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Postmodern literature
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Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature.[1]
Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, tends to resist definition or classification as a "movement". Indeed, the convergence of postmodern literature with various modes of critical theory, particularly reader-response and deconstructionist approaches, and the subversions of the implicit contract between author, text and reader by which its works are often characterised, have led to pre-modern fictions such as Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century satire Tristram Shandy being retrospectively considered by some as early examples of postmodern literature.[2][3]
While there is little consensus on the precise characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature, as is often the case with artistic movements, postmodern literature is commonly defined in relation to a precursor. In particular, postmodern writers are seen as reacting against the precepts of modernism, and they often operate as literary "bricoleurs", parodying forms and styles associated with modernist (and other) writers and artists. Postmodern works also tend to celebrate chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the text's authority or authenticity. Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.[4]
Contents
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1 Background
1.1 Notable influences
1.2 Comparisons with modernist literature
1.3 Shift to postmodernism
1.4 Post-war developments and transition figures
1.5 Scope
2 Common themes and techniques
2.1 Irony, playfulness, black humor
2.2 Intertextuality
2.3 Pastiche
2.4 Metafiction
2.5 Fabulation
2.6 Poioumena
2.7 Historiographic metafiction
2.8 Temporal distortion
2.9 Magic realism
2.10 Technoculture and hyperreality
2.11 Paranoia
2.12 Maximalism
2.13 Minimalism
2.14 Fragmentation
3 Different perspectives
4 Examples of postmodern literature
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
Background[edit]
Notable influences[edit]
Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and challenged the authority of the artist.[clarification needed] Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized.[citation needed] Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers.[citation needed] He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars.[5]
Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]".[6][7]
Comparisons with modernist literature[edit]
Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature.[citation needed] The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely.[5] Gertrude Stein's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern.[8]
Shift to postmodernism[edit]
As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance, the literary theorist Keith Hopper[9] regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel.
The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction).[10][11][12]
Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes' The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 (Waiting for Godot, 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959.[citation needed] For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.[13]
Post-war developments and transition figures[edit]
Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and Magic Realism) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic.[citation needed]
The work of Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett.[citation needed] The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says, "Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.[...] Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work [...] He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters."[14]
The "Beat generation" was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac, who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group (John Ashbery, Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the "cut-up" technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded.
Magic Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American "boom", a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America.
Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern, see Brian McHale.[15]
Scope[edit]
American author and publisher Dave Eggers is one of several contemporary authors who represent the latest movement in post-modern literature which some have deemed post-postmodernism
Postmodernism in literature is not an organized movement with leaders or central figures; therefore, it is more difficult to say if it has ended or when it will end (compared to, say, declaring the end of modernism with the death of Joyce or Woolf). Arguably postmodernism peaked in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and many others. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general."[16]
Some declared the death of postmodernism in the 1980s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism.[17] With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some[who?] declared White Noise in 1985 or The Satanic Verses in 1988 to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.
A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace, Giannina Braschi, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Denvor Fernandez—and publications such as McSweeney's, The Believer, Denvor Fernandez's Rebirths, and the fiction pages of The New Yorker, herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism.[5][18]
Common themes and techniques[edit]
Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques, discussed below, are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list of features.
Irony, playfulness, black humor[edit]
Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc. It's common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller and Vonnegut address the events of World War II. The central concept of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic "catch-22", and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context. For example, it contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure.[5][19][20]
Intertextuality[edit]
Since postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales – as in works by Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, and many others – or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges, a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism is John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke's poem of the same name.[citation needed] Often intertextuality is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice, for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Also, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Borges.[21][22][23] Some critics point to the use of intertextuality as an indication of postmodernism's lack of originality and reliance on clichés.
Pastiche[edit]
Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Giannina Braschi mixes poetry, commercials, musical, manifesto, and drama; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson's 1969 novel The Unfortunates; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose.[5][24][25]
Metafiction[edit]
Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", as it's typical of deconstructionist approaches,[26] making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of disbelief." For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself.[27][28][29]
Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien's 1990 novel/story collection The Things They Carried, about one platoon's experiences during the Vietnam War, features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture the truth. Another example is David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, in which he claimed that the copyright page only claimed it was fiction for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel was non-fiction. He also employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace.
