.
The leading features of postmodern literature are irony, “quoting thinking”, intertextuality, pastiche, collage, and the principle of the game.
Total irony reigns in postmodernism, general ridicule and ridicule from all over. Numerous postmodern works of art are characterized by a conscious attitude towards the ironic juxtaposition of various genres, styles, artistic movements. A work of postmodernism is always a mockery of previous and unacceptable forms of aesthetic experience: realism, modernism, mass culture. Thus, irony defeats the serious modernist tragedy inherent, for example, in the works of F. Kafka.
One of the main principles of postmodernism is quotation, and representatives of this trend are characterized by quotation thinking. The American researcher B. Morrissett called postmodern prose "citation literature". The total postmodern quotation comes to replace the elegant modernist reminiscence. Quite postmodern is an American student joke about how a philology student read Hamlet for the first time and was disappointed: nothing special, a collection of common catchwords and expressions. Some works of postmodernism turn into quotation books. So, the novel by the French writer Jacques Rivet "The Young Ladies from A." is a collection of 750 quotations from 408 authors.
Such a concept as intertextuality is also associated with postmodern quotation thinking. The French researcher Julia Kristeva, who introduces this term into literary criticism, noted: “Any text is built as a mosaic of citations, any text is a product of the absorption and transformation of some other text.” The French semiotician Roland Karaulov wrote: “Each text is an intertext; other texts are present in it at various levels in more or less recognizable forms: texts of the previous culture and texts of the surrounding culture. Each text is a new fabric woven from old quotations.” Intertext in the art of postmodernism is the main way of constructing a text and consists in the fact that the text is built from quotations from other texts.
If numerous modernist novels were also intertextual (Ulysses by J. Joyce, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, T. Mann's Doctor Faustus, G. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game) and even realistic works (as Y. Tynyanov proved, Dostoevsky's novel "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants" is a parody of Gogol and his works), it is the achievement of postmodernism with hypertext. This is a text constructed in such a way that it turns into a system, a hierarchy of texts, at the same time constituting a unity and a multitude of texts. Its example is any dictionary or encyclopedia, where each entry refers to other entries in the same edition. You can read such text in an equal way: from one article to another, ignoring hypertext links; read all the articles in a row or moving from one link to another, carrying out "hypertext navigation". Therefore, such a flexible device as hypertext can be manipulated at one's own discretion. in 1976 American writer Raymond Federman published a novel, which is called - "At your discretion." It can be read at the request of the reader, from any place, shuffling unnumbered and bound pages. The concept of hypertext is also associated with computer virtual realities. Today's hypertexts are computer literature, which can only be read on the monitor: by pressing one key, you are transferred to the backstory of the hero, by pressing another - you change the bad ending to a good one, etc.
A sign of postmodern literature is the so-called pastish (from Italian pasbiccio - an opera composed of excerpts from other operas, a mixture, potpourri, stylization). It is a specific variant of parody, which changes its functions in postmodernism. Pastish differs from parody in that now there is nothing to parody, there is no serious object that can be ridiculed. O. M. Freudenberg wrote that only that which is “living and holy” can be parodied. For a day of non-postmodernism, nothing "lives", and even more so nothing is "holy". Pastish is also understood as parody.
Postmodern art is by its nature fragmentary, discrete, eclectic. Hence such a feature of it as a collage. Postmodern collage may seem new form modernist montage, but it differs significantly from it. In modernism, montage, although it was composed of incomparable images, was nevertheless united into a whole by the unity of style and technique. In the postmodern collage, on the contrary, various fragments of the collected objects remain unchanged, not transformed into a single whole, each of them retains its isolation.
Important for postmodernism with the principle of the game. Classical moral and ethical values are transferred to the game plane, as M. Ignatenko notes, “yesterday’s classical culture and spiritual values live dead in postmodernity - its era does not live with them, it plays with them, it plays with them, it plays with them.”
Other characteristics of postmodernism include uncertainty, decanonization, carialization, theatricality, hybridization of genres, co-creation of the reader, saturation with cultural realities, “dissolution of character” (complete destruction of the character as a psychologically and socially determined character), attitude to literature as to the “first reality” (text does not reflect reality, but creates new reality, even many realities, often independent of each other). And the most common images-metaphors of postmodernism are centaur, carnival, labyrinth, library, madness.
A phenomenon of modern literature and culture is also multiculturalism, through which the multi-component American nation has naturally realized the unsteady uncertainty of postmodernism. A more "grounded" multi-cult) previously "voiced" thousands of uniform unique living American voices representatives of various racial, ethnic, gender, local and other specific streams. The literature of multiculturalism includes African American, Indian, Chicano (Mexicans and other Latin Americans, a significant number of whom live in the United States), literature of various ethnic groups inhabiting America (including Ukrainians), American descendants of Asians, Europeans, literature of minorities of all stripes .
