Theories and Methodologies Essay2

The postmodern perspective has changed the way people look at literature. Like modernism before it, postmodernism has created a revolution in writers and readers alike. The many ways in which postmodernism challenges traditional theories and decentralises the reading of a texts is influential in a whole new way of looking at those texts written both before and after the mid-twentieth century when this theory was first formed. I need to look at to what extent the postmodern perspective has caused a revision of traditions of popular fiction and to see what room there is for further change in what is sometimes referred to as the post-postmodern era that we are entering in the twenty first century.

Postmodernism is difficult to define, often even so called postmodern theorists can not give us a complete definition; is postmodernism a continuation of modernism, or destruction of modernism? This is one of many debates both about postmodernism and caused by postmodernism and its deconstruction of language. So how can we look at the effects of something that we can not even define? It’s simple, we literally look at the effects of postmodernism, the literary techniques that have developed because of a postmodern point of view, the texts that have become popular fiction due to postmodernism and what we can define as a postmodern text.

To define postmodernism, we first need to understand the progression of society from realism to modernism and finally postmodernism. Between 1700 and 1850 the world became dominated by market capitalism. This was during the age of reason when scientist believed that by use of scientific reason to proof things it became undeniably true, theories like Darwinism became popular. After this age of realism, we entered into a monopoly of capitalism, national markets expanded into world markets. The age of modernism is defined by alienation, social fragmentation and imperialism. Finally, as the world becomes more consumer orientated, we enter into a period of commercialism, a world dominated by surreal images and pop culture: the age of postmodernism.

During the early twentieth century, many writers became disillusioned with the way society work. These were the Modernists, predecessors to postmodern theorists. The Modernists believed that everything should have a finished conclusion, a limitation, depth, design and purpose. Writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, wrote stories and poems designed to be understood only after reading the whole text and understanding the background to the piece. The Modernists believed in a hierarchy of society and so developed this form of high modernism which cumulated with works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, written entirely in the stream of consciousness style.

With the increase in popularity of ideas like Darwinism and Nietzsche’s philosophical proclamation of the ‘Death of God’, Western Culture found itself in a void let by the removal of a key figure-God. Left with a void to fill, the modernist thinkers searched for new meta-narratives to fill the gap. They grasped ideas such as mysticism as a new meta-narrative and Darwinism and mythology too.

In opposition to that, in the 1960’s, Jean-François Lyotard began to consider the possibility that perhaps, instead of trying to find a new meta-narrative to fill the void left by the death of religion, we should be trying to look at all the mini narratives that make up the big picture that is life. In that case, both the Christian belief that God created the world in seven days and the scientific reasoning that the Earth was caused by a huge explosion in space and that we are all descended from apes, are both fundamentally true mini-narratives and both are perfectly valid. The idea that there are no grand-narratives is fundamental to postmodernism, although Lyotard’s theory is often criticised for being itself a meta-narrative.

Another postmodern belief is that texts should be decentralised, this relates to the idea of no grand narratives, instead of trying to find a centralised grand-narrative, we should be looking for what the book itself is actually telling us, so instead of using a mystical grand-narrative as a core and therefore a centre for a text, such as Eliot or Joyce would do, the readers should be looking at what the story says to them, thus taking the emphasis away from centralising the texts. This means that postmodernists are against the idea of a centralised binary opposition. The idea of male and female, republic and democracy or even just chocolate and vanilla as binary opposites are created by the desire to centralised a text. Jacques Derrida, claims that by creating binary opposition, we are putting one side into power and the other into a marginalized group, thus we find Christian and Jew as a pair of binary opposites, with Christian being a central concept in western culture and Jew being a marginalized group.

A key idea in the study of literary theory is that of authorial intention and the meaning of a text. We consider whether what the author intended us to read is important. If we can read a book and see a allegory for the troubles in our own lives whether or not it is relevant to the authors intention and whether this interpretation can therefore be seen as valid. Postmodernism claims that what the author intended is entirely unimportant; the only true meaning is that defined by each individual reader therefore there is no true meaning. Postmodernism challenges the author’s control of the texts. So unlike the modernists who wrote their stories in such an obscure way, so as to make them elitist and only for the truly enlightened, postmodernists try to make texts that are ‘public domain’, anyone can read them and understand them and interpret them as they please.

From this, we can see that rather then developing a higher form of literature, postmodernism encourages popular fiction and seems to be best represented in the form of the science fiction genre where we can see examples of the blurring of reality and the distinction between reality and images. The most famous example of a postmodern piece is the film Bladerunner, based on a book titled “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. The story tells of super humans created to discover habitable planets and prepare them for humans to live there. To stop them becoming too powerful, the androids are designed to only last 4years, but the androids are designed so that the imitate human emotions and so it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between the real humans the androids, blurring the distinction between the reality and the image. In a sense the androids represent hyper-reality, they become more human like then the humans themselves.