Fabulation[edit]
Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators. Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Giannina Braschi's "United States of Banana" and Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.[30]
Poioumena[edit]
Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek: ποιούμενον, "product") is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth."[31] In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children parallels the creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt, describes a week in the life of a poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves remarkably prophetic. In The Comforters, Muriel Spark's protagonist hears the sound of a typewriter and voices that later may transform into the novel itself. Jan Křesadlo purports to be merely the translator of a "chrononaut's" handed down homeric Greek science fiction epic, the Astronautilia. Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook; John Fowles's Mantissa; William Golding's Paper Men; and Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew.[23][31][32][33][34]
Historiographic metafiction[edit]
Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung), and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to feature a metafictional, "Janus-headed" outlook in the way the novel seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War Two while, at the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that.[35]
Temporal distortion[edit]
This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version.[5]
Magic realism[edit]
Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian who in 1935 published his Historia universal de la infamia, regarded by many as the first work of magic realism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier is another described as a "magic realist". Postmodernists such as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino commonly use Magic Realism in their work.[5][23] A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier's "The Ceiling", Dan Chaon's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel's "Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver's "The Mourning Door".[36]
Technoculture and hyperreality[edit]
Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the "cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillo's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment.[37][38][39]
Paranoia[edit]
Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke".[40] This often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human.[5]
Maximalism[edit]
Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work.
Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto, attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment.[41][42]
Minimalism[edit]
Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse and especially Samuel Beckett.[43]
Fragmentation[edit]
Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout the entire work.[44] In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit, a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos, one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature,[45] an almost telegraphic style is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax structure which complements the illustration of the main character's subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly chaotic world.[46]
Different perspectives[edit]
John Barth, the postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called "The Literature of Exhaustion" and in 1980 published "The Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "Literature of Replenishment" Barth says,
My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett's Texts for Nothing... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and "contentism," pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction...[47]
Many of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II, one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war:
The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the Fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle. I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat's Cradle.[48]
In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose', the novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon:
[P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. ... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.[49]
Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature:
It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists, the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern." The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR, the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ... Here's Robert Coover's 1966 A Public Burning, in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president.[50]
Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature:
Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative.[51]
Examples of postmodern literature[edit]
Some well known examples of postmodern literature, in chronological order, include:
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) by Flann O'Brien
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) by Jorge Luis Borges
The Third Policeman (1941, published 1967) by Flann O'Brien
The Cannibal (1949) by John Hawkes
The Ginger Man (1955) by J. P. Donleavy
The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
The Comforters (1957) by Muriel Spark
Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
The Lime Twig (1961) by John Hawkes
Mother Night (1961) by Kurt Vonnegut
Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick
V. (1963) by Thomas Pynchon
Cat's Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut
Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortázar
Niembsch oder Der Stillstand (1964) by Peter Härtling [52]
Albert Angelo (1964) by B. S. Johnson
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez
Lost in the Funhouse (1968) by John Barth
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula Le Guin
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) by Ishmael Reed
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) by Vladimir Nabokov
The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) by J. G. Ballard
The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) by José Donoso
Another Roadside Attraction (1971) by Tom Robbins
Double or Nothing (1971) by Raymond Federman
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson
The Monster at the End of This Book (1971) by Jon Stone
Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino
Mumbo Jumbo (1972) by Ishmael Reed
Chimera (1972) by John Barth
Crash (1973) by J. G. Ballard
Breakfast of Champions (1973) by Kurt Vonnegut
