Talk:Postmodern literature

Dawkins quote

Is this quote from Dawkins really needed? Since when has his opinion on literature mattered? --Dreww 17:23, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Is anyone even sure this is a quote about literature? I would more readily believe that Dawkins tries to chastise postmodern philosophy. (About which he presumably knows nothing, of course.) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 145.97.205.222 (talk) 14:25, 6 May 2007 (UTC).

It doesnt seem to be (though he is in the Royal Society of Literature), he is rather concerned with religion, but I liked his postmodernist text generator! -Flammingo^Hey 15:26, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Ok, for the moment, this needs supporting editors, so here's the passage: Richard Dawkins writes of postmodernism: "But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious?" --Richard Dawkins: Postmodernism Disrobed Cheers, Flammingo^Hey 16:03, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I would point out that it is a criticism, in a section titled "Criticism". And since the quote is criticizing writers specifically, I'd say it applies. I'd Vote to Keep. --SECurtisTX | talk 18:32, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Right, but that quote is not about postmodern literature. Just look at the context.--Dreww 17:25, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Is a quote about postmodern writers and what they write not, by extension, about postmodern literature? You may be splitting hairs here. --Janus Shadowsong | talk 17:50, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

This seems just like an opinion and not really a well-reasoned literary criticism. I think there should be more negative criticism on this page (Jameson, Eagelton, etc.) but it doesn't seem like Dawkins, a very smart man when it comes to religion, etc., is putting much thought into his criticism here. It seems like a side comment, like he was talking about something else and wanted to give a little jab at postmodern literature (and it definitely seems like he's talking abt literature here). But it's just an opinion, not an argument with much merit. I wonder what he was thinking about specifically when he said, "one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious?" Off the top of my head I can't think of a postmodern novelist who isn't entertaining, especially compared to modernist writers (I'm not talking about quality, just entertainment). People like Pynchon may seem stupefying and pretentious (though I'd disagree -- only an opinion, not an argument), but boring and solemn don't really fit. Vonnegut may often be solemn but he's definitely not pretentious (again, opinion) or boring. Maybe he's talking about Derrida -- still just an opinion. Anyway, for all the solid arguments Dawkins may have made about other things, this is not a helful, insightful, or relevant argument. Jameson or Eagelton, on the other hand, might present an actual argument against postmodernism (literature specifically) based on more than just opinion.

F. Simon Grant 14:26, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Postmodernism series

I've created a template feel free to add other important examples of postmodernism - broadly defined - in this template so that readers can gain a better understanding of the terms involved by comparing and contrasting their use over several articles. Stirling Newberry 17:25, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Disputed Tag

I would question two important things about this article:

1) The attribution of Cyberpunk, etc. as 'postmodern' - it doesn't seem to fit my (reasonably informed) understanding of literary postmodernism. Appears to be the addition of a fanboy type who likes the word postmodern. More evidence of this is the addition of Chuck Panicuik at the top of the otherwise alphabetical list of postmodern authors.

2) The list of critics and authors seems similarly ill informed - Isaac Asimov is postmodernist since when? Terry Pratchet? I would bet hard money that CS Lewis and JRR TOlkien aren't even close to the postmodern. Cameron 04:26, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

• I dealt with the second concern by moving the authors and critics to two seperate lists (the links are in the article). Take any relevant discussion about whether a particular individual should be labelled postmodern to the respective list talk. I don't want to deal with the first concern, so I moved the disputed tag to the section in question. --DanielNuyu 05:40, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Terry Pratchett could be considered as a postmodernist author because he utilizes intertextuality and metafiction in Discworld novels. 88.230.226.184 (talk) 13:49, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

removed material

There is material that is encyclopediac here, but it is either original research or needs to be cited as to who said it. The page has been reverted but without prejudice to the material itself, merely the lack of citation for what is clearly an overarching theory of different periods of time, which means it has to either be notable and documentable. We aren't here to create theories of literature, but to document important theories of literature that have been presented. Stirling Newberry 13:50, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

+ 1. The emphasis is put on [[impressionism] and subjectivity in writing (f.e. stream-of-consciousness writing).

+ 2. Disappearance of objectivity ,f.e. Faulkner´s mutltiply-narrated stories.

+ 3. Prose and poetry blur together, f.e. T.S.Elliot and Woolf.

+ 4. Use of "fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials".

+ 5. Emphasis on reflexivity, or self-consciousness.

+ 6. Use of minimalist designs as well as spontaneity and discovery in creation instead of formal aesthetic elements.

+ 7. Methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art replace popular culture.

+

+ Unlike postmodern literature, however, modernist literature saw fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict.

+ Postmodernism, closely resembles modernism, they both contain aspects that emphasize reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity, and favoring the destructured subject. In postmodern literature, however, this crisis is avoided because there is no lamentation of fragmentation, provisionality, or incohorence, but rather its celebration. The tortured, isolated anti-heroes of, say, Knut Hamsun or Samuel Beckett, and the nightmare world of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, make way in postmodernist writing for the self-consciously deconstructed and self-reflexive narrators of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Sorokin, Gerhard Anna Concic-Kaucic, John Fowles, John Barth, or Julian Barnes. Meanwhile, authors such as David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow, satirise the paranoid system-building of the kind associated, by postmodernists, with Enlightenment modernity. The Enlightenment has the same basic ideas as humanism as follows:

+ 1. Existence of a stable, coherent, knowable self.

+ 2. This self is the highest form of mental functioning.

+ 3. "Science" as a way to experience universal truths about the world.

+ 4. "Truth" as the eternal knowledge produced by [[science].

+ 5. This knowledge/truth leads toward progress and perfection.

+ 6. Reason as the the ultimate judge of true and correctness.

+ 7. There is no conflict between what is true and what is right.

+ 8. Science is the paradigm for all useful kinds of knowledge; the laws of reason and not money or power are means used by scientists.

+ 9. It is absolutely necessary that there is a connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (signifier and signified).

Commentary

The first lists what has been called the "Dionysian" face of modernism, however the other face is depictionalism, reportorial and "objective", including Conrad and Hemmingway. The same list of features could be ascribed to much Romantic period literature, and indeed there was a revival of material from the Romantic as part of these movements in modernism. Therefore it cannot claim to be an obviously and universally accepted frame work.

