Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
Postmodernism notes
Postmodernism developed during the sixties and its main tenses are:
It does no longer believe in the concept of truth
It puts therefore the question of authority into doubt.
It doss no longer believe into the concept of the centre as it generally happens in the previous generation.
If modernism (covers the first decade of the 20th century) was still looking for a centre or for a point of reference and puts the question and resource on art at the centre, Postmodernism questions all that comes to the conclusion that there is no longer a single centre because saying that there is no absolute truth, also implies that there is not meaning.
There is no longer one centre but many centre and therefore meaning is always differed. There is a continues sleeping of meaning because meaning is never stable.
The concept is connected to the relationship between:
1. Signifier
2. Signified
In literature:
The position of the reader is the best one because it is the reader that makes sense, who gives meaning, that is the meaning.
A perfect example of postmodern is:
Oranges are not the only fruit which relive on a restructuring of the Bible structure in a new context and there is a lot of intertextuality.
David Lodge's Nice Work denotative analysis:
Nice Work (1988) is a novel by British author David Lodge.
The extract from the second chapter introduces immediately Robyn Penrose, a university teacher, who is introduces by the narrator as a character that doesn't believe in the concept of character. This first part tells you about her considerations on novel writing during the 19th century up to the 20th century.
She is the opinion that "character" is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. As an argumentation she says that the literary genre of "character" in the rise of the novel coincided with the rise of capitalism and its triumph coincided with the triumph of capitalism. In addition the deconstruction of the classic novel by the postmodernist coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.
In Robyn's opinion the novelist is a capitalist of the imagination and he/she invents a product which consumers did not know they wanted until it is made. The novel was the first mass-produced cultural artefact.
According to Robyn every text is a product of intertextuality and there is nothing outside the text and there is only productions, no origins, and the people produced their "selves" in language.
Going on the extract tells you about Robyn that is getting up, and getting ready for the day, thinking mostly about the 19th century industrial novels.