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon[53]
The Magus (1973) by John Fowles
Alphabetical Africa (1974) by Walter Abish
The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) by Ishmael Reed
J R (1975) by William Gaddis
The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
The Dead Father (1975) by Donald Barthelme
Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany
Options (1975) by Robert Sheckley
The Alteration (1976) by Kingsley Amis
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) by Tom Robbins
Almost Transparent Blue (1976) by Ryu Murakami
Ratner's Star (1976) by Don DeLillo
Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko
A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick
The Public Burning (1977), by Robert Coover
Life: A User's Manual (1978) by Georges Perec
The Twyborn Affair (1979) by Patrick White
If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino
Mulligan Stew (1979) by Gilbert Sorrentino
How German Is It (1980) by Walter Abish
Coin Locker Babies (1980) by Ryu Murakami
Nikopol Trilogy (1980–1993) by Enki Bilal
Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler
Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) by Tom Robbins
VALIS (1981) by Philip K. Dick
Sixty Stories (1981) by Donald Barthelme
Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) by Alasdair Gray
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) by Philip K. Dick
Mantissa (1982) by John Fowles
Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift
The Norm (1983) by Vladimir Sorokin
Brilliant Creatures (1983) by Clive James
The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco
Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983) by Elizabeth Jolley
Nights at the Circus (1984) by Angela Carter
Jitterbug Perfume (1984) by Tom Robbins
Blood and Guts in High School (1984) by Kathy Acker
Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) by Milorad Pavić
Democracy (1984) by Joan Didion
Marina’s Thirtieth Love (1984) by Vladimir Sorokin
Foxybaby (1985) by Elizabeth Jolley
"Perfume (novel)" (1985) by Patrick Süskind
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson
Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985) by Assia Djebar
Less Than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis
The New York Trilogy (1985–86) by Paul Auster
White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
A Maggot (1985) by John Fowles
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) by Haruki Murakami
The Infinite Deadlock (1985–1988) by Dmitry Galkovsky
Watchmen (1986–87) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Well (1986) by Elizabeth Jolley
Memoirs of Many in One (1986) by Patrick White
Kisses of the Enemy (1987) by Rodney Hall
Moon Tiger (1987) by Penelope Lively
Women and Men (1987) by Joseph McElroy
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
The Mezzanine (1988) by Nicholson Baker
Foucault's Pendulum (1988) by Umberto Eco
Braschi's Empire of Dreams (1988) by Giannina Braschi
Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) by David Markson
Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich
London Fields (1989) by Martin Amis
The Black Book (1990) by Orhan Pamuk
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) by Salman Rushdie
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) by Mark Leyner
Almanac of the Dead (1991) by Leslie Marmon Silko
Omon Ra (1991) by Victor Pelevin
The Gold Bug Variations (1991) by Richard Powers
American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis
What a Carve Up! (1991) by Jonathan Coe
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland
Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson
Vurt (1993) by Jeff Noon
A Frolic of His Own (1994) by William Gaddis
Astronautilía Hvězdoplavba (1995) by Jan Křesadlo
Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers
"The Dog King" (1995) by Christoph Ransmayr
Reservation Blues (1995) by Sherman Alexie
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) by Haruki Murakami
The Lost Scrapbook (1995) by Evan Dara
The First Death (1996) by Dimitris Lyacos
Chapayev and Void (1996) by Victor Pelevin
Wozzeck (novel) (1997) by Yuri Izdryk
Mason & Dixon (1997) by Thomas Pynchon
Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo
In the Miso Soup (1997) by Ryu Murakami
Transmetropolitan (1997-2002) by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) by Giannina Braschi
Glamorama (1998) by Bret Easton Ellis
Zero Degree (1998) by Charu Nivedita
Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) by Rabih Alameddine
My Name Is Red (1998) by Orhan Pamuk
Generation "П" (1999) by Victor Pelevin
Blue Salo (1999) by Vladimir Sorokin
The Rings of Saturn (1999) by W. G. Sebald
Q (1999) by Luther Blissett
Motherless Brooklyn (1999) by Jonathan Lethem
Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) by Haruki Murakami
White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith
Morning and Evening (2000) by Jon Fosse
An Invisible Sign of My Own: A Novel (2000) by Aimee Bender
The Blind Assassin (2001) by Margaret Atwood
Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald
Everything Is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer
You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) by Dave Eggers
Kafka on the Shore (2002) by Haruki Murakami
2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño
After Dark (2004) by Haruki Murakami
Depeche Mode (novel) (2004) by Serhiy Zhadan
On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith
Lunar Park (2005) by Bret Easton Ellis
Against the Day (2005) by Thomas Pynchon
Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006) by Heather O'Neill
What Is the What (2006) by Dave Eggers
The Last Novel (2007) by David Markson
The Easy Chain (2008) by Evan Dara
The City & the City (2009) by China Miéville
Generation A (2009) by Douglas Coupland
Inherent Vice (2009) by Thomas Pynchon
Z213: Exit (2009) by Dimitris Lyacos
1Q84 (2009–2010) by Haruki Murakami
Witz (2010) by Joshua Cohen
There But For The(2011) by Ali Smith
United States of Banana (2011) by Giannina Braschi
Home (2012) by Toni Morrison
Bleeding Edge (2013) by Thomas Pynchon
Taipei (2013) by Tao Lin
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) by Marlon James
With the People from the Bridge (2014) by Dimitris Lyacos
Titrāktūs Chahār La‘natī (2015) (in Persian :تتراكتوس چهار لعنتي ), by Reza Khoshnazar
See also[edit]
Postmodern American Poetry
Hysterical realism
Maximalism
Magic realism
List of postmodern authors
List of postmodern critics
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Felluga, D. (n.d.). General Introduction to Postmodernism. College of Liberal Arts: Purdue University. Retrieved August 16, 2013.
