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
>>24687897huh?
>>24686695Absalom, Absalom!.. wasn't difficult but he sure made it a lot harder to grasp than it needed to be. Also his grandiloquent prose is a bit masturbatory. He's alright though but not a personal favorite. I'll take DFW over Faulkner everytime.
>>24688953>I'll take DFW over Faulkner everytime.
>>24688953What does “hard to grasp” have to do with modernism or postmodernism. There’s ancient and medieval writing that is absolute impenetrable. Did they invent modernism and postmodernism?
>>24688971It was a reply to a specific post my guy. On postmodernism, it doesn't actually mean anything it seems to just be a substitute for avant garde, divergent from the modernists who elevated the literary tradition to its apex. Rather than ascending up the carved out path they strive to explore new ones. Or something along those lines
>>24686170Philosophy decided how we should read and interpret literature for a long time, which meant they also decided how we wrote literature. This was far from ideal since it meant the quality of a work was determined by how well it pandered to philosophers, it was easy to game, and it disconnected literature from its past since the old ways of literature would become "wrong" when ever the trends in philosophy changed. It also made literature (and the arts in general) a pawn in the battle to be the dominant school of philosophy. The rise of the novel changed this, it caught philosophy with its pants down and the novel developed much faster than philosophy, they were suddenly playing catch-up with the writer and by the mid 19th century there was a decent sized disconnect. Modernism is when philosophy caught up but not really, and a decent chunk of literature from that period can't really be understood through the tools of modernism. They managed to develop a methodology which could reach a reasonable conclusion with the bulk but it more often than not missed a great deal and was sort of a cheat. Also during this period we saw the writer move into theory and criticism on their own terms and not just blindly following and repackaging what the dominant school of philosophy dictated. Then we get to postmodernism, this is when literature completely broke free from philosophy and really is just the end of modernism as far as literature is concerned. That small group of writers who are often called postmodernist are the writers who forced philosophy to admit that they can't dictate art anymore, only observe and maybe nudge things in a slightly different direction on occasion. These writers used the tools of literature within the methodology of philosophy and directly demonstrated that literature could not be contained within philosophy; take a single literary device, approach it like a philosophical problem and explore its limits, plainly show that the limits of the device are not even remote constrained by the methodology and that you can do some very useful and interesting things if you don't constrain yourself with methodologies external of literature.Pynchon and Vonnegut are not really postmodernist, just influenced by the movement and are of the current period which is the period that is figuring out how to use all those techniques the postmodern writers demonstrated, how to use them in a less academic and more natural way. When you get down to it, realism to postmodernism is a single movement and we don't have hard lines between the periods as some would like you to believe but a slow gradual evolution that occasionally lined up with the dominant school. The idea that pomo lit does not mean anything is a meme and mostly people conflating pomo lit with pomo philosophy combined with modernist calling it meaningless because their theory and criticism could not interpret it, but it also could not interpret much of prior lit.
>>24689054I have a strong urge to prove you retarded but I can't find a way to go about it without being a retard. So I am just going to call you a retard. Retard.