Enlightenement is the same way - while some figures of the Enlightenment were rationalists, a number of important literary works from that period in no way conform to rationalism. One famous example is Les Liasons Dangereuses. The novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while sharing some of these characteristics, do not share others. And let us not get started on Lessing - who is, while influential to the Romantic period, almost universally listed as an Enlightenment dramatist.

NPOV is an essential requirement for contribution, and it sometimes takes a while to get the hang of the style in general, and almost all editors, myself included, go back over their own work to "file away POV language". Again, welcome to the page, and let us work together to get important material here. Stirling Newberry 14:06, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Critic/Author Listings

The postmodern author/critic listings are getting insanely long. I recommend an article split. Spamguy 06:09, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

It's a good idea. --exile The Wrong Man 23:02, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I think the author listing is absurd. It simply throws in every writer of experimental fiction in the last 60 years -- some of the writers (such as Saul Bellow) aren't experimental at all. Any list that includes Samuel Beckett must include his mentors Marcel Proust and James Joyce and they are the princes of high modernism. Oh, by the way, you might as well throw in Cervantes too because nothing written today is a fraction as experimental, inventive and playful as "Don Quixote." So if the first novel was postmodern, then there obviously is no postmodern. There are postmodern critics, but there's no such thing as a postmodern novel.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.80.114.116 (talk • contribs) 02:04, 6 May 2007

Postmodern novel... I don't think that would work without a referenced literary anthology, Norton and the like, and the rest simply deleted and watched that doesnt have the put-anything-in-here-character... Flammingo^Hey 07:04, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Include Michael Ondaatje? Mary Edward (talk) 06:17, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd agree to including Ondaatje, especially considering his Billy the Kid book. Could we find sources to support his inclusion?F. Simon Grant (talk) 21:00, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Hey there, I know the list of works is already a bit unruly, but I just wanted to point out that with 50 or 60 authors listed, only one of them is female. This seems rather unfortunately slanted, especially when authors like Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Kathy Acker, Maxine Hong Kingston (e.g. "The Woman Warrior"), A. S. Byatt, and Margaret Atwood come so readily to mind. It's still a boy's club, to be sure, and the list ought to reflect this for documentary reasons, but it's not quite so bad as it's made out to be here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Squidwiggle (talk • contribs) 14:05, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

The page mentions Atwood twice but doesn't seem fit to include her most famous work "The Handmaids Tale" as an example. In fact there is only one woman author in the list. Boys club much? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.68.94.232 (talk) 00:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Demarcating Postmodernity

Could anyone point me in the direction of a critic who has said that postmodernism begins with the end of the second world war? I realise that this demarcation is a little naive, but I would like to know who laid it down. --James Kemp 12:38, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Also, it would be nice if there were citations that some of these styles are described as "postmodern fiction", and with more qualifications. Describing cyberpunk in general as "postmodern" is very problematic, for example. Some of it might be, and it certainly occurred at about the same time as postmodernist literature, but it is not necessarily or even mostly postmodernist—much of it really fits in better with classic sci-fi than it does with postmodern novels. --Delirium 03:50, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Part of the problem here might be with the lack of any coherent definition of the postmodern. Quite rightly, given what various people have written about it, "postmodern" can mean different things for different readers and writers. I think the cyberpunk reference comes from Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". He makes particular reference to Neuromancer and, interestingly, to "an imaginary network of interconnected computers" (paraphrase) which he sees as a metaphor for international capitalism. He was writing in 1984 I think, when the internet was not widely used.

As for considering science-fiction in general as postmodern, Brian McHale refers to this in "Postmodernist fiction" where I think he refers to science-fiction as the low-brow equivalent to postmodern literature; I also think he makes a similar coupling between modernist fiction and the detecetive story. --James Kemp 23:19, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

That seems odd to me, since sci-fi dates back to the modernist era of literature (Jules Verne and whatnot). In any case, if cyberpunk is discussed here it should be at somewhat more length, since even a quick google search turns up numerous articles on both sides of the debate. I haven't seen any claims that sci-fi in general is postmodernist, but I also haven't researched that subject much. --Delirium 00:53, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe Jameson's point in including in referencing Neuromancer is that "Late Capitalism" is the post-industrial, information age type stuff. The idea of the simulacra and being information-drenched are major themes in postmodern fiction (see for example White Noise, one book that's on almost every list of postmodern novels). So for example the first Matrix is a scifi movie in the long tradition of scifi movies but it can be considered postmodern because it deals with simulacra and information-age chaos/dehumanization (if I'm not mistaken Neo's even reading Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra I think). Sci-fi is very commonly used in pomo (Vonnegut, Calvino, Burroughs) and Gibson and Stephenson are commonly on lists of pomo writers. So what's the difference between traditional and pomo scifi? There's a sense, reminiscent of the Enlightenment, in much traditional scifi that technology holds promise, but that's far from being true about all traditional scifi and not a simple way to mark the difference. There's tons of traditional scifi that demonstrates the dangers of technology in an anti-Enlightenment-project sort of way. How much traditional sci fi, though, is about the information age? My point is, cyperpunk and scifi shouldn't be dismissed all together. That sort of dismissal of "low brow" and genre fiction is antithetical to pomo as I see it (I'd like to ask McHale if he consideres Naked Lunch "high brow" scince fiction, especially the "Talking Asshole" section). Cyberpunk/scifi definitely has a place, but we shouldn't give up trying to figure out what that place is.

