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; nevertheless, it seems possible to distinguish three main meanings in which this term is 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 generally accepted use - Christianity (and in a broader sense - belief in God in general), science, democracy, communism (as belief 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. Such disappointment, the feeling of "lostness" led to a sharp decentralization of the cultural sphere of 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. The theoretical foundations of poststructuralism are, in particular, a structuralist-deconstructivist complex of ideas and attitudes. Among the techniques used by postmodernists, the following should be mentioned: refusal to imitate reality in images (generally accepted is associated with the familiar, and is a great delusion of mankind) in favor of the Game with form, conventions and symbols from the arsenal of "high art"; cessation of the pursuit of originality: in the age of mass production, any originality instantly loses its 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, 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, postmodernists used the achievements of a variety of artistic methods for their own purposes. Thus, an ironic attitude to everything, without exception, saves postmodernists, as once romantics, from fixing on something unchanging, solid. They, like the existentialists, put the individual above the universal, and the individual above the system. As John Barth, one of the theorists and practitioners of postmodernism, wrote, "the main feature of postmodernism is the global assertion of human rights, which are more important than any interests of the state." 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 positive aspect of this is that postmodernists are reviving obsolete artistic methods - baroque, gothic, but their irony, their boundless doubt prevails over everything.
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 stylistic 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 boundary 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 the novels "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, "Paper People" 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 nevertheless oriented towards a reader of high artistic culture, because one of the main techniques of postmodernism is the technique of literary allusion, association, paradox, and various kinds of collages. Postmodernists also use the technique of "shock therapy", aimed at destroying the habitual norms of the reader's perception, which was formed by cultural tradition: the fusion of tragedy and farce, posing important problems and all-encompassing irony.
Conclusions to Chapter 1
The characteristic features of postmodernism as a 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 "the unconditional maximum of negation, or absolute nothingness, 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 something else 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.
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 story, or maybe as a philosophical novel that reveals the issues 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 of the 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, allusions. The artist does not deal with "pure" material, but with culturally assimilated, because the existence of art in the previous classical forms is impossible in a 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 bizarre interweaving of different styles of narration (high classic and sentimental or crudely naturalistic and fabulous, etc.; scientific, journalistic, business styles, etc. 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, confessional novels, dystopias, short stories, mythological novels, socio-philosophical and socio-psychological novels, etc. Genre forms can be combined, opening up 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 of science fiction is activated, 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 of 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) literature.
In the second half of the XX century. a “new novel” (“anti-novel”) is developing - a genre equivalent of the French modern novel of the 1940s-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 Marquez (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. traditional realism is also developing, which is acquiring 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. is determined primarily by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, as well as the powerful development of the intellectual trend, science fiction, "magic 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 Karl Ransmayr ("The 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 the general theoretical "superstructure" of contemporary art, philosophy, science, politics, economics, and 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 the 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 an ironic juxtaposition of various genres, styles, and 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, the 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 that can only be read on a monitor: by pressing one key, you are transported to the hero's backstory, 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 like a new form of 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 translated into a playful 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 a 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 "earthed" multicult) previously "voiced" thousands of equal, unique living American voices of 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 .
Postmodernism - (English postmodernism) - a common name referring to the latest trends in contemporary art. It was introduced into wide use in 1969 by the American literary critic L. Friedler. In the specialized literature there is no consensus on the meaning of the term "postmodernism". As a rule, postmodernism is attributed to post-war European and American culture, but there are also attempts to extend this concept to an earlier period or, conversely, to attribute it to the art of the future, after or outside of modernity. Despite the vagueness of the term, there are certain realities of contemporary art behind it.
The concept of "postmodernism" can be interpreted in a broad and narrow sense. In a broad sense, postmodernism is a state of culture as a whole, a set of ideas, concepts, a special view of the world. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a phenomenon of aesthetics, a literary trend in which the ideas of postmodernism in a broad sense are embodied.
Postmodernism emerged in the second half of the 20th century. R. Barthes, J. Kristeva, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, U. Eco played a special role in shaping the ideas of postmodernism. In practice, these ideas were implemented by A. Murdoch, J. Fowles, J. Barnes, M. Pavic, I. Calvino and many others. others
The main elements of postmodern consciousness:
Narrative- a story with all its properties and signs of a fictionalized narrative. The concept of narrative is actively used and interpreted in various poststructuralist theories.total relativism- the relativity of everything and everything, the absence of absolute truths and precise guidelines. There are many points of view, and each of them is true in its own way, so the concept of truth becomes meaningless. The world of postmodernism is extremely relative, everything in it is unsteady and there is nothing absolute. All traditional landmarks have been revised and refuted. The concepts of good, evil, love, justice and more. others have lost their meaning.
