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    A Study Guide for "Postmodernism"
    A Study Guide for "Postmodernism"
    A Study Guide for "Postmodernism"
    Ebook54 pages40 minutes

    A Study Guide for "Postmodernism"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for "Postmodernism," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535831307
    A Study Guide for "Postmodernism"

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      A Study Guide for "Postmodernism" - Gale

      09

      Postmodernism

      c. 1950

      Movement Origin

      Postmodernism is the name given to the period of literary criticism that developed toward the end of the twentieth century. Just as the name implies, it is the period that comes after the modern period. But these are not easily separated into discrete units with specific dates as centuries or presidential terms are limited. Post-modernism came about as a reaction to the established modernist era, which itself was a reaction to the established tenets of the nineteenth century and before.

      What sets Postmodernism apart from its predecessor is the reaction of its practitioners to the rational, scientific, and historical aspects of the modern age. For postmodernists this took the guise of being self-conscious, experimental, and ironic. The postmodernist is concerned with imprecision and unreliability of language and with epistemology, the study of what knowledge is.

      An exact date for the establishment of Post-modernism is elusive, but it may be said to have begun in the post-World War II era, roughly the 1950s. It took full flight in the 1960s in the face of global social and political unrest. In 1968 it reached an early zenith with the intense student protests in the United States and France, the war for independence in Algeria, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The beginning of space exploration with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, culminating in the 1969 landing of men on the moon, marks a significant shift in the area of science and technology.

      At the same time, Jacques Derrida presented his first paper, Of Grammatology (1967), outlining the principles of deconstruction. The early novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Alain Robbe-Grillet were published; Ishmael Reed was writing his poetry. The Marxist critics, Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, who saw a major shift in the social and economic world as a part of the postmodern paradigm, were beginning their creative careers. As time progressed, more and more individuals added their voices to this list: Julia Kristeva, Susan Sontag, and, in popular culture, Madonna. (In her openly sexual music and music videos she broke down the limits of sexuality and femininity. Still, while some believe that her career is a setback for feminist movement, others believe that she opened the doors to a wider acceptance of female and human sexuality.)

      In a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 1994, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, said:

      The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.

      This state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad

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