F. Simon Grant 14:01, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I may be shouting into the wind here, as it looks like no one's been up to this convo for quite some time, but I also find the periodizing going on in the article fairly problematic. I don't have a page number in front of me, but Jameson, in Postmodernism, famously begins the trend in 1973, which is the year American goes off the gold standard, the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex is demolished (what architectural theorist Charles Jencks, who influenced Jameson, called "The day Modern architecture died"), and Gravity's Rainbow is published. I don't even recall which work it is, but McHale put it a few years earlier, 1966. The point being that my sense of the most prevailing opinion is that postmodernism begins in tandem with, or just after, the New Left. Hence, Jameson's oft-cited essay, "Periodizing the 60s," constructs that decade as the last gasp of modernist political resistance before postmodernism kicks in, and Marianne DeKoven's book, Utopia Limited, constructs the sixties as a "pivot" between modernism and postmodernism. The gap that this periodization of postmodernism problematically leaves between modernism's attenuation in the late-thirties and postmodernism's rise in the late-sixties/early-seventies constitutes one of the primary reasons for "late modernism" to be used as a term. Anyone who has read around even a bit in the post-45 period can almost immediately come up with examples that complicate this narrative, but that's sort of the problem when you try to think historically about a tendency often at least partially defined as a resistance to thinking historically in any traditional sense. Most responsible discussions of postmodernism must engage quite early with the fact that the tendency is notoriously hard to define artistically and to demarcate historically. At any rate, I'm finishing my dissertation on post-45 American literature, and I can't think of ever hearing, in class, personal research, or conference talk, the 1941 marker for postmodernism. 75.128.173.10 (talk) 21:46, 5 February 2013 (UTC)MOB

Excrement Literature and Fight Club

I removed that section from the article. I'm a Masters student who has studied postmodern literature to some depth, and I have never heard of excrement literature. Also, I don't think Fight Club belongs, just because it is "clever". There is more to postmodernism than this. I think one of the problems with this article is a lack of a working definition of the postmodern; but that is also maybe a problem of the postmodern itself! --Jim 00:55, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Agreed; also, the following is IMHO misconceived as being written in the period of postmodernity, but not having a postmodernist criticism in mind: "Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is an exemplar of 'cyberpunk' science fiction...while cyberpunk represents a fast-forward vision of the present, contemporary science fiction is also the site for a peculiarly postmodern technological retrospection. William Gibson's...1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is widely regarded as one of the most influential futuristic visions in American literary history" (page 510).[1]. Also, I removed some false suggestions and added some sources --Flammingo^Hey 11:17, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

English Literature Page

Somebody with a good knowledge of postmodernism needs to add a synopsis of postmodern literature to this page: English_literature#Post-Modern_literature. Most of the sections are filled out quite nicely, but the postmodern section merely links to this pafe. Thanks! Robinoke 23:32, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Shift to postmodernism

I added the Fire-bombing of Tokyo to the list of atrocities mostly since it affected Akira Kurosawa so much, and of course everyone else who survived the slaughter. Galo1969X 07:14, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Is this page really helpful???

I always try to read these Wikipedia pages as if I'm one of my students; I could just imagine my students reading this with giant cartoon question marks boinging over their heads. I know postmodernism is hard to define and definitions are constantly shifting, but why not give the simplest and most widely agreed upon definition. For example, the summary blurb at the beginning is confusingly punctuated and it seems like its based entirely on one person's perspective. In fact the most prominent citation is this: Hans-Peter Wagner, A History of British, Irish and American Literature. Why is the entire page based on Wagner? Furthermore, I've read about a thousand definitions of postmodern literature. A very useful thing these definitions do is give well-known writers who are commonly assocaited with postmodern literature and explain why they are postmodern. That list almost always includes the following (all well-known) writers: Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon. There are a lot of other names that are usually included (you know usually DeLillo, Nabokov, Fowles, etc.), but those five are fairly universally included. The only one of those so far included on this page is Pynchon. I think if I was a young student approaching pomo for the first time, an introduction which included these guys would be extremely helpful. I'll be honest: I've been studying postmodern literature for years and I don't know a third of the writers listed on this page. A lot of time is spent on newer guys like Eggers, Foster, and Palahniuk (sp?), but according to many definitions I've read, they'd really be postpostpostmodernism (because Carver and the realists were given the complete nonsense name postpostmodernists, so since Eggers etc. come after ... you get the picture). I'd say they're postmodern, just based on personal opinion, but should we really include Foster and not Vonnegut??? Eggers and not Rushdie???

I think overall this page needs an overhaul to make it user friendly, it needs citations from other sources (more than one source for such a widely argued about movement is imperative!), and it needs BASIC stuff (like Vonnegut for god's sake!) to help beginners understand.

Finally (and I think this should really be considered after the massive overhaul of the page for the sake of the more important duty, user-friendliness), I think myopic focus on Modernism as the (apparently sole) precursor of postmodernism is grossly inaccurate. Those who get aroused at the J sound b/c they love Joyce so much may think Finnegan's Wake is the endallbeall of experimentation in the 20th century (and to respond to an earlier comment: Beckett CAN be postmodernist without having to mention Joyce or Proust. They're two different people, dude.) But this inaccurately eliminates the contributions of movements and people who have no direct connection to Ezra Pound. Though the page as a whole should be simplified, the mono-focus on Modernism is a gross oversimplification. It leaves out the interplay of such movements as Dadaism, Surrealism, nearly concurrent movements like the Beat Generation, Absurdism (which involved more poeople than just Beckett, believe it or not), not to mention plenty of pre-20th century movements like Romanticism and Symbolism and individuals like Alfred Jarry, Laurence Stern, Lewis Carrol, etc. Take for example William S. Burroughs, often categorized as a member of the Beat Generation, but very commonly listed as an important postmodernist writer (I've read in some places that postmodernism started with Naked Lunch, but that's a bit of an exaggeration). He was influenced by Surrealism (Tristan Tzara for example), he was influenced by popular culture (sci fi, detective novels, westerns, etc.) Which modernist novelist is he influenced by/reacting against? I mean specifically? No seriously, I'd like to know. Likewise, Vonnegut: which modernist novelist is he influenced by/reacting against? For either one of those guys I'd really like to know the answer to that. I've read a lot about both of them and haven't yet encountered an instance when they've specifically reacted against a modernist novelist. But maybe I'm reading the wrong thing. My point is, modernism is not very important for either one of them (and, need I mention for the tenth time, both are very important writers who are very commonly used to define postmodern literature, and neither one is on this page).

p.s. Just to harp on Beckett a second longer: Beckett, though largely influenced by Joyce, was reacting against him in that he was rejecting Joyce's belief in the power of language. Beckett had a revelation (related partly in Krapp's Last Tape) that his purpose should be to focus on the poverty and failure of language which I believe is a very postmodern concept that makes him an individual definable separate from Joyce (though reading this page I couldn't tell you one way or the other since pomo here is defined so ironically in a self-reflexively maximalistic way ... or something like that).