Jump up ^ Graf, E.C. (2007) Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on Don Quijote. Rosemount Publishing, p. 22.
Jump up ^ McCaffery, L. (1986) Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. Greenwood Press, p. xv.
Jump up ^ Jameson, Fredric. 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', in Hal Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto, 1985, pp. 112-115.
^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h Lewis, Barry. Postmodernism and Literature // The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. NY: Routledge, 2002.
Jump up ^ McHale, Brian. ''Postmodernist Fiction''. Methuen, 1987. Books.google.com.au. 2004-06-19. p. 66. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
Jump up ^ "Text by Jan Svenungsson". Jansvenungsson.com. 1999-04-18. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
Jump up ^ Pitchford, Nicola (2002), Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. Bucknell University Press: 21.
Jump up ^ Hopper, Keith (2009), Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist, 2nd edn. Cork University Press, Cork, Ireland (ISBN 9781859184479).
Jump up ^ Postmodern American Fiction: An Anthology Archived December 25, 2006, at the Wayback Machine., Chapter 6: Technoculture, p. 510.
Jump up ^ Sponsler, Claire (1992). "Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson". Contemporary Literature. University of Wisconsin Press. 33 (4): 625–44. ISSN 1548-9949. JSTOR 1208645. doi:10.2307/1208645 – via JSTOR. (Registration required (help)).
Jump up ^ "Hypertext fiction: The latest in postmodern literary theory". Findarticles.com. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
Jump up ^ McHale, Brian (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, (ISBN 0-4150-4513-4)
Jump up ^ Wagner, p. 194
Jump up ^ McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987 and "Constructing Postmodernism" New York: Routledge, 1992.
Jump up ^ Pöhlmann, Sascha Nico Stefan. "Gravity's Rainbow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 October 2006 accessed 17 March 2013.
Jump up ^ Tom Wolfe, "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel", Harper's Magazine, November 1989.
Jump up ^ John Barth. "Very Like an Elephant: Reality vs. Realism" Further Fridays. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.
Jump up ^ Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. NY: Routledge, 2004.
Jump up ^ Barth, John. "Postmodernism Revisited." Further Fridays. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.
Jump up ^ Graham Allen. Intertextuality. Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0-415-17474-0. pg. 200.
Jump up ^ Mary Orr. Intertextuality: debates and contexts. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. ISBN 0-7456-3121-5.
^ Jump up to: a b c The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. J.A.Cuddon. ISBN 0-14-051363-9
Jump up ^ Hutcheon
Jump up ^ McHale
Jump up ^ Richard Dyer (2004) Isaac Julien in Conversation in Wasafiri, Issue 43, 2004, p. 29.
Jump up ^ César J. Ayala, Rafael Bernabe (2007) Puerto Rico in the American century: a history since 1898 p.331
Jump up ^ Historias tremendas de Pedro Cabiya, in Modernidad literaria puertoriqueña (San Juan: Isla Negra, 2005), 257–58, 260
Jump up ^ Daniele Luttazzi (2004), Introduction to the Italian translation of Woody Allen's Complete Prose. Bompiani.
Jump up ^ Patricia Waugh. Metafiction: the theory and practice of self-conscious fiction. Routledge, 1984 ISBN 0-203-13140-1, ISBN 978-0-203-13140-4. pg. 19.
^ Jump up to: a b Fowler, Alastair. The History of English Literature, p. 372 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1989) ISBN 0-674-39664-2
Jump up ^ M. Keith Booker. Techniques of subversion in modern literature: transgression, abjection, and the carnivalesque. University Press of Florida, 1991. ISBN 0-8130-1065-9. pg. 81–82.
Jump up ^ Fowler, Alastair. The History of English Literature, p. 372 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1989) ISBN 0-674-39664-2
Jump up ^ Fowler, Alastair. "Postmodernism". www.westga.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-09-14. Retrieved 2009-09-11.
Jump up ^ Jensen, Mikkel (2016) "Janus-Headed Postmodernism: The Opening Lines of Slaughterhouse-Five" in The Explicator, 74:1, 8-11.
Jump up ^ Things That Fall From the Sky, The Village Voice, May 7, 2002
Jump up ^ Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. Ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
Jump up ^ ’’Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction’’. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Duke University Press, 1994.
