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LITERATURA INGLESA II
Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Class content:
The main features of Post-Modernism.
The main Post-Modernist titles. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
MODERNISM - Modernism is notoriously difficult to define clearly because the term encompasses a variety of specific artistic and philosophical movements including symbolism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, dada, and others.  To further complicate matters, many Modernists (including some of the most successful and most famous), are not affiliated with any of these groups. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
However, there are some basic tenets of the Modernist period that apply, in one way or another, to all these movements and those writers and artists not associated with them: “Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader” (Baldick 159).  Specifically, Modernists deliberately tried to break away from the conventions of the Victorian era.  This separation from 19th century literary and artistic principles is a major part of a broader goal.  Modernists wished to distinguish themselves from virtually the entire history of art and literature. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Ezra Pound captured the essence of Modernism with his famous dictum, “Make it new!”.  Many Modernist writers felt that every story that could possibly be told had, in one way or another, been told already.  Therefore, in order to create something new, they often had to try using new forms of writing.  The period thus produced many experimental and avant-garde styles.  Perhaps best known for such experimentation are fiction writers James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, just to name a few. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
The dates of the Modernist movement (itself a problematic term, as there was in no sense a singular, consolidated, “movement”) are sometimes difficult to determine.  The beginning of the 20th century is an extremely convenient starting point.  It saw the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, marking a symbolic break from the preceding century.  The turn of the century also roughly coincided with the publication of several groundbreaking theories, such as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Einstein’s theory of special relativity.  As such, there were real shifts (not merely symbolic changes) in the natural sciences, social sciences, and liberal arts occurring at this time as well. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
However, using the year 1900 as a starting point for Modernism is also problematic, as it would exclude some writers or texts from the late 1800s which definitively display Modernist tendencies.  Many scholars thus use the year 1890 as a starting point.  It is important to remember, however, that while 1890 is an entirely appropriate starting date, it is also an artificial one. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
By convention and convenience, most scholars use 1945 as the endpoint for Modernism.  The date marks the end of WWII, and a momentous shift in world politics as well as in the most prominent social, cultural, and literary values. There is, however, a specific literary reason to use 1939 rather than 1945: it is the publication year of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.  In sofar as Modernism is characterized chiefly by experimentation in structure, form, and technique, it is the ultimate work of Modernism. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
MODERNISM GOAL - accomplishing something which, artistically speaking, had never been done before was often accompanied by a sense of despair due to the inherent difficulty (and sometimes the apparent impossibility) of accomplishing that goal.  This despair coincided with a changing worldview that filtered throughout British and much of European and American society.  While the pre-Modernist world is characterized by sense of order and stability rooted in the meaningful nature of faith, collective social values, and a clear sense of identity (both personal and cultural), the Modernist period is characterized by a sense of chaotic instability rooted in the revelation that collective social values are not particularly meaningful, leading to faithlessness, skepticism, and a confused sense of identity.  
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569)
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Those are excellent visual depiction of this distinction between the pre-Modernist and Modernist ideology. 
The Fall of Icarus -the clear imagery: the coastline with the seaside town; the shepherd with his dog and his flock; the plowman working his field; the ships, the sunset, and the flailing legs of the fallen Icarus. The images are clear, as is the classical allusion, and likely the message. 
Nude Descending a Staircase - the fragmented imagery, the multiple perspective coalescing into a single view. If not for the title, many people would have no idea what the painting is supposed to depict. The clarity and order which characterize Bruegel's painting are entirely absent, replaced by a sense of chaos, confusion, and futility of meaning. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning. 
Marcel Duchamp 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Post-modernism was characterized by an attempt to establish transhistorical or transcultural validity, it claims that search for reality is pointless, as the "real" is conditioned by time, place, race, class, gender, and sexuality. There is no knowledge or experience that is superior or inferior to another.Having started in the second half of the twentieth century, it was largelyinfluenced by a number of events that marked this period. Genocide that occurred during the Second World War, Soviet gulags, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, mass destruction caused by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insecurity of Cold War Era, post colonialism issue, as well as the supremacy of multinational corporations and post-industrialism with new technologies, violence, counter culture and consumer culture shaped the perception of new authors. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Common features and techniques of Post-modernism:
Irony, playfulness, black humor: 
Intertextuality: 
Metafiction: 
Temporal distortion: 
Magic realism 
Paranoia 
Maximalism 
Minimalism 
Technoculture and hyperreality
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Ancient and Modern - John Riley
Away from the house the snow falls slanting,  And trees almost in leaf in yesterday's sun  Put on today an elegant new shape, A complex, streamlined growth. Did you ever see  The maidenhair (some few survive), a pre-  Historic tree? Limpid leaf, irregularity,  A touching intent to grow come what may With perhaps insifficient means: a pleasure  To look on. As who shall see in winter leisure Compassionate history take lucid measure  Of our too-obvious nourishment of hate, And love that can't pass for understanding. 
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Why shouldn't men blossom in the wilderness?  Hermits of course have their delights: they die  From weariness, renouncing every world. This other death of ours need too much music —  Can you come out to play coming out You've always been reluctant towards and I  Don't think too highly of myself for asking you. . . 
(John Riley)
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
PERSPECTIVES
 
Individuality and Identity 
All artists and viewers are different with their own perspective.
Cultural factors affect each person individually. 
Human beings are full of potential.
Postmodernists tackle issues of identity like:
 Feminism
 Race
 Gender
 Sexuality
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Postmodernists place a large emphasis on originality and creativity within each individual. Creating their own new boundaries. 
Expands major ideas of the Post-structuralist theory.
Postmodernism started with many of the smaller art movements in America, and expanded into literature and philosophy then art in Europe. Today, some of the most famous postmodern and contemporary artists are from Europe and their roots influence their ground-breaking original work.
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Lesson 9: Post-modern Literature - An Overview
LITERATURA INGLESA II
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