F. Simon Grant 23:16, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

I was reading John Barth's Furthur Fridays the other day where he talks about how confusing it is to define postmodernism. Even in his confusion he communicated more lucidly what postmodern literature means than this page does. Then I remembered Barth's essay "Literature of Exhaustion" which was an important essay in forming ideas about what postmodern literature is, if I'm not mistaken. And I was thinking just now that if I picked a random definition of postmodernism from a book on my book shelf would it perhaps be far more useful than the first response in a google search of "postmodern literature" (ie this Wikipedia page)? I picked up the Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory and I was reminded of Ihab Hassan's literature of silence ideas that were also influential and also nowhere on this page. Anyway, here's what the Penguin says:

"In 1971 the journal New Literary History published a special issue on 'Mondernism and Postmodernism' which included Ihab Hassan's influential 'paracritical bibliography' of postmodernism, which both summarized and went beyond his earlier work on the 'literature of silence', defined as spanning the period marked by the names of Kafka and Beckett. Hassan now spoke of a 'change within modernism' and of a literature in search of itself. With an extraordinary eclectisism, Hassan names Jarry and his 'Pataphsyics, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, McCluhan, John Barth's novel Giles Goat Boy and the music of John Cage as harbingers of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon's much more substatial and reasoned survey of postmodernism in literature also cites Barth, along with Vonnegut, Eco and Salman Rushdie, as one of the exemplars of a postmodern metafictional literature which deliberately and playfully employs paradox to display its own artificiality and contradictions, which plays with genre and its convention and alludes to both high and popular cutlure in such a way as to appeal to a very wide audience. An emphasis on the playful and popularity is a frequent theme in discussions of postmodernism..."

Playfulness is one thing this page is definitely missing. And Umberto Eco. Though I think popularity is over-emphasized, this blurb is more useful and interesting than this whole page. Why is there a whole paragraph about neo-existentialism? Why is there NOT a whole paragraph about metafiction??? Metafiction, foregrounding the apparatus, one of those defining features of postmodernism -- where is it? (throw a dart at a Vonnegut book and you can fine a fantastic example of metafiction that can be used to help explain metafiction and, by extension, postermodern literature) Yet Maximalism gets its own section? And where is discussion of playing with genre? Instead we get some nonsense argument about why noir fiction is not postmodern. A discussion about how Burroughs USES noir fiction would be a thousand times more useful -- or how Vonnegut uses scifi or Eco uses detective fiction, etc. etc. And what is the "post-war value system"? The materialism practiced by much of the middle class or the value system of the artists who rebelled against that? That's an important thing to define but it's a big jumbled mess. And I love Beckett to death, but why is there a whole paragraph about Beckett? Most people can't even agree whether or not he's a modernist or postmodernist yet he gets the most space and half of the stuff is off topic. (FYI: Beckett wasn't an existentialist). If all this stuff comes from Wagner, then Wagner obviously has an unusual understanding of the most essential aspects of postmodern literature. Let's please move beyond just Wagner!

and a p.s. to my previous p.s. because "Any list that includes Samuel Beckett must include his mentors Marcel Proust and James Joyce and they are the princes of high modernism" is such utter nonsense: Proust wasn't Beckett's mentor. Beckett wrote a book about Proust for the money; that's all. Look it up.

F. Simon Grant 19:42, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Spring Cleaning

Routledge

I used the Routledge Companion as a source for many of my changes. I know there are more signifcant sources, but the Routledge Companion seemed to really lay it all out in a simple, reader-friendly way. This page needs many more sources (as mentioned above, Hutcheon and Hassan certainly, but there are tons of other important commentators we could use). But the Routledge Companion is a good starting place.

Neo-existentialism: Probably complete b.s.

I hate to be a rat here, but I hate existentialism even more than I hate being a rat: All that stuff about neo-existentialism is probably complete b.s. I saw the same stuff on the existentialism page and I looked into it. I'm pretty sure the citation is a fake: no mention of neoexistentialism or existentialism or Palahniuk, etc. on the index page. From what little I found (nothing really except non-notable personal pages) neo-existentialism looks like a complete kayfabe. You should've called your fake movement neo-surrealism. Surrealism is way cooler than existentialism. But that's just my opinion. This helps prove my above point that this page needs some serious overall editing.

F. Simon Grant 21:04, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

First names for authors?

I'll ignore how poor a form it is to leave off first names, especially in a document that's supposed to be informing a general audience, and just ask: Do I have the first names of all the following correct? I'm not familiar with Wagner's book (from what I know, seems like a skewed, UK-centric list), so I'm not sure who exactly he means. Here are my guesses:

"In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially [Laurence] Durrell, [John] Fowles, [Angela] Carter, [Christine] Brooke-Rose, [Julian] Barnes, [Peter] Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while 'post- modern' is applied to authors who have been less innovative."

I want to put those first names in there, but I want to make sure it's right.

F. Simon Grant 19:39, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Finally its a very english-centric list of authors, it must be more diverse.

New Criticism does not equal Postmodernism

I'm pretty sure this is referring just to New Criticism (based on content and citation). Though this aspect of New Criticism sounds kind of sort of a little like postmodernism, New Criticism as a whole is the development from modernism (arguably) postmodernism was most interested in rebelling against.

It was "characterized by allusive difficulty, paradox, and indifference or outright hostility to the democratic ethos", which was more and more in jeopardy since the rise of fascism and dictatorial communism.

F. Simon Grant 15:07, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Specific criticism of paragraphs in "Characterization" section

This section is a huge mess: it's randomly organized; much of the info is dropped in as nonsequitors; a lot of the info is questionable; it becomes repetitious with the revised intro. I took it out for now. Feel free to put parts of it back in if you can find a good place for it. Here are some more specific notes on paragraphs:

The following quote is redundant, of course, and much of the info is questionable. Eclecticism is accurate, but is that really the "best" of previous movements. The idea of a "best" is antithetical to postmodernism. Are "nihilism" and "spiritual voidness" really accurate? As I mentioned before, what is the postwar value system and how does it affect the lit? And why can't hardboiled and fantasy be postmodern? I'm not completely dismissing that; it just needs further explanation:

"Postmodernist (synonymous with postmodern) literature is not necessarily the same as the literature of postmodernity: the movement ("postmodernism") focuses on eclecticism (the choosing of the "best" of previous movements), based on the postwar value system, while any literature of the period postmodernity might be mislabelled "postmodern", although it has none of the aspects other than the time of publication: thus, the field of aspects nihilism, spiritual voidness and search for identity, and especially "intertextuality, pastiche, and parody", may be postmodern, while noir fiction and new fantasy are not; the postwar value system also is dominated by the failure of the complete Western value system in the 1940s."

