Expert: Garrett - 10/2/2009

Question
In a nut shell, what are the characteristics of a post-modern literary piece?

I understand that it parodies history (and its accuracy is not important). Most of them utilizes the double twists ending.

I want to have a true grip of this literary development just so I would know exactly how it differs from Modern Lit.

Thank You.

Answer
Annabelle

Postmodernism easily means "after the modern," or more specifically, after the modernist movements in the arts, literature, architecture, etc.  The best way to define postmodern in terms of an accessible and definitive definition that makes a postmodern work particularly recognizable is that it rejects and challenges the ideas and standards that make up the traditional viewpoint and execution of things.

In literature, I would love to use some authors as examples.  The work of Mark Z. Danielewski particularly stands out to me - he takes the familiar idea of what a book is and literally turns your experience with it upside down.  In his work "House of Leaves," we see many examples of it:

-The audience is almost a central character in the book, constructing and deconstructing the house that is in the book.
-The narrators are nested within one another, and it defamiliarizes the audience with how a narrative is traditionally structured by having several narrators and formats within one another - and they all seem to be different and confused by one another as well.
-The format of the writing is all over the place, in style and on the page.  Words appear in different colors, on different parts of the page, in footnotes, in books within the book itself, and at times it even falls off the page both literally and metaphorically, transforming into musical notations, braille, and sometimes even being lists of names.  There are even blank pages.

Some other very recent examples include Dave Eggers' work like "You Shall Know Our Velocity" and "A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius," Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and "Everything is Illuminated," and William Burrough's "Naked Lunch."  I believe it is commonly accepted that the earliest work of literature that is arguably the first modern postmodern book was Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy."

I am not an expert in postmodernism in other disciplines, however, films of director Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kauffmann, the architecture on campus at MIT, the music of Philip Glass and John Adams, the drama of Samuel Beckett, and artwork of most if not all of the Dadaists all are major recognizable postmodern works...

I hope this helps!  Let me know if you need more info or clarification, and I will be happy to help!

G