Jump up ^ ’’Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of Postmodern and Science Fiction’’. Ed. Sabine Heuser. ISBN 90-420-0986-1
Jump up ^ "The Crying of Lot 49." "Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.: Spermatikos Logos" Archived December 14, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.. The Modern Word. 4 February 2008.
Jump up ^ Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. NY: Palgrave, 1998.
Jump up ^ Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction: Postmodern Studies 38; Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature.
Jump up ^ An Introduction to Literary Studies. Marion Klarer. ISBN 0-415-33382-2
Jump up ^ H.T Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 88. Rutledge 2005.
Jump up ^ Paul B. Roth, Preface to Dimitris Lyacos, Bitter Oleander Special Feature. The Bitter Oleander Journal, Volume 22, No 1, Spring 2016, Fayetteville, NY
Jump up ^ "Văn chương hậu hiện đại (phần I)" (in Vietnamese). Khoavanhoc-ngonngu.edu.vn. Archived from the original on 2014-10-29. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
Jump up ^ John Barth. "The Literature of Replenishment" in The Friday Book. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Jump up ^ Heller, Joseph. "Reeling in Catch-22". Catch as Catch Can. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Jump up ^ Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose (translated by William Weaver). London: Secker and Warburg, 1985, pp 65–67.
Jump up ^ David Foster Wallace. "E Unibus Pluram". A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.
Jump up ^ Hans-Peter Wagner, A History of British, Irish and American Literature, Trier 2003, p. 211. ISBN 3-88476-410-1
Jump up ^ Markus Bücker: Kontrafakturen der Moderne. Erinnerung als Intertextualität in der frühen Postmoderne (1964/1981). Philologie und Kulturgeschichte Band 1. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2014. ISBN 978-3-8498-1074-0.
Jump up ^ Herman, L., R. Hogenraad, and W. van Mierlo, "Pynchon, postmodernism and quantification: an empirical content analysis of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow"[permanent dead link]. Language and Literature 12(1): 27–41 (2003).
Further reading[edit]
Barthes, Roland (1975). The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, Roland (1968). Writing Degree Zero, New York: Hill and Wang.
Foucault, Michel (1983). This is Not a Pipe. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoover, Paul. ed. (1994). Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (ISBN 0-8223-1090-2)
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (ISBN 0-8166-1173-4)
Lyotard, Jean-François (1988). The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985. Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. (ISBN 0-8166-2211-6)
McCaffery, Larry. ed.(1986). Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. New York: Greenwood Press. (ISBN 0-3132-4170-8)
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction, London: Routledge. (ISBN 0-4150-4513-4)
McHale, Brian (1992). Constructing Postmodernism, London: Routledge. (ISBN 0-4150-6013-3)
Magliola, Robert (1997), On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture (Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1997; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). This book's long and experimental first part is an application of Derridean "oto-biography" to postmodern life-writing.
Arik Glasner, "The Thirst for Classical Works"[permanent dead link], Acheret Magazine
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Consumer protection
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In regulatory jurisdictions that provide for this (a list including most or all developed countries with free market economies) consumer protection is a group of laws and organizations designed to ensure the rights of consumers, as well as fair trade, competition, and accurate information in the marketplace. The laws are designed to prevent the businesses that engage in fraud or specified unfair practices from gaining an advantage over competitors. They may also provide additional protection for those most vulnerable in society. Consumer protection laws are a form of government regulation that aim to protect the rights of consumers. For example, a government may require businesses to disclose detailed information about products—particularly in areas where safety or public health is an issue, such as food.
Consumer protection is linked to the idea of consumer rights, and to the formation of consumer organizations, which help consumers make better choices in the marketplace and get help with consumer complaints. Other organizations that promote consumer protection include government organizations and self-regulating business organizations such as consumer protection agencies and organizations, ombudsmen, the Federal Trade Commission in America, and Better Business Bureaus in America and Canada, etc.
A consumer is defined as someone who acquires goods or services for direct use or ownership rather than for resale or use in production and manufacturing.[1]
Consumer interests can also be protected by promoting competition in the markets which directly and indirectly serve consumers, consistent with economic efficiency, but this topic is treated in competition law.
Consumer protection can also be asserted via non-government organizations and individuals as consumer activism.