It seems like saying feminism is a part of postmodernism is like saying marxism is a part of surrealism. Two separate things that connect in certain ways, but are they really necessary to define one another? The bigger question is this: What does it have to do with literature? Maybe if there was a section about feminism in, say, Margaret Atwood I'd understand the purpose of this paragraph:

"Feminism began (at least) in the 19th century, and while crucial rights (right of property, to vote, self-defence) have been gained, postfeminism seeks remaining fields, including the ever present question of identity in postmodern society and its options for women, especially the question of career and family."

One of the most randomly plopped in lines. It sounds like a random quote. If this is at all relevant, it needs explanation and transitions:

"Not until the 1960s was the serious, literary, historical novel able to make an impressive return in the works of Byatt, Farrell, and Unsworth."

Re-reading this, I realized one characteristic shift in postmodernism was from the modernist insistence on the artist being separate from history and above all such lowly things as history, to postmodernism's engagement (with stuff like pastiche and historiographic metafiction) with history. Byatt would be relevant in that context (Farrell and Unsworth I'm less familiar with, but they may work). But "serious, literary" doesn't seem to fit with pomo like "historical" does. In general, I'm not sure of the poster's/Wagner's point here. And if this is re-inserted, it desperately needs proper context.

As I mentioned above, neo-existentialism is more than likely a fake movement (feel free to defend it if I'm wrong). If it's real, I still question its relevance to this article. I'm fine with mentioning Palahniuk and ... the other one ... but I'm not fine with it taking up this much space:

"Focusing on the aspect of identity, neo-existential literature, combines elements of postmodern and existential thought. It explains the shift away from individual being-towards-death, which was characteristic of traditional existentialism, to society as a whole recognizing its own being towards death. The realization of this fact creates a new angst for which there is no relief, no possible escape, only at first confusion, then surrender and at the end perhaps joy in realizing and accepting what is and must be. Neo-existential writers have also focused more on the postmodern end of Neo-existentialism, creating stream of consciousness narratives that depict the confusion of postmodern, neo existential angst, as well as the bitter resignation to a blind, uncaring corporate world which alienates individuals from their own individual meaning so that rather than becoming to be "something" (the actualization of their potential), they become rather "nothing" (by the disvaluing and disregard of their potential they are never able to actualize themselves in society as productive members of a process directed towards an end), they become a mere tool to be used and dispensed with as needed. Novels such as "Fight Club" and "Toilet: The Novel" deal with these themes."

Interesting? Certainly. Relevant? Maybe. It needs a proper place. Maybe there could be a section about later developments in postmodernism. It was declared dead in the 80's (White Noise was supposedly the last great postmodernist work and postmodernism was supposedly going to be forever replaced by the sort of minimalist realism represented by Raymond Carver and Tom Wolfe in his "Thousand Footed Beast" nonsense), but with Eggers, McSweeney's, Chabon, Letham, Wallace, all those guys, postmodernism is very obviously not dead. I think there should be at least a brief acknowlegement of that. But are there any reliable sources that talk about the resurgence of postmodernism in the McSweeney's/etc. crowd? One more note about the following passage: The phrasing implies that a devestating war took place in Europe in the 90's. Are we talking about the Balkans here? The phrasing should be clearer:

"The experience of poverty in the (for Europe) devastating war have created a rise in materialism which, in turn, has since the 1990s created some criticism of postmodern literature as being "spiritually void". To revive attention, postmodern art resorted to shocking methods like new realism, obscene and shocking dimensions and "in-yer-face-theatre" of the fin-de-siècle."

This paragraph (originally near the end of the article) contains the sort of stuff that needed to be in the intro. Hopefully I've fixed that problem so that much of this is redundant, but the second sentence is certainly interesting. I'm not familiar enough with phenomonology to know how/where to integrate it (the intro perhaps?):

"Literature of this era sets itself against modern literature by developing and extending the style, making it self-conscious and ironic. In such literature, one finds a shift in the role of the "inner narrative of the self," from the self at war with itself to the self as arbiter, pointing to the phenomenological roots of postmodern thought. Authors such as David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow satirise the paranoid system-building of the kind associated, by postmodernists, with Enlightenment admiration for Reason."

F. Simon Grant 15:07, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

"although just confirmed"

How are we meant to understand the phrase "although just confirmed"? What was just confirmed in the Geneva Convention? The disrespect of human rights or the human rights? What's the purpose of the "although"? Somebody explain this confusing phrasing/structure.

"the Second World War with unseen disrespect of human rights (although just confirmed in the Geneva Convention in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment.)"

134.224.220.1 14:24, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Some things that need to be done

• Expand the "themes and techniques" section. There are dozens more that should go up there. An important theme for which I can't think of a heading is the idea that a central meaning is impossible to find, like in Pyncon or Heller. What's a simple heading for that?
• "Different perspectives" needs expanding. It needs more than just Wagner (that Wagner stuff is interesting so it shouldn't be eliminated, but it's not representative of the broad consensus and seems very UK centric -- since when is Laurence Durrell so important?). One perspective that definitely should be included is Frederic Jameson.
• Should we have a section about the historical development of postmodernism itself? It's not a unified movement by any means, but maybe something about significant publications...
• The examples in the "themes and techniques" section should be broader. I feel like I'm repeating Burroughs, but that's just because I feel confident to speak about Burroughs. There might be some great examples of pastiche or metafiction in, say, Paul Auster or John Hawkes, but I don't feel confident enough to write about them. So, please, somebody expand those examples.

134.224.220.1 16:26, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

note: "F. Simon Grant" is using the ip address above for right now -- the extensive edits from today were done by me. It won't let me stay signed in when I have two Wikipedia windows open. So any comment about today's edits should be addressed to me.

