Learning Goal: to distinguish between Modern Literature and Post-Modern literature

1. Learning Goal: to distinguish between Modern Literature and Post-Modern literature Success Criteria: identify and label characteristics of Post-Modern literature

2. Remember that Modernist literature was reacting to what came before it! Think of it like this modern building. quest for meaning What is my life’s purpose when I’m just one of the thousands of workers in this building? • focus on the everyday The elements are simple; “less is more” • new concepts What can make this “new” or different than what came before? isolation/alienation/pessimism Hmm, I’m different than everyone else, they don’t like me. Life sucks! • subjective and limited points of view How can I tell the whole story, when I’m limited to this tiny cubicle and window blind that only opens part way???

3. So Post-Modern literature is reacting to what came before it too! Instead of simple symmetrical skyscrapers (or stories about everyday people, living regular lives in regular places) we get kooky stuff like this: Eero Saarinen JFK Airport I.M. Pei Madrid Court of Justice Phillip Johnson AT&T Headquarters

4. Post-Modernism Post-modernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. Whereas Modernism was pessimistic and serious, Post-Modernism is playful. Post-Modernism attempted to incorporate many styles at once. Instead of moving on from tradition and history is includes touches of history, pop culture, humour, decoration and metaphor. The architect Robert Venture would counter van derRohe’s “less is more” with “less is bore”.

5. One of the most prominent characteristics of Post-Modernism is simply that it is non-conformist. In turn, Post-Modernist Literature is characterized by: • rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, exposing the mechanisms of writing (metafiction) • rejecting rigid distinctions of genre or form; the artist acts as a technician creating something from existing traditions, norms, conventions (“A Girl’s Story” is part discourse... the author’s self-reflection); • fragmentation or the breaking of up narrative or character construction; • emphasizing pastiche, satire and parody, bricolage (using bits and pieces from other works, time periods, cultures, etc), irony, and playfulness. • Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

6. emphasizing pastiche, satire and parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, rejecting rigid distinctions of genre or form fragmentation