Post modern Era

1970-1990
 Objectives
01 Define post Modern Era

Demonstrate a value from the literary

02 works of the Post- Modern Era

03 Compare Modern and Post-modern

Era
 In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth
century(1500 to 1945), modernism was the central
literary movement. However, after World War II,
there is a new school of literary theory, the
post-modernism.
 Postmodern literature is a literary
movement that eschews absolute
meaning and instead emphasizes:
Embrace of randomness, playfulness,
fragmentation, metafiction, and
intertextuality.
Why is there another
movement?
The literary movement rose to
prominence in the late 1950s and
early 1960s as a reaction to modernist
literature’s quest for meaning in light
of the significant human rights
violations of World War II.
 Origin of
Post-modern Era
Postmodern literature’s precursor, modernist (or
modern) literature, emphasized a quest for meaning,
suggesting the author as an enlightenment-style creator
of order and mourning the chaotic world—examples

However, after the series of human rights violations that occurred

during and after World War II (including the Holocaust, the
atomic bombings of Japan, and Japanese internment in the US),
writers began to feel as if meaning was an impossible quest, and
that the only way to move forward was to embrace
meaninglessness fully.

Thus, postmodern literature rejected (or built upon)

many of the tenants of modernism, including
shunning meaning, intensifying and celebrating
fragmentation and disorder, and initiating a major
shift in literary tradition.
 Characteristics And
achievement of Postmodern
Era
 Postmodern works reject the idea
of absolute meaning and instead
mbrace of randomness
embrace randomness and disorder.
Postmodern novels often employ
unreliable narrators to further
muddy the waters with extreme
subjectivity and prevent readers
from finding meaning during the
story.
 While modernist writers mourned
Playfulness the loss of order, postmodern
writers revel in it, often using
tools like black humor ,wordplay,
Irony, and other techniques of
playfulness to dizzy readers and
muddle the story.
 Postmodernist literature took
Fragmentation modernism’s fragmentation and
expanded on it, moving literary
works more toward collage-style
forms, temporal distortion, and
significant jumps in character and
place.
 Postmodern literature emphasized
Metafiction meaninglessness and play.
Postmodern writers began to
experiment with more meta elements
in their novels and Short, drawing
attention to their work’s artifice and
reminding readers that the author
isn’t an authority figure.
 As a form of collage-style writing, many
postmodern authors wrote their work
Intertextuality overtly in dialogue with other texts. The
techniques they employed included
pastiche (or imitating other authors’
styles) and the combination of high and
low culture (writing that tackles subjects
that were previously considered
inappropriate for literature).
Authors And works of
postmodern Era
Thomas Pynchon Born on May 8, 1937
- Is an American novelist noted for
his dense and complex novels. His
Fiction and non-fiction writings
encompass a vast array of subject
matter, genres and themes,
including history, music, science,
and mathematics. For Gravity’s
Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973
U.S. National Book Award for
Fiction.
 Theme of
Thomas Pynchon’s Works
Theoretical breakdown: a
common theme to Pynchon's
stories is heat death, or the
evolution of activity in the
universe to a state of stillness.
 It focuses on a search for German "V-2"
rockets, which were the world's first guided
missiles, as well as the wartime atmosphere
in London and the postwar atmosphere in
Germany and France. Particularly important
to this narrative are American Lieutenant
Tyrone Slothrop and his quest to find one
particular, mysterious rocket called 00000, as
well as Slothrop's search for his identity and
the conspiracy surrounding his childhood and
military career.
The arc of a rocket's flight is
Gravity's Rainbow--a symbol not
of God's covenant with Noah that
He will never again destroy all
living things, nor of the inner
instinctual wellsprings of life that
will rise above the dark satanic
mills.
Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, born on November 11,
1922, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.,
American writer noted for his wryly
satirical novels who frequently used
postmodern techniques as well as elements
of Fantasy and science fiction to highlight
the horrors and ironies of 20th-century
civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s work is
marked by an essentially fatalistic
worldview that nonetheless embraces
modern humanist beliefs.
 Theme of
Kurt Vonnegut’s Works
Vonnegut centers much of his
work around three general
concepts: pacifism, social
equality, and the need for
common decency.
The Slaughterhouse One of the most important events in
Billy’s life(Character in the movie) was
witnessing the Allied carpet-bombing and
firebombing of Dresden (which leveled the
city and reportedly killed at least 25,000
civilians), and the descriptions of that
horror bring home in gripping fashion
Vonnegut’s eloquent antiwar message.
Despite its bleak message, however,
Slaughterhouse-Five is filled with black
humor
The Slaughterhouse • ”…there is nothing
intelligent to say about a
massacre. Everybody is
supposed to be dead, to never
say anything or want anything
ever again. Everything is
supposed to be very quiet
after a massacre, and it
always is, except for the
birds. And what do the birds
say? All there is to say about
a massacre, things like
Joseph Heller Joseph Heller, Was born on May 1,
1923, Brooklyn, New York,
U.S..American writer whose novel
Catch-22(1961) was one of the
most significant works of protest
literature to appear after World War
II. The satirical novel was a
popular success, and a film version
appeared in 1970.
 Theme of
Joseph Heller’s Works
the major themes involve the
distortion of justice, the
influence of greed, and the
issue of personal integrity.
Catch 22
A catch-22 is a
situation from which
an individual cannot
escape because of
contradictory rules or
limitations.
Catch 22 Joseph Heller uses black humor to express
normally emotional scenarios in humorous
ways in his writing.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for "a handful

of racial slurs, the characters speak with
typical 'military men' misogyny and racist
attitudes of the time. There are scenes of
violence both hand to hand and with guns,
and violence against women." The Things
They Carried by Tim O'Brien for
"profanity and sexual references".
 Compare and contrast
Modern Period Post-Modern Period
modernism was born out of
based on idealism scepticism and a
and reason suspicion of reason

Modernism was based on using rational, logical means to gain knowledge

while postmodernism denied the application of logical thinking. Rather, the
thinking during the postmodern era was based on unscientific, irrational
thought process, as a reaction to modernism, they tend to eschew things and
try to use the blac humor to emphasize reality
Thank you