Postmodernism is a
complicated term or set of ideas, one that has emerged as an area of academic
study since the late 1950s. Modernism was the period between 1910 and 1930 when
the famous modernists like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound etc gave their contributions.
According to American Heritage Dictionary,
Postmodernism is,
Of or relating to art, architecture or literature
that reacts against earlier modernist principles, or by reintroducing
traditional or class elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or
practices to extremes. It is so architecturally interesting…with its
post-modern wooden booths and sculptural clock.
Postmodernism is a
concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines including art,
architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communication, fashion and
technology. Modernism was primarily concerned with principles such as identity,
unity, authority and certainty. And, postmodernism is often associated with
difference, plurality, textuality, scepticism and self-reflexivity. In the
postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into
being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.
Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing
always that the outcome of one’s own experience will necessarily be fallible
and relative, rather than certain and universal.
It is ‘post’ because it
denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of
being a scientific, philosophical or religious truth which will explain
everything- a characteristic of the so- called modern mind. The paradox of the
postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of
its scepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond
questioning.
Jean Francois Lyotard’s
book The Postmodern Civilization has proved to be the major text
for debates on postmodernism, with his stress on the need to be incredulous
towards good narrative. Given below is the propositional account of
postmodernism:-
1) There
is no such thing as transcendent truth. What we call ‘true’ is simply what we
agree with. They are merely negotiated beliefs, the products of social
construction and fabrication.
2) Knowledge,
reality and truth are the products of language.
3) If
there were any transcendent or objective truths, they would be inaccessible and
unknowable by human beings, hence unavailable for any practical epistemological
purposes.
4) There
are no privileged epistemic positions and no certain foundations for beliefs.
All claims are judged by conventions or language games, which have no deeper
grounding. There are no neutral, transcultural standards for settling
disagreements.
5) Appeals
to truth are merely instruments of domination or repression which should be
replaced by practices with progressive social value.
6) Truth
cannot be attained because all putatively truth-oriented practices are
corrupted and biased by politics or self-serving interests.
Another literary critic Ihab Hasan in his
book Paracriticisms equates postmodernism with anti-elitism and
anti-authoritarianism. According to Linda Hutcheon, conventions are
used, abused and subverted in post modern literature through the use of irony
and parody.
It is also found, postmodern literature also often
rejects boundaries between high and low forms of art and
literature, as well as the distinctions between different genres and forms of
writing and storytelling. Therefore, one can say postmodernism stood against
modernism.
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