The need to address postmodern poetry

Yesterday in the book store I was flipping through "Poetry for Dummies" just for fun to see what "Dummies" are learning about poetry and I saw a section labeled "Postmodern poetry" which featured Beat Generation and Confessional poetry people plus a whole hodgepodge of post-50's people. I've noticed occasionally all these people lumped into "postmodernism" (I addressed the common conflation of Beat and Pomo in the Background section). Anyway, the "Dummies" book said it was a shift from anxiety to irony. Well, saying all post-50's poets were characterized by irony is an extreme oversimplification. But I was wondering if this was just somebody labeling all poets in the period of postmodernity "postmodern" poets or if this an actual serious label, involving irony, emotion, continuing formal experimentation, etc. The only time I really hear about postmodern poetry is in brief snippets in passing or in stuff I don't really take seriously like readers and "Dummies" books. When I read about "postmodern literature" it's almost always in reference to fiction. So does anyone know how seriously this distinction "postmodern poetry" is taken. I think there certainly should be some acknowlegement, if brief, that "postmodern" was used by Charles Olson and Donald Allen from Grove, in his New American Poets anthology, and in Amiri Baraka's fiction anthology (again, geniuses like Olson could be referring specifically to the time period, not any unifying principle). So maybe there could be a section between "background" and "themes and techniques" called "postmodern poetry", just talking about the common use of the label. Any opinions?

F. Simon Grant 14:26, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

References

Preemptive defense of Heller quote

Based on the response to the Dawkins quote earlier (which was completely useless for other reasons) I'm guessing someone might say the Heller quote isn't about postmodernism. I think it's an important quote because it shows how closely tied much of the early postmodern fiction was to the culture of the 50's and the swing the other direction in the 60's. Kesey is a perfect example of that. Kesey is commonly sited as a postmodernist though that designation is tricky and I'm sure somebody will claim he's not. I also think that's a good quote because postmodern literature is so often tied to the criticism. I've acknowleged that in some of my edits (the strange assumption that seems common that postmodern literature started with Derida in 66). I think there should be some quotes from that perspective, but many quotes I've read tie the aesthetic of postmodern literature to the oppressive conformism of the 50's (a decade before Derida, apparently, founded postmodernism).

F. Simon Grant 21:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Poetry, Norton

The Norton Anthology for Postmodern American Poetry (and this is true of other lists labeled "Postmodern Poetry" I've seen -- not inlcuding the "dummies" list I mentioned above which was just silly, plenty of real, serious sources) has a long list of significant postwar poets from the Beat Generation, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, the Confessional poets, and tons of others (and, incidentally if you look up Postmodern American Poetry in Wikipedia, it links to a page about that anthology, a page which doesn't say much about the poetry itself). If this page is called "Postmodern Literature", it's a disservice to leave off postmodern poetry. But there's a big problem. Including postmodern poetry here is a formula for a big mess. The definition, for the most part, seems to be Charles Olson plus anything similar afterwards. Precusors for postmodern poetry will be different (Whitman, for example, huge precursor for postmodern poetry, not terribly important to postmodern fiction). The themes and techniques will be different (irony is a defining feature of postmodern fiction; confession is a defining feature in postmodern poetry). So I present these options:

1) Poetry only gets a brief mention; the majority of the page is focused on fiction

2) Poetry is interwoven with fiction (this will take the most work to keep it from becoming a huge mess)

3) Fiction and poetry occupy different large sections within the page with different precursors, different themes and techniques, etc.

4) Two completely separate pages are created for postmodern fiction and postmodern poetry

5) Some other option. Feel free to suggest it here.

please let me know what you think about all these issues.

F. Simon Grant 18:51, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm leaning toward option number four. There's already a separate page for postmodern theatre (though that page seems to need a lot of help). I fear it would be such an overwhelming task to generalize about both postmodern fiction and postmodern poetry that the best option would be to create a new page for postmodern poetry. To some degree the name "Postmodern Poetry" is used to refer to a time frame (as, it seems, the postmodern art article does), but like the postmodern art article, there's a general aesthetic involved that doesn't exactly flush with postmodern fiction -- thus the necessity for two different articles. For example, with postmodern poetry you'd have to talk about the formal experimentation of Pound, Eliot, Williams, etc. but with the dismissal of the impersonality recommended by Eliot in "Tradition and Individual Talent" leading to the confessional apsects of beat poetry, confessional poetry, etc. -- that stuff has little bearing on postmodern fiction, and impersonality is an aspect of the irony present in many postmodern stories (Barthelme for example). So adding poetry in this article would be a big, tricky, confusing mess. I think it would be best to have a separate article like postmodern theatre ... except more thorough and useful.

F. Simon Grant 17:21, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi F. Simon Grant, I'm just following up on this to see what became of this project. I can't seem to find a discrete page on Postmodern poetry outside of the summary of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry. I agree with you that 1) this page is too biased toward fiction and 2) the process of delimiting "postmodern" poetry from all late 20th-century is messy and could be troublesome. I'm happy to start the process, though I don't want to redo any work you may have already done. Best, and thanks for any help in advance. Noah Hickman (BYU) (talk) 22:49, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Cyberpunk, Norton

I added info about cyberpunk. It could use some more, but it's a start. This was a topic of discussio earlier and was unmercifully ripped from the page. There was plenty on this page that should have mercifully been ripped. Cyberpunk, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc. are very commonly listed as postmodern and to not include them and not give a very good reason for taking them off is a disservice to the reader. Here's a comment from earlier that went unaddressed:

"The attribution of Cyberpunk, etc. as 'postmodern' - it doesn't seem to fit my (reasonably informed) understanding of literary postmodernism. Appears to be the addition of a fanboy type who likes the word postmodern."

