Postmodernism
Students who wish to explore Postmodernism will first want to familiarize
themselves with the larger cultural meanings of the term and then explore its
manifestations in exemplary authors and works. While few scholars and critics are
likely to dispute the significance of Postmodernism in contemporary American
literature and culture, it remains a vexed term about which there is much debate.
Some critics argue for a temporal definition: Postmodernism is the art and litera-
ture that come after Modernism, both extending and reacting to the principles
that infused that movement. But if a temporally based definition is accepted, all
art and literature produced after about 1950 would be “Postmodernist,” and the
term would lose its conceptual power.
More useful definitions of Postmodernism are those that describe it in terms
of a set of philosophical assumptions and approaches to art and culture. One of
the most influential of these definitions is that by Jean-François Lyotard in La
Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (1979; translated as The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984). Lyotard says that the basic premise of
Postmodernism is a lack of belief in the overarching, all-encompassing expla-
nations that he calls “metanarratives”; this stance maintains that there can be
no absolute truth. Other critics conceptualize Postmodernism in political and
economic terms. In his influential Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991) Fredric Jameson argues that Postmodernism describes the kind
of cultural artifacts that are created in “late capitalism,” a period characterized by
multinational corporations and mass consumption. Consumer culture and the
“Information Age,” according to Jameson, have created a superabundance of dis-
connected images and styles, resulting in a sense of fragmentation and depthless-
ness. All experience is commodified; art reflects that commodification, blurring
and even erasing the distinction between “high” art and popular culture.
A third major interpretation of Postmodernism comