To understand some of the ideas behind the counterculture revolution is to understand Ken Kesey’s (1935 – 2001) fictional heroes and some of his themes. Originating with the 1950’s Beat generation, the 1960’s counterculture youth were disillusioned with the vast… Read More ›
The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form,… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the… Read More ›
Unlike a number of his contemporaries, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) does not provide a single, systematic theory of cinema. Instead, his comments are scattered across a range of works, taking the variant forms of brief asides, longer analyses and remarks made… Read More ›
Shakespeare need not be abandoned by the postmodern world.Indeed; the postmodern world does and continues to embrace his works wholeheartedly. Hugh Grady rightly observes “we are now witnessing the emergence of a postmodernist Shakespeare through the development of critical paradigms… Read More ›
In his novels, Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) coaxes the reader toward greater sympathy for humanity and deeper understanding of the human condition. His genre is satire—sometimes biting, sometimes tender, always funny. His arena is as expansive as the whole universe… Read More ›
The quest would seem to be the one indispensable element in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, for each of his novels proves to be a modern-dress version of the search for some grail to revive the wasteland. Pynchon’s characters seek… Read More ›
Harper Lee’s (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), has gained stature over the years, becoming thought of as more than merely a skillful depiction of small-town southern life during the 1930’s with a… Read More ›
At first glance, Joseph Heller’s (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) novels seem quite dissimilar. Heller’s manipulation of time and point of view in Catch-22 is dizzying; it is a hilariously macabre, almost surreal novel. Something Happened, on the… Read More ›
Critics have placed William Gaddis (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) in the tradition of experimental fiction, linking him closely to James Joyce and comparing him to contemporaries such as Thomas Pynchon. Gaddis himself also indicated the influence of… Read More ›
In Robert Coover’s work, humanity is presented not as the center of the universe, the purpose of creation, but, instead, as the center of the fictions it itself creates to explain its existence. Only when people learn the crucial difference… Read More ›
The pattern of Truman Capote’s 1(924 – 1984) career suggests a divided allegiance to two different, even opposing literary forms—objective realism and romance. Capote’s earliest fiction belongs primarily to the imagination of romance. It is intense, wondrously evocative, subjective; in place… Read More ›
Although John Barth’s (1930 – ) novels have ensured his eminence among contemporary American writers, his short fictions have been no less influential or controversial. In addition to his novels, he published a collection of shorter works, Lost in the… Read More ›
Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West…. Read More ›
The postmodern condition entails the treatment of time and space as finite or tied to the social context of their use. They are, from a postmodern perspective, no longer unproblematic media whose neutrality permits comparison and communications across diverse boundaries…. Read More ›
[Feminism] should persist in seeing itself as a component or offshoot of Enlightenment modernism, rather than as one more ‘exciting’ feature (or cluster of features) in a postmodern social landscape. (Sabina Lovibond, in T. Docherty, ed., Postmodemism: A Reader (1993).)… Read More ›
While motoring across the Californian desert, a young woman encounters a young male student engaged in the militant activities of May 1968. He is later shot by the police. Thanks to this encounter, her eyes are opened as to the… Read More ›
Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) is one of France’s most important and interesting intellectual figures. She excelled at being a writer, filmmaker and dramatist. After the Second World War she also worked for a number of years as a journalist for France-Observateur…. Read More ›
In a society dominated by production, Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) argues, the difference between use-value and exchange-value has some pertinence. Certainly, for a time, Marx was able to provide a relatively plausible explanation of the growth of capitalism using just these… Read More ›
The uniqueness of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) stems, in large measure, from the intersection of writing and lived experience. Born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka was the son of a prosperous self-made businessman. Although his parents… Read More ›
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
If the era of ‘postmodernity’ is increasingly seen as ‘a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself’ then poetry produced under this new ‘socio-economic mode’ might rightly be dismissed as another form of ‘postmodern’ candyfloss neatly packaged for… Read More ›
John Hawkes once divulged that when he began to write he assumed that “the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme”. Certainly many subsequent authors have done their best to sledgehammer these four literary cornerstones into… Read More ›
Many postmodernist writers disrupt the smooth production and reception of texts by welcoming chance into the compositional process. The infamous The Unfortunates (1969) by B. S.Johnson, for instance, is a novel-in-a-box which instructs the reader to riffle several loose-leaf chapters… Read More ›
Paranoia, or the threat of total engulfment by somebody else’s system, is keenly felt by many of the dramatis personae of postmodernist fiction. It is tempting to speculate that this is an indirect mimetic representation of the climate of fear… Read More ›
Postmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be expressing a new form of ‘depthlessness‘ – a concentration on style and ‘surface’. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the… Read More ›
A French philosopher of the post-structuralist school, Jean Francois Lyotard (1925-1998) is perhaps best known for his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). In that work, Lyotard attempted to define the principle aspects of postmodernity in the wake… Read More ›
Rhizome comes from the Greek rhizoma . Rhizome is often taken as being synonymous with “root”; in botany, a rhizome is a plant structure that grows underground and has both roots (commonly, the part that grows down into the ground)… Read More ›
Over three decades after his death, Michel Foucault’s (1920–1984) legacy continues to impact upon the humanities. Key phrases and concepts drawn from Foucault’s historical work now form part of the everyday language of criticism and analysis. Foucault’s texts continue to resonate… Read More ›
The Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer produced an incisive critique of modern culture through their work The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they introduced the term “Culture industry,” to describe mass cultural forms which, in the wake… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectic theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connections of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognises the need to see its… Read More ›
Postmodern literature’s celebratory mode of experimentation found new impetus with the usage of parody and pastiche. While a parody imitates the manner, style or characteristics of a particular literary work/ genre/ author, and deflates the original by applying the imitation… Read More ›
A term originally coined by Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, historiographic metafiction includes those postmodern works, usually popular novels, which are “both intensely self-reflexive and paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages”. This is categorically a postmodern… Read More ›
The postmodern idea of history repudiates the humanist notion that it corresponds faithfully to reality and asserts that it is textual and mediated in order to validate power centres. Thus, while “history” deals with the past, “historiography” deals with the… Read More ›
Although active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language,… Read More ›
Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida‘s deconstruction of logocentrism- the belief that language provides access to truth — the interest in power and its workings that dominates the poststructuraiist criticism of the 1980s… Read More ›
Michel Foucault, best known for his critical studies of social institutions, such as psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison systems as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality, has been tremendously influential on… Read More ›
From top left to right: Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Leopold Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists, the leading figures of which included Max Horkheimer,… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson, best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, called postmodern culture as one of “depthlessness” and as the cultural logic of late capitalism. “Late capitalism” implies that society has moved past the industrial age.and into the information… Read More ›
Baudrillard‘s concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his idea of Simulacrum, which he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has… Read More ›
Postmodernism is a term applied to a variety of artistic, cultural and philosophical movements that arose as a result of modernism. While modernism frames itself as tahnedculmination of in response to Enlightenment‘s quest for authoritatively rational aesthetics, ethics and knowledge,… Read More ›
Jean Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition famously described Postmodernism as the “incredulity towards metanarratives”. Postmodernism attacks specific notions of monolithic universals and encourages fractured, fluid and multiple perspectives. Lyotard observes that modernism relies on metanarratives or grand recits — the… Read More ›
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern… Read More ›