Not only is this incredibly rude, but it's ironically "reasonably" uninformed. If the Norton's not good enough for you -- and if not, why not? -- I added another citation. If that one's not good enough, I'll find another one. It's simple. There's lots of them. The phrasing of the entry as it was before is, perhaps, what made it seem fanboy-ish. Perhaps this new phrasing will convince any critics that cyberpunk is a legit part of postmodernism. I am no fanboy. I haven't even read Gibson or Stephenson (though people keep telling me I should). So if you want to take it down this time, please give more substatial reason than how it might "seem" and some obviously under-informed concept of what constitutes "postmodern". F. Simon Grant 12:59, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Let's not let the name list get out of control

In my experience with other Wikipedia pages, name lists like the one at the beginning of this page can get out of control. In my opinion it's a pretty good list as it is -- nineteen is a lot of names, but just on the verge of being too big. A bad example of a name list is Modernist literature (the first one is Knut Hamsen, really?)-- they have twenty four and they're all over the place, just a big mess of names. So I just wanted to leave a note to make sure that list doesn't become a big mess like the Modernist page. One basic guideline I thought of is to leave off anybody whose status as a postmodernist was up for much debate, transitional figures like Nabokov and Beckett for example or the disputed cyberpunk people like Gibson and Stephenson. The ones we have here so far may be debatable, but it's not like they're not commonly listed as something incompatible with postmodernism (Nabokov and Beckett as modernists, for example). Magical realism and Beat Generation writers fit well with postmodernism so their double billing in that case doesn't disqualify them (for example, Cortazar is a good addition). I think those guidelines will help keep it from growing out of control like the Modernist page.--F. Simon Grant 13:27, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Finally we have one name in the giant list of names I would like to challenge. Coupland and Cortazar are hard to argue, but I have to question Cormac McCarthy. I admit not knowing much about Cormac McCarthy, but I rarely ever see him on a list of postmodern writers. I got the impression he was embraced by post-Carver, anti-pomo activists. Nothing against Cormac, I just question his status as a pomo writer. Any defenders?--F. Simon Grant (talk) 21:27, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Seeing as how there's an entire article for listing postmodern authors I really think we could limit it 4 or 5 rather than 20. I'm thinking Pynchon, Borges, Calvino, Rushdie and a couple others. But then there's the debate of who to include and who not to. --TM 04:49, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I was wondering that myself -- I partly regret expanding the list, but I saw the modernist list, and then I looked at the list I originally included and it was a bunch of old white guys. I know PC considerations are irrelevant in an encyclopedia, but to just have old white guys obscures a major issue within postmodernism. The fact that I'd exclude Borges from the list certainly doesn't help that point. Borges started writing in the 30's and I'd qualify him more as a pomo precursor. To me, if it's under ten the basic list would have to be: Pynchon, Calvino, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Heller, DeLillo, and Burroughs at least -- all old white guys except Rushdie. But that's a significant point we should really discuss: the underrepresentation of minority groups is a big issue in postmodernism but not represented by "the greats" -- and the concept of having "the greats" is counter to postmodernism anyway. I think I'll just leave that open for discussion for now; it's making my head hurt

p.s. Maybe Reed, Atwood, and Kingston to round out the ten ... ? Is that encyclopedic? Okay, head still hurting, must stop...F. Simon Grant (talk) 16:03, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Can someone explain why John Fowles, Alasdair Gray and W. G. Sebald are included in the list of postmodernists? Rwood128 (talk) 00:26, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

New sections under Common Themes and Techniques

I'm very appreciative to whoever put in new sections under Common Themes and Techniques. It's a section I started which I thought was vital to this article, and I knew it was incomplete so I'm glad it's expanding. My only issue, and it's very minor, is that much of it is repetitive. We should (though I'll probably end up doing this when I have the time) go through and eliminate the reptitiveness -- read the article as a whole with the new sections in mind. I regrouped them so that closely related ideas are grouped together, but some of those could be easily combined. Another minor issue that relates to a major issue I brought up earlier that didn't get much response: R&G are Dead is a good way to illustrate intertextuality, but it's a play. My issue earlier is whether the whole article should be focused on fiction (which it is currently) -- if we expand it out to other genres like drama and poetry, the article needs a lot of changes to make that work. For now, until we make that decision, I think there are plenty of good examples within fiction that work to illustrate intertextuality.F. Simon Grant (talk) 17:51, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Let's discuss erasing the first paragraph before we erase it

Here's the first paragraph that was recently erased. Obviously someone wants to erase it. Let's discuss.

"The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature."F. Simon Grant (talk) 19:23, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I reinserted this information because I feel the page needs it. Someone else obviously doesn't. I would like to find out why. Who knows, I may agree with you. But the best way to address your desire to get rid of such basic information is to discuss it instead of erasing it. I feel that if it is erased, there is at least some information from this sentence that should remain. Let's hold hands, sing kumbaya, and figure it out together.F. Simon Grant (talk) 18:13, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

The article mentions the "Enlightenment" twice, but never clarifies exactly which Enlightenment concepts or ideas postmodernism challenges. What are these ideas? We need to be much more specific. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.125.184.66 (talk) 14:23, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Early 21st century magical realists

The new information added at the end of the "Magical Realism" section seems worthwhile to me, but I don't know if it belongs in that section. I bring this up b/c I recognize it as the sort of thing people like to erase as irrelevant. I'll be the first to defend whoever included it, but I would suggest putting it in "Scope" since the "Magical Realism" section is more about the use of magical realism by those who are generally accepted as postmodern (Rushdie, Grass) not about the legacy of Magical Realism. That seems more appropriate for "Scope" along with Eggers, etc. Other opinions?F. Simon Grant (talk) 18:16, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Poioumena

Some of the more recently added common traits are problematic, but let's go piece by piece. Somebody added "a" to this section which inadvertently caused me to read this which then caused me to say to myself, "What the hell?" I have a master's degre in this crap, but this description is still very confusing. Poioumena, as far as I undersand it, is basically writing about writing, a kind of metafiction where the book is really about the process of writing: Tristram says over and over again that he's trying to write a book; Salaam says over and over again that he's trying to write a book; Kimbote says over and over again that he's trying to write a book, and so on. Saying, "It claims to be about one thing but is about something else" pretty much narrows it down to half of all books ever written ever. That's a very bad definition. And I think it's plagiarism. I did a google check, but that's never proof. I think this should be tightened up to a basic, more accurate definition and narrow it down to just pomo books. Beckett, Carlyle and Sterne are great, but this is not the poioumena article (which, by the way, is very similar).F. Simon Grant (talk) 23:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

• "In this genre, a story purports to be about one narrative, although it is really about something else. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, is a story about India after its independence. The poioumenon goes back through Samuel Beckett´s trilogy, to Thomas Carlyle´s Sartor Resartus, and also Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a poioumenon as is Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, John Fowles's Mantissa, and William Golding's Paper Men.[15] The poioumenon offers opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth."

