When someone claims that a novel or a writer is “postmodern” what do they mean, generally? Postmodernism is something that is hard to pin a definition onto as a literary movement, but keywords like “irony”, “metafiction”, and “minimalism” are ones that crop up a lot when people set out to define the parameters of it. But on the other hand, postmodernism is also an era, being from the end of WWII onward.
So which thing do people mean more often? Are all contemporary writers postmodern writers regardless of their writing styles and subjects? Lists like this one on wiki include Stephen King and Lemony Snicket…did the creator of the list mean that they’re writing during the correct era, or can it be defended that they’re actually examples of people who write with (intentional) irony and delve into metafiction?
Or is this one of those things that means whatever the person using the term wants it to mean?
You do have to include when. Although there are precursors (there are always precursors) it makes no sense to talk about postmodern literature before about the 1960s. Even there you get a great deal of contention between those who find such writers as Barth and Barthelme and Coover to be the last gasp of modernism and those who see in them the beginnings of postmodernism. And I would argue that postmodernism has run its course as a reaction to modernism and that not much of today’s works should qualify, although whether post-postmodernism exists in any coherent sense is also contentious.
But that’s just an opinion. Unless you find it in a 400-page professional academic treatise which is defining the word rigorously, it’s used to mean whatever people want it to mean.
Like pornography, it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
I think to a certain extent almost all present-day literature is necessarily pomo, insofar as pomoism is a certain sense of awareness of literature; a loss of the “innocence” that was in place before. And you can’t reboot innocence; once lost it’s lost. Of course I recognize that this is a relatively difficult-to-defend opinion, and I’m not sure it’s even fully formed for my own understanding of it; it’s just a sense that I have about the subject.
I suppose it can be argued that something like Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Lady’s Detective Agency series is pretty close to pomo-free. The stories I mean. But what about the setting? In order to achieve the innocence that’s very much at the heart and soul of those storeis, he had to set the stories in a kind of, well, pomo Eden. While reading them, we can’t help but be aware of the world outside; that awareness is somehow pomo. I have similar thought about Lars and the Real Girl. It’s hard to watch that film and enjoy it for what it is, without appreciating that in large part that’s because we’re so used to what it’s not.
But still, is audience awareness part of the equation? Kind of a tree/forest conundrum I think. No.1LDA isn’t pomo . . . until someone reads it.
Post-colonialism as a theme; a discussion of former colonial states, or states subject to heavy foreign influence. Commonly these will be states outside the 1st world.
Post-structualism as a theme; a discussion or reflection on how language itself shapes and creates experience. Particularly in ideas of political action and personal identity. Post-modern literature takes it as given that language is never neutral, nor that the narrator or narative is omniscient.