Contents
[hide]
1 Consumer law
1.1 Australia
1.2 Nigeria
1.3 Germany
1.4 India
1.5 Taiwan
1.6 United Kingdom
1.7 United States
2 Constitutional laws
3 Laws
3.1 United Kingdom
3.2 United States
3.3 Australia
4 See also
4.1 Consumer issues
4.2 People
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
Consumer law[edit]
Consumer protection law or consumer law is considered as an area of law that regulates private law relationships between individual consumers and the businesses that sell those goods and services. Consumer protection covers a wide range of topics, including but not necessarily limited to product liability, privacy rights, unfair business practices, fraud, misrepresentation, and other consumer/business interactions. It's a way of preventing frauds and scams from service and sales contracts, eligible fraud, bill collector regulation, pricing, utility turnoffs, consolidation, personal loans that may lead to bankruptcy.
The following lists consumer legislation at the nation-state level. In the EU member states Germany and the United Kingdom there is also the applicability of law at the EU level to be considered; this applies on the basis of subsidiarity.
Australia[edit]
In Australia, the corresponding agency is the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission or the individual State Consumer Affairs agencies. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has responsibility for consumer protection regulation of financial services and products. However, in practice, it does so through privately run EDR schemes such as the Financial Ombudsman Service (Australia).
Nigeria[edit]
The Government has a duty to protect its people from any form of harm to human health through the use and purchase of items to meet daily needs. In light of this, the Nigerian Consumer Protection Council (CPC), whose aim is to protect and enhance consumers' interest through information, education, and enforcement of the rights of consumers was established by an Act of Parliament to promote and protect the interest of consumers over all products and services. In a nutshell, it is empowered to Eliminate hazardous & substandard goods from the market. Provide speedy redress to consumer complaints and petition arisen from fraud, unfair practice and exploitation of consumer.
Germany[edit]
Germany as a member state of the European Union is bound by the consumer protection directives of the European Union; residents may be directly bound by EU regulations. A minister of the federal cabinet is responsible for consumer rights and protection (Verbraucherschutzminister). In the current cabinet of Angela Merkel, this is Heiko Maas.
When issuing public warnings about products and services, the issuing authority has to take into account that this affects the supplier's constitutionally protected economic liberty, see Bundesverwaltungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court) Case 3 C 34.84, 71 BVerwGE 183).
India[edit]
See also: Consumer Protection Act of 1986 and National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission
In India, consumer protection is specified in The Consumer Protection Act, 1986. Under this law, Separate Consumer Dispute Redress Forums have been set up throughout India in each and every district in which a consumer can file his complaint on a simple paper with nominal court fees and his complaint will be decided by the Presiding Officer of the District Level. The complaint can be filed by both the consumer of a goods as well as of the services. An appeal could be filed to the State Consumer Disputes Redress Commissions and after that to the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC). The procedures in these tribunals are relatively less formal and more people friendly and they also take less time to decide upon a consumer dispute[2] when compared to the years long time taken by the traditional Indian judiciary. In recent years, many effective judgment have been passed by some state and National Consumer Forums.
Indian Contract Act, 1872 lays down the conditions in which promises made by parties to a contract will be legally binding on each other. It also lays down the remedies available to aggregate party if the other party fails to honor his promise.
The Sale of Goods Act of 1930 act provides some safeguards to buyers of goods if goods purchased do not fulfill the express or implied conditions and warranties.
The Agriculture Produce Act of 1937 act provides grade standards for agricultural commodities and live stock products.It specifies the conditions which govern the use of standards and lays down the procedure for grading, marking and packaging of agricultural produce.The quality mark provided under the act is known as AGMARK-Agricultural Marketing.
Taiwan[edit]
Modern Taiwanese law has been heavily influenced by European civil law systems, particularly German and Swiss law. The Civil Code in Taiwan contains five books: General Principles, Obligations, Rights over Things, Family, and Succession. The second book of the Code, the Book of Obligations, provided the basis from which consumers could bring products liability actions prior to the enactment of the CPL.[3]
The Consumer Protection Law (CPL) in Taiwan, as promulgated on January 11, 1994, and effective on January 13, 1993, specifically protects the interests and safety of customers using the products or services provided by business operators. The Consumer Protection Commission of Executive Yuan serves as an ombudsman supervising, coordinating, reporting any unsafe products/services and periodically reviewing the legislation.
