Help me out...
 

I need help defining postmodern. Especially in relation to literature. What exactly does this term mean?

this is easily found on a google search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...ism+definition


anyway, postmodernism relates to movements in the arts which reject the tenets of modernism as static, oppressive, heroic, and based on the values of the dominant culture.

postmodernism posits an alternative in which anti-heroic, and anti-dominant-culture attitudes are emphasized:

informality as opposed to formality
appropriation rather than authorship
non-linear as opposed to linear
multi-media rather than monomedia

Good fucking explanation.Let me tip my hat to you.

Ah yes, I suppose I should google before posting a thread like this, but I thought it would be helpful to start a discourse about this term as it is very complicated. I am reading the norton anthology of postmodern american literature and the intro raises more questions than it solves, maybe because we're such deconstructionists these days. Thanks for your input it's aligned with what I'm reading, but in a fresh and comprehensible style.

Has anyone here read Infinite Jest by David Wallace?

Its a postmodern doorstop of a book, and one of my proudest achievements in life is never having read it.
But I would love to hear from someone who has.

Oh, and good definition ART. Though modernism itself wasn't as stodgy as it may seem from that juxtaposition, which may more accurately describe the break between modernism and pre-modernism. Modernism moved on from the pre-modern (Victorian-ish) approach [which itself must have seemed fresh and new at the time] by blurring genres, playing around with narrative standpoints, breaking linearity and generally making art and literature less formal, rigid and rule based, as it was in the pre-modern era. So what's the difference then between modernism and postmodernism? Well one way would be that postmodernism continues these trends, making them seem even more extreme. However a more important one would be the attitude towards this new style. Modernism seemed to lament this new uncertainy, fragmentation and subjectivity. It did it because that was the way the world was and art shouldn't hide from it (by papering over it with disingenous, premodern rules). But Postmodernism embraces the fragmentation and the lack of meaning in the world.

That, at least, is my take on things.