A consequence of total relativism is the concept end of history, which means the denial of the objective linear nature of the historical process. There is no single history of mankind; large-scale explanatory systems that those in power create for their own purposes. Metanarratives are, for example, Christianity, Marxism. Postmodernism is characterized by distrust of metanarratives.
Epistemological uncertainty- a feature of the worldview in which the world is perceived as absurd, chaotic, inexplicable. Episteme- this is a set of ideas that in this era defines the boundaries of the true (close to the concept of a scientific paradigm). Epistemological uncertainty arises during the period of episteme change, when the old episteme no longer meets the needs of society, and the new one has not yet been formed.
Simulacrum- this is an object that arises as a result of the simulation process, not connected with reality, but perceived as real, the so-called. "connotation without denotation". The central concept of postmodernism, this concept existed before, but it was in the context of postmodern aesthetics that it was developed by J. Borillard. “A simulacrum is a pseudo-thing that replaces the “agonizing reality” with post-reality through a simulation that passes off absence as presence, blurring the distinction between real and imaginary. It occupies in non-classical and postmodern aesthetics the place that belonged to the artistic image in traditional aesthetic systems.
Simulation- the generation of the hyperreal with the help of models of the real that do not have their own sources in reality. The process of generating simulacra.
The main elements of postmodern aesthetics:
Synthesis is one of the fundamental principles of postmodern aesthetics. Anything can be combined with anything: different types of art, language styles, genres, seemingly incompatible ethical and aesthetic principles, high and low, mass and elite, beautiful and ugly, and so on. R. Barth in the works of the 50-60s proposed to abolish literature as such, and instead formulate a universal form of creative activity that could combine theoretical developments and aesthetic practices. Many classics of postmodernism are both theoretical researchers and practical writers (W. Eco, A. Murdoch, Yu. Kristeva).
Intertextuality- special dialogical relations of texts, built as a mosaic of citations, which are the result of absorption and modification of other texts, orientation to the context. The concept was introduced by Yu. Kristeva. "Any text is located at the intersection of many texts, rereading, emphasizing, condensing, moving and deepening of which it is" (F. Sollers). Intertextuality is not a synthesis, the life-giving essence of which is the "fusion of artistic energies", the connection of thesis with antithesis, tradition with innovation. Intertextuality opposes "merging" with the "competition of a specializing group," which was called modernism, then postmodernism.
Nonlinear reading. Associated with the theory of J. Deleuze and F. Guattari about two types of culture: "tree" culture and "rhizome culture". The first type is associated with the principle of imitation of nature, the transformation of world chaos into an aesthetic cosmos through creative effort, here the book is a "tracing paper", a "photo" of the world. The embodiment of the second type of culture is postmodern art. “If the world is chaos, then the book will become not a cosmos, but a chaosmos, not a tree, but a rhizome. The book-rhizome implements a fundamentally new type of aesthetic connections. All its points will be interconnected, but these connections are unstructured, multiple, confusing, they break off unexpectedly every now and then. Here the book is no longer a "tracing paper", but a "map" of the world. “It is not the death of the book that is coming, but the birth of a new type of reading: the main thing for the reader will be not to understand the content of the book, but to use it as a mechanism, to experiment with it. "Rhizome Culture" will become a kind of "smorgasbord" for the reader: everyone will take whatever they want from the book-plate.
Double coding- the principle of text organization, according to which the work is addressed simultaneously to differently prepared readers who can read different layers of the work. An adventurous plot and deep philosophical problems can coexist in one text. An example of a work with double coding is U. Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose", which can be read both as a fascinating detective story and as a "semiological" novel.
World as text. The theory of postmodernism was created on the basis of the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as a culturologist, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, "the world is a text", "text is the only possible model of reality". The second most important theorist of poststructuralism is considered to be a philosopher, culturologist Michel Foucault. His position is often seen as a continuation of the Nietzschean line of thought. Thus, history for Foucault is the largest manifestation of human madness, the total lawlessness of the unconscious.
Other followers of Derrida (they are also like-minded people, and opponents, and independent theorists): in France - Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes. In the USA - Yale School (Yale University).
