Post-Modernism

WHAT IS POST-MODERNISM?

Here is an interesting quote about post-modernism from __The Story of Literature__ by Anderson, Lord, Macaroon, Peel and Stubbs. Published by Tandem Verlag GmbH in 2010:

//"Notoriously hard to define, the movement takes its cue from the ideas of largely French philosophers and writers, in particular Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004), Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981), and Jean- Francois Lyotard (1924 - 1998), and moves away from the modernist conception of order within complexity to the notion that there is no order and that the artist (in this case the writer) should revel in the pay and multiple interpretations that then open up. In order to achieve this, writers adopted a plethora of techniques to present a bewildering and chaotic world. These include: the widespread use of multiple voices and viewpoints within a text, often using elements of literary pastiche and even quotation (known as intertextuality); a stressing of the artificiality of the text itself (the artifice of art) by making the literary technique obvious; ironic or disturbing juxtapositions of unrelated subjects, characters, plots or devices to break up the narrative and create disorder; and, playing with the temporal flow of the narrative, so that it does move - as we have come to expect - in a linear way. It might be argued that none of these techniques, or even the combination of them, is new and the whole area of post-modern literature has fierce supporters and critics alike."//