On Postmodernism

Postmodernist Devices and Their Significance {392}

Modernism/avant-garde - showing rather than concealing
Postmodernism - device still shows as contrivice it is, but also states that everything else is a contrivice too
Magritte's realistic painting of a pipe, says "This is not a pipe."
question reality behind the image and reality of image itself
Most obvious potmodernist devices
"ontological" use of narrative perspectivism
duplication and multiplication of beginnings, endings, and narrated actions
Foweles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - alternative endings
parodic thematization of the author
parodic thematization of the rader
Calvin's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler -[ implied reader is a character or series of characters
treatment as equals to emphasize undecidability, self-referemtiality and "metafiction" to dramatize inescapable circularity [303-4]
fact and fiction
reality and myth
original and imitation
Borges's "Circular Ruins" and "Tlöaut', Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
extreme versions of "unreliaable narrator"
Nabakov, Despair, slef-confessed and self-deluded mythomaniac
Preference for unconventional figures, as deliberate anachronism, tautology, and palinode or retraction [304]

DWFokkema
poetical device of hypothesis = outstanding feature of modernist prose
Proust, A ;a recherche du temps perdu--narrator hypothesizes about a character
Postmodern writers oppose this with "impossibilities" and pervasice uncertainty (epistemological nihilism - - "There is no reality."
Brian McHale
modernist fiction - epistemological dominant
Postmodernist fiction - ontological dominant
term used in poetics by Thomas Pavel
"an ontology is 'a theoretical description of a universe.'"
Two theses valid for an historical poetics of 20th century fiction
1. The dominant of modernist writing is epistemological - asks
What is there to be known
Who knows it
How do they know it
With what degree if certainty
How is knowledge transmitted and how reliably
Robbe-Grillet, The Jealosy
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! modernist with postmodern elements
2. The dominant of Postmodernist writing is ontological - asks
What is a world
What kinds of world are there
How are they constituted
How do they differ
What is the mode of existence of a text and what is the mode of existence of the world(s) it projects
Switch from one to other is reversible - leaves question:
Is modernism a distinct moment in an irreversible sequence or an essential urge of all literature at all time?
Is postmodernism ...
Elrud Ibs
Modernist, Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaftem (1930- 43)
embodies Nietzsche;s perspectivist epistemology opposing idealistic and materialistic theories of knowledge
contrast: Thomas Bernhard, Korrektur (1975)
demystifying hypothesis
showing inherent imprecision, shabbiness, and weakness of hypothetical thought [308]
correction of correction
Palinode - taking back what one has said
Beckett, Malloy, Malloy Dies, and The Unnamable (1950s)
each turn of phrase could annul all sentences that preceeded it
unsolvable uncertainty
first novel narrator seems to be Malloy or later his double Moran
second novel suggest first was by Malone
third novel Malone's existence also doubtful

On Postmodernism