According to postmodernist theorists, language functions according to its own laws. Shortly speaking, the world is comprehended by a person only in the form of this or that story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of a "literary" discourse (from the Latin discurs - "logical construction").
Doubt about the reliability of scientific knowledge has led postmodernists to the belief that the most adequate comprehension of reality is available only to intuitive - "poetic thinking". The specific vision of the world as chaos, which appears to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, has received the definition of "postmodern sensitivity".
From the second half of the 20th century, philosophy began to offer humanity to come to terms with the fact that there are no absolute beginnings in our being, but this was perceived not as the impotence of the human mind, but as a kind of richness of our nature, since the absence of a primary ideal stimulates the diversity of the vision of life. There is no single correct approach - they are all correct, adequate. This is how the situation of postmodernism is formed.
From the point of view of postmodernism, modernism is characterized by the desire to know the beginning of beginnings. And postmodernism comes to the idea of abandoning these aspirations, because. our world is a world of varieties, movements of meanings, and none of them is the most correct. Mankind must accept this diversity and not pretend to comprehend the truth. The burden of tragedy and chaos is removed from a person, but he realizes that his choice is one of many possible.
Postmodernism absolutely consciously revises the entire literary heritage. It becomes today the existing cultural context - a huge cultural unwritten encyclopedia, where all texts relate to each other as parts of an intertext.
Any text is a quote from another text. We know something, therefore we can express it in words. How do we know them? Heard, read, learned. Everything that we do not know is also described in words.
Our culture is made up of cultural context. Literature is part of the cultural context in which we live. We can use these works, they are part of the reality, the picture of which we create for ourselves.
All our knowledge is information that we have learned. It comes to us in the form of words that someone draws up. But this someone is not the bearer of absolute knowledge – this information is just an interpretation. Everyone must understand that he is not a carrier of absolute knowledge, but at the same time, our interpretations can be more or less complete, depending on the amount of information processed, and they cannot be right or wrong.
The hallmark of postmodernism is conceptuality.
The work consolidates the writer's vision of the world, and not just describes the world. We get the picture as it appears in the mind of the author.
The trend, called postmodernism, arose at the end of the 20th century and combined the philosophical, ideological and cultural moods of its time. Occurred and art, religion, philosophy. Postmodernism, not striving to study the deep problems of being, gravitates toward simplicity, a superficial reflection of the world. Therefore, the literature of postmodernism is aimed not at understanding the world, but at accepting it as it is.
Postmodernism in Russia
The forerunners of postmodernism were modernism and avant-gardism, which sought to revive the traditions of the Silver Age. Russian postmodernism in literature has abandoned the mythologization of reality, to which previous literary trends gravitated. But at the same time, he creates his own mythology, resorting to it as the most understandable cultural language. Postmodernist writers conducted a dialogue with chaos in their works, presenting it as a real model of life, where the utopia is the harmony of the world. At the same time, there was a search for a compromise between space and chaos.
Russian postmodern writers
The ideas considered by various authors in their works are sometimes strange unstable hybrids, designed to always conflict, being absolutely incompatible concepts. So, in the books of V. Erofeev, A. Bitov and S. Sokolov, compromises, paradoxical in essence, between life and death are presented. T. Tolstoy and V. Pelevin - between fantasy and reality, and Pietsuha - between law and absurdity. From the fact that postmodernism in Russian literature is based on combinations of opposite concepts: the sublime and the base, pathos and mockery, fragmentation and integrity, the oxymoron becomes its main principle.
The postmodern writers, in addition to those already listed, include S. Dovlatov, L. Petrushevskaya, V. Aksyonova. In their works, the main characteristic features of postmodernism are observed, such as an understanding of art as a way of organizing a text according to special rules; an attempt to convey a vision of the world through organized chaos on the pages of a literary work; attraction to parody and denial of authority; emphasizing the conventionality of the artistic and visual techniques used in the works; connection within the same text of different literary eras and genres. The ideas that postmodernism proclaimed in literature point to its continuity with modernism, which in turn called for a departure from civilization and a return to savagery, which leads to the highest point of involution - chaos. But in specific literary works one cannot see only the desire for destruction, there is always a creative tendency. They can manifest themselves in different ways, one prevail over the other. For example, Vladimir Sorokin's works are dominated by the desire for destruction.