According to the Pacific Rim Law & Policy Association and the American Chamber of Commerce, in a 1997 critical study, the law has been criticized by stating that "although many agree that the intent of the CPL is fair, the CPL's various problems, such as ambiguous terminology, favoritism towards consumer protection groups, and the compensation liability defense, must be addressed before the CPL becomes a truly effective piece of legislation that will protect consumers"[4]
United Kingdom[edit]
The United Kingdom, as it is still a member state of the European Union, is bound by the consumer protection directives of the European Union; residents may be directly bound by EU regulations. Specifics of the division of labour between the EU and the UK are detailed here.[5] Domestic (UK) laws originated within the ambit of contract and tort but, with the influence of EU law, it is emerging as an independent area of law. In many circumstances, where domestic law is in question, the matter judicially treated as tort, contract, restitution or even criminal law.
Consumer Protection issues are dealt with when complaints are made to the Director-General of Fair Trade. The Office of Fair Trading[6] will then investigate, impose an injunction or take the matter to litigation. However, consumers cannot directly complain to the OFT. Complaints need to be made to the Citizens Advice Consumer Service (which has taken over from Consumer Direct) who will provide legal advice to complainants, or re-direct the individual complaint to Trading Standards for investigation. Due to restrictions within the Enterprise Act 2002, individual complainants are unable to be told whether their case is being investigated or not. In very rare cases, Consumer Direct may direct a very large number of complaints to the OFT to be considered as a systemic complaint. The OFT can also be engaged by consumer groups e.g. The Consumers Association or the statutory consumer protection body – Consumer Focus – via a super complaint. The OFT rarely prosecute companies, however, preferring a light touch regulation approach. Consumer complaints against companies are not published, but investigation work, undertakings, and enforcement are located at.[7] Many of the consumer protection laws e.g. Distance Selling Regulations 2000 or Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 (19 years ago) are actually UK implementations of EU directives. The OFT is one of the bodies responsible for enforcing these rules. It leads to a problem that these examples of legislation are clearly designed to deal with individual complaints but the OFT will only deal with systemic complaints and will ignore individual complainants redirecting them back to Consumer Direct.
The Office of Fair Trading also acts as the UK's official consumer and competition watchdog, with a remit to make markets work well for consumers, and at a local, municipal level by Trading Standards departments. General consumer advice can be obtained from the Citizens Advice Consumer Service or via a local branch of the Citizen's Advice Bureau.
United States[edit]
Consumer protection laws often mandate the posting of notices, such as this one which appears in all automotive repair shops in California
In the United States a variety of laws at both the federal and state levels regulate consumer affairs. Among them are the federal Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Truth in Lending Act, Fair Credit Billing Act, and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. Federal consumer protection laws are mainly enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
At the state level, many states have adopted the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act including, but not limited to, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, and Nebraska. The deceptive trade practices prohibited by the Uniform Act can be roughly subdivided into conduct involving either a) unfair or fraudulent business practice and b) untrue or misleading advertising. The Uniform Act contains a private remedy with attorneys fees for prevailing parties where the losing party "willfully engaged in the trade practice knowing it to be deceptive". Uniform Act §3(b). Missouri has a similar statute called the Merchandising Practices Act. This statute allows local prosecutors or the Attorney General to press charges against people who knowingly use deceptive business practices in a consumer transaction and authorizes consumers to hire a private attorney to bring an action seeking their actual damages, punitive damages, and attorney's fees.[8]
Also, the majority of states have a Department of Consumer Affairs devoted to regulating certain industries and protecting consumers who use goods and services from those industries.[9] For example, in California, the California Department of Consumer Affairs regulates about 2.3 million professionals in over 230 different professions, through its forty regulatory entities. In addition, California encourages its consumers to act as private attorneys general through the liberal provisions of its Consumers Legal Remedies Act.
California has the strongest consumer protection laws of any US state, partly because of rigorous advocacy and lobbying by groups such as Utility Consumers' Action Network, Consumer Federation of California, and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. For example, California provides for "cooling off" periods giving consumers the right to cancel contracts within a certain time period for several specified types of transactions, such as home secured transactions, and warranty and repair services contracts.[10]
Other states have been the leaders in specific aspects of consumer protection. For example, Florida, Delaware, and Minnesota have legislated requirements that contracts be written at reasonable readability levels as a large proportion of contracts cannot be understood by most consumers who sign them.[11]
Constitutional laws[edit]
47 national constitutions currently in force include some sort of consumer right.[12] The Constitute project lists the text of each of these provisions here.[13] Kenya's provision, for example, suggests that citizens have the right to (1) goods and services of "reasonable quality." (2) information about the product, and (3) protection of their health and safety in the use of the product. The Kenyan rule also stipulates that citizens would have legal recourse in the case of injury or product defects.
