Postmodernism ( Notes)

Postmodernism
is a cultural movement which develops after modernism, that is after the
sixties. The most important feature of postmodernism is that it questions the
idea of authority, absolute truth and the existence of a single centre. It
questions all these themes because people don't believe in meaning as a
definite concept. Therefore they trust the multiplicity of truth, there are as
many truth as there are people. Another important feature of Postmodernism is
that there are no origins, there are only textual production.

There is no
definite meaning, it means there is not a definite truth, it means there is not
a single centre, it follows that if there are many centre, many truth, and many
meanings, this implies that only intertextuality matters because no text has an
original birth or an original author.

The second
feature of postmodernism is the conception of a text as a product of
intertextuality. All text are the result of a series of quotation.

An
additional feature is that postmodernism does not distinguish between high and
low art. This is the effect of the absence of something which is considered a
centre. This is also the result of the advent of technology.

We can
identify some of the postmodernism's main themes in the novel " Oranges are not
the only fruit". For example, when the main character, Janette, grows up she
understands that there is not a unique vision of life, that's to say the
religion vision imposed by her mother during her youth but there are a lot of
viewpoints.