Formed in Russia in the 80-90s, postmodernism in literature absorbed the collapse of ideals and the desire to get away from the orderliness of the world, so a mosaic and fragmentary consciousness arose. Each author has refracted this in his own way in his work. L. Petrushevskaya and her works combine a craving for naturalistic nudity in describing reality and the desire to get out of it into the realm of the mystical. The perception of the world in the post-Soviet era was characterized precisely as chaotic. Often in the center of the plot of postmodernists there is an act of creativity, and the main character is a writer. It is not so much the relationship of the character with real life that is explored, but with the text. This is observed in the works of A. Bitov, Yu. Buyda, S. Sokolov. The effect of literature being closed on itself comes out when the world is perceived as a text. The protagonist, often identified with the author, pays a terrible price for its imperfection when confronted with reality.
It can be predicted that, being focused on destruction and chaos, postmodernism in literature will one day leave the stage and give way to another trend aimed at a systemic worldview. Because sooner or later the state of chaos is replaced by order.
All over the world, it is generally accepted that postmodernism in literature is a special intellectual style, the texts of which are written as if out of time, and where a certain hero (not the author) checks his own conclusions, playing non-committal games, getting into various life situations . Postmodernism is viewed by critics as an elite reaction to the widespread commercialization of culture, as an opposition to the general culture of cheap tinsel and glitter. In general, this is a rather interesting direction, and today we present to your attention the most famous literary works in the mentioned style.
10. Samuel Beckett "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable"
Samuel Beckett is a recognized master of abstract minimalism, whose pen technique allows us to objectively view our subjective world, taking into account the psychology of an individual character. The author's unforgettable work, "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable", is recognized as one of the best - by the way, the translation can be found on lib.ru
9. Mark Danilewski "House of Leaves"
This book is a real work of literary art, since Danilewski plays not only with words, but also with the color of words, combining textual and emotional information. The associations caused by the color combination of various words help to imbue the atmosphere of this book, which contains both elements of mythology and metaphysics. The famous Rorschach color test prompted the idea of coloring the author's words.
8. Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions"
Here is what the author himself says about his book: “This book is my gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday. At fifty, I'm so programmed that I act childish; talking disrespectfully about the American anthem, drawing the Nazi flag with a felt-tip pen, and buttocks, and all that.
I think that this is an attempt to get everything out of my head so that it becomes completely empty, like on that day fifty years ago when I appeared on this badly damaged planet.
In my opinion, all Americans should do this - both whites and non-whites who imitate whites. In any case, other people filled my head with all sorts of things - there is a lot of both useless and ugly, and one does not fit with the other and does not at all correspond to the real life that goes on outside of me, outside of my head.
7. Jorge Luis Borges "Labyrinths"
It is impossible to describe this book without resorting to deep analysis. In general, this characterization is applicable to most of the author's works, many of which are still waiting for an objective interpretation.
6. Hunter Thompson "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
The book tells the story of the adventures of lovers of psychotropic drugs in Las Vegas. Through seemingly simple situations, the author creates a complex political satire of his era.
5. Bret Easton Ellis "American Psycho"
No other work is able to show the life of an ordinary Wall Street yuppie. Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of the work, lives an ordinary life, on which the author imposes an interesting focus in order to show the undisguised reality of such a way of being.
4. Joseph Geller "Catch-22"
This is probably the most paradoxical novel that has ever been written. Geller's work is widely recognized, and most importantly, recognized by most literary critics of our time. It is safe to say that Geller is one of the greatest writers of our time.
3. Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow"
All attempts to describe the plot of this novel will obviously fail: it is a symbiosis of paranoia, pop culture, sex and politics. All these elements merge in a special way, creating an unsurpassed literary work of the new era.
2. William Burroughs "Naked Lunch"
Too much has been written about the influence of this work on the minds of our time to write about it again. This work occupies a worthy place in the literary heritage of the contemporaries of the era - here you can find elements of science fiction, erotica and detective story. All this wild mixture in some mysterious way captivates the reader, forcing him to read everything from the first to the last page - however, it is not a fact that the reader will understand all this from the very first time.
1. David Foster Wallace "Infinite Jest"
This work is a classic of the genre, of course, if you can say so about the literature of postmodernism. Again, here you can find sadness and fun, intelligence and stupidity, intrigue and vulgarity. The opposition of two large organizations is the main plot line that leads to an understanding of some factors in our lives.
In general, these works are very difficult, and this is what makes them extremely popular. I would like to hear from our readers who have read some of these works, objective reviews - perhaps this will allow others to pay attention to books of this genre.