Laws[edit]
Competition law
United Kingdom[edit]
Supply of Goods (Implied Terms) Act 1973
Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977
Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982
Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999
Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000
Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002
Enterprise Act 2002
Sale and Supply of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002/3045
General Product Safety Regulations 2005
Consumer Rights Act 2015
United States[edit]
Consumer Product Safety Act – gives the Consumer Product Safety Commission the power to develop safety standards and pursue recalls for products
Federal Trade Commission Act – created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to prevent unfair competition, deceptive acts, regulate trade, etc.
Privacy laws
United States National Do Not Call Registry – allows US consumers to limit telemarketing calls they receive.
Food and drug
Pure Food and Drug Act – led to the creation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate foods, drugs, and more.
Communications
Communications Act of 1934 – created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate all radio and interstate cable, phone, and satellite communications.
Banking
Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA) – regulates the collection, dissemination, and use of consumer credit information
Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) – eliminates abusive consumer practices, ensure fairness, etc.
Truth in Lending Act (TILA) – requires clear disclosure of key terms of the lending arrangement and all costs.
Real estate
Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) – prohibits kickbacks and requires lenders to provide a good faith estimate of costs
Health insurance
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – provides consumer protection for health information
Digital media
Digital Millennium Copyright Act – prohibits production or sale of devices or services intended to circumvent copyright measures.
Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (proposed) – would repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Australia[edit]
The Australian Consumer Law
Division 2 of Part 2 of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001[14] in relation to financial services and products
See also[edit]
Consumer issues[edit]
Airline complaints
Antitrust
Better Business Bureau
Class action
Competition policy
Competition regulator
Consumer complaint
Consumer organization
Cooling-off period
Credit and debt
Extended warranty
Fairtrade labelling
Federal Trade Commission
Food safety
List of food labeling regulations
Mandatory labelling
Ombudsman
Online Complaint Management System
Planned obsolescence
Product recall
Telephone Consumer Protection Act
Transparency (market)
Unfair competition
People[edit]
Florence Kelley
Ralph Nader
Phil Radford
Michael Vernon
References[edit]
Jump up ^ "West Encyclopedia of American Law. Consumer. Answers.com. n.d.. Retrieved on January 31, 2010"
Jump up ^ V. Balakrishna Eradi, "Consumer Protection and National Consumer Disputes Redress Commission" Archived July 21, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.. New Delhi: National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission. Accessed 25 June 2013.
Jump up ^ Taiwan Consumer Protection Law,[1], citing Laws & Regulations Database of the Republic of China, [2]
Jump up ^ Carol T. Juang, "The Taiwan Consumer Protection Law: Attempt to Protect Consumers Proves Ineffective" Pacific Rim Law & Policy Association, 1997.
Jump up ^ "EU law and the balance of competences: A short guide and glossary, 2012". Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
Jump up ^ U.K. Office of Fair Trading, [3], 2013.
Jump up ^ U.K. Office of Fair Trading, "Consumer Enforcement" Archived 2011-03-13 at the Wayback Machine., 2013.
Jump up ^ http://www.flesnerwentzel.com/#!merchandising-practices-act/c1k1e
Jump up ^ State by state list of consumer affairs divisions of state attorney general offices
Jump up ^ "Contract Cancellation periods or "Cooling off periods"". Law Soup LA. 2014-07-09. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
Jump up ^ Lewis D. Eigen, "A Solution to the Problem of Consumer Contracts That Cannot be Understood by Consumers Who Sign Them", Scriptamus, 2009.
Jump up ^ Elkins, Zachary, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton. 2014. "Characteristics of National Constitutions, Version 2.0." Comparative Constitutions Project. Last modified: April 18, 2014. Available at: http://www.comparativeconstitutionsproject.org.
Jump up ^ Elkins, Zachary, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton. 2013. Constitute: The World's Constitutions to Read, Search, and Compare. https://www.constituteproject.org/
Jump up ^ Australian Securities and Investments Commission, [4] Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001.
Further reading[edit]
Mańko, Rafał. "The notion of 'consumer' in EU law" (PDF). Library Briefing. Library of the European Parliament. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
External links[edit]
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Category:National Consumer Protection Week
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Legal and Regulatory Issues in the Information Economy
Consumers International
Role of Regulators in Consumer Protection: Discussion
Consumer Protection Act 1986
Health-EU Portal Consumer Safety in the EU
OECD Consumer Policy Toolkit Report
About Econsumer.gov, a portal for consumers to report complaints concerning online and related transactions with foreign companies
International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN)
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