• Here's a suggestion for a change: Poioumenon (plural, "poioumena") is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to speciic type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. For example, in Nabokov's Pale Fire, the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Rushdie's Midnight's Children parallels the creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Other postmodern examples of poioumea include Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, John Fowles's Mantissa, and William Golding's Paper Men, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew. —Preceding unsigned comment added by F. Simon Grant (talk • contribs) 17:40, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Is this section necessary at all? Poioumena is seldom used in relation to Postmodern Literature aside from in Fowler's book.Possum61 (talk) 19:10, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

References

Plagiarism found: Intertextuality, Fabulation, and Faction

I finally got off my lazy butt and checked some of the stuff for plagiarism, a few sections I've suspected for a while. I found clear evidence that "Intertextuality," "Fabulation," and "Faction" were directly plagiarized from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary terms. I think these sections are fine to keep, but we must paraphrase them. I will put some effort into paraphrasing these as soon as I can. Please, I encourage other users to paraphrase this because it may be a while before I'm able to really do it. Also, if anyone else catches plagiarism, please mention it here, but also put some effort into paraphrasing it.F. Simon Grant (talk) 22:37, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to remove these for right now until we get a chance to fix them:

Intertextuality: Interdependence of literary texts is not based on the theory that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the "absorption and transformation of another". One literary text depends on some other literary work. An example of this is Tom Stoppard´s play Rosencrantz and Guildestern are Dead.

Faction: Faction is fiction which is based on and combined with fact. Notable examples are Truman Capote´s In Cold Blood, Norman's Mailer's Armies of the Night and Alex Haley´s Roots. It can apply to historical novels which combine a great deal of period fact with fictional treatment or to novels which incorporate actual living personalities (e.g. the President of the USA, the British Prime Minister etc.) in a narrative about recent events which pertain to historical fact.

Fabulation: A term used to describe the anti-novel. It appears to have been introduced by Robert Scholes in The Fabulators. Fabulation involves allegory, verbal acrobatics and surrealistic effects. This style can be represented by Salman Rushdie´s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

F. Simon Grant (talk) 23:32, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

References

Steampunk definitely belongs somewhere on this page

Someone on the main postmodernism talk page suggested adding a reference to steampunk. I replied that steampunk would fit better on the postmodern lit page. There was some argument earlier about the place of cyberpunk within postmodern lit. The argument was essentially whether cyberpunk was postmodern or if it was just regular science fiction. I would definitely argue that steampunk has an even clearer place with in postmodern literature because it deals so much with patiche and temporal distortion. Steampunk as a genre is also very playful to a more significant degree than even cyberpunk. I would argue that steampunk deserves a reference, even if it is brief, in perhaps the "Technoculture and hyperreality" section or in the "Temporal distortion" section.F. Simon Grant (talk) 19:40, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Necessity of mentioning Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard etc, at beginning?

It is it necessary to have all these intellectually intimidating references to the so-called post-structuralists in an article on literature? Especially since many of the great examples of what we refer to as postmodern literature (Burroughs, Pynchon, Barth, Flann O'Brien) were written without the slightest knowledge of such figures?

Is not the modifier "postmodern" used to describe a literary work's aesthetic features more than a kind of homogeneous anti-Enlightenment philosophical content? Perhaps the opening sentences on characteristics of postmodern literature could be expanded upon, and distinguished from "postmodernism" in general (remember, even many of those often described as "postmodernists" did not identify at all with the term). Perhaps somewhere below a good section could be given to treat overlapping areas of concern with figures like Baudrillard and so on.

Just a thought. What do you think? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bertrandroussel (talk • contribs) 03:22, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Dubious inclusion of Watchmen. Graphic novels = liturature?.

I notice that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (a "graphic novel" or thick comic-book) is included in the list of exemplary postmodern literature.
A graphic novel is no more an example of literature than a film is. It is a different medium altogether, not merely an illustrated text as is implied by the ommision of Dave Gibbons as co-author.
Also, if "literature" were to be expanded to the extent that graphic novels (and, I suppose, any other artform that employs words) were included, there are many better examples, in terms of postmodernism. For instance:
Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzuchelli;
David Boring and Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes;
Jimbo in Purgatory and Jimbo's Inferno by Gary Panter,
Black Hole by Charles Burns;
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill;
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell;
The Fate of the Artist by Eddie Campbell;
Maus by Art Spiegelman;
not to mention hundreds of short pieces by Robert Crumb, Mark Newgarden, Chris Ware, Glenn Head, Danny Hellman, Henriette Valium, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, etc etc.

The inclusion of Watchmen alone resembles spurious tokenism and is hardly informative. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.101.245.36 (talk) 05:28, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Vandalism

If you look at footnote 1, you will see that there are 10 references in the article that refer to a work identified as "Lewis." This must have been in the bibliography, but have since been removed. Could someone responsible for the page restore it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.32.64.44 (talk) 21:05, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

LOL, I Did it.109.205.248.227 (talk) 18:25, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

"Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle -- Who?

The above, that appears in a quotation at the end of the article, doesn't make sense. Who are the "Chemical Generation"? and what fin-de-siècle is the critic referring to -- the link is inappropriate. I must presume that there's an error in copying the quotation. Rwood128 (talk) 16:02, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Notable influences?

The inclusion of the 18th century novelist Laurence Sterne in this section paradoxically suggests that postmodernism preceded modernism. Sterne should be deleted or, the paradox clearly explained. This also applies to other writers listed in this section of the article. Furthermore doesn't Esslin, in his famous book on the Theatre of the Absurd, give examples from Classical times. Were there possibly precursors of postmodernists in ancient Greece? Rwood128 (talk) 12:36, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I have deleted the unsourced section preceding the late 19th century dramatists, although the whole thing is unsourced and much of the article is in a general deplorable state regarding lack of sources and various dubious claims which reeks of WP:OR. --Saddhiyama (talk) 20:34, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

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