I keep seeing people talk about Postmodernism in relation to literary analysis, especially Pynchon, but I don't get it. Is it just a pretentious way of saying "words can mean anything you want"? It seems like a total meme. Help a brainlet out.
Words DO mean anything you want. If I call someone a “faggot”, that one word holds multiple meanings: is it an insult? A friendly jive? Or am I calling someone gay, mistakenly thinking that it’s a clinical rather than offensive term? Words mean whatever you want.If I called your mother a landwhale, am I just calling her fat? Or am I sharpening the harpoon for when I see her next morning at Costco? Who knows….
>>24686170Okay, so it all started with modernism. Fellas like Faulkner and Jimbo Joyce really liked to experiment. They made their books really difficult, but also very beautiful. They made their books really dense, tried to mimic human psychology through stream of consciousness, experimented with form. Swell guys.Then in comes along Pynchon, does the exact same thing, just as whacky and fond of song as Joyce, and gets called postmodernist for some reason. As if all his tricks weren't already present in the Ulysses. It really boggles my noggin.
Postmodernism won't be remembered. What's coming will be. I call it "classical revivalism"
>>24686170Pynchon emerged at the same moment as other postmodernist artists so retards assume he’s one of them. He’s not.
>>24686224Tell me more please
>>24686218Faulkner... difficult?
>>24686170It's pretentious ironic bullshit.
>engagement bait youtube thumbnailtry reading a book instead of watching slop, guy
>>24686170People stopped having good ideas so they started coming with gay retarded ones
>>24686705Gravity's Rainbow is not ironic...
>>24686170>Can someone explain Postmodernism to me?It's critical theory but French. Because French intelligentsia are far too contrarian and psudo intellectual to admit to using a German philosophy.
>>24686170>Is it just a pretentious way of saying "words can mean anything you want"?Words don't mean anything, read post-structuralist linguistics and watch chomsky/Foucault rape debate.
>>24686170Postmodernism is when Batman meets Mario.
literally just means the story doesn't follow the conventional style, it has almost nothing to do with the philosophical "post-modernism". Oedipa doesn't find out if the conspiracy is actually real vs a more traditional story where it all gets tied up with a bow and she solves the case
>>24687795Bateman. Batman isn't nearly psychotic enough.
>>24686201Or are you frustratingly expressing your latent homosexuality?
>>24687823Which stems from what Lyotard called the loss of faith in grand narratives. Life doesn't have all the answers, and there isn't necessarily one correct way to act or observe or live, so this reflects in the writing as questioning the premises of storytelling and the moral frameworks that were in place still in modernist writing.
>>24686170Fiction that serves primarily as commentary