Hyper reality is yet another postmodern theme. It stems from cultural ideas and stereotypes. Hyper reality relates to what we expect from the world and our desire to make everything more ‘real’ then it actually is. A key example of hyper reality links to a recent film Tomb Raider. The main character Lara Croft visits a Buddhist monastery; the film makers used a real monastery, but did not use the genuine Buddhist monks who lived and prayed there because they were not how people expected Buddhist monks to look so instead they hired actors to pretend to be Monks, thus creating a hyper reality.

One cannot mention postmodernism without referring to the idea of pastiche; the combining of old and new to create a new style.

“An artistic work in a style that imitates that or another work, artist or period" (From the Oxford English Dictionary).

In my opinion, a key example of postmodern pastiche is Baz Lurhman’s recent film Moulin Rouge. Set in Paris 1899, Moulin Rouge tells the story of a courtesan who falls in love with a writer, but is forced to commit herself to the Duke. The Duke’s attempts to split up the main characters, Satine and Christian are thwarted, only for Satine to die of tuberculosis at the end of the film. Although the film is set so long ago, Lurhman uses modern pop songs with a pre-twentieth century twist, thus we hear Harold Zidler, owner of the Moulin Rouge sing Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ in a gothic tower make a dizzying and slightly camp spectacle. We find Christian’s “ridiculous obsession with love” accentuated by him singing a medley of love songs such as “Love lift us up”, “I will always love you”, “love is a many splendid thing”, “all you need is love” and many more, punctuated by cynical responses from Satine. The postmodern and surreal production of Moulin Rouge made it one of the most popular films last year.

I have shown, briefly, what postmodernism can be defined by, but I still have not clearly described a postmodern text nor the influence postmodernism has had on the past. Key aspects of postmodern writing are irony, playfulness, pastiche and parody and so I think that a key example of postmodern writing can be seen in the work of Terry Pratchett. In the series of Discworld books, Pratchett creates a series of parodies of the world. The Discworld comes across as a fairly medieval setting, but this is not always true, for example in Moving Pictures we find the alchemists creating films or “Clickies” in ‘Holy Wood’, an ironic version of our own Hollywood. The irony is taken one step further by the subtle hinting to the worshipping of a character who “looks just like my uncle Oswald” a character sounding suspiciously like an Oscar, the coveted media awards won by Hollywood stars, so named because someone commented that it looked just like their “uncle Oscar”. In the case of Moving Pictures the Uncle Oswald character is an unknown hero whose purpose is to stop creatures from the dungeon dimension breaking through the dreams of Holy Wood. Some from one Discworld novel we have seen pastiche with the merging of a medieval style world and modern technology, irony with the Oscar figure being central to the survival of the plot and playfulness with whole idea of Hollywood.

Pratchett seems to be using postmodernism to emphasis the irony of the post-modern world in which we live. All 26 Discworld novels seem to have a specific part of life in which they are meant to be a parody of; often the ‘witches’ stories relate to Shakespeare or fairy tales; Small Gods is a clear imitation of Christianity, Hogfather is about Father Christmas. Despite this apparent mimicry of the way we live, Pratchett is an extremely popular, if understated, writer. Here he defines his original conception of Discworld:

“DW (discworld) is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.”

Where modernism takes itself far too seriously, Postmodernism makes everything into a playful joke, which underlines the serious truth of the piece in which they are presenting and so we can laugh at the thought that the Hindu mythology is derived from a Star trek episode, we can also understand the point that Pratchett is trying to make, we live a widely culturally deverse world and trying to define a source for something is entirely useless. So we have returned back to meta and mini-narratives.

So in the Renaissance Shakespeare was writing about kings and murder, in the eighteenth century Wordsworth told us about Daffodils, in the early twentieth century we heard of Eliot’s Wasteland and now, sweeping through popular literature in the twenty-first century we find ourselves submerged by elves and fairies with a kick, we get realistic cyborgs, android Pinocchio’s and Buddhist Monks that aren’t real enough. We see works from the past torn from their strongholds and made into comic fantasies that lull the reader into a false sense of security before unleashing the power of postmodern irony. In short, we have seen the development of a new form of fiction that is not only popular, but provides us with a new sense of being and also a concept of what is yet to come.

As to how far the postmodern perspective has altered traditions of writing, that is up to the individual reader, but we can say that that although postmodern is a popular theory, it is not the only style of writing. We still see different styles of writing that are just as popular as they were hundreds of years ago. Postmodernism is an ever-changing concept, but romance will never die.

Bibliography

Brooker, Peter and Brooker, Will, 1997. Postmodern After-Images. London: Arnold.

Gibson, Andrew 1996. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Powell, Jim 1998. Postmodernism for Beginners. London: Writers and Readers Publishing.

Pearsall, Judy, ed 2001. Oxford English Dictionary Tenth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press

People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school. -- (Terry Pratchett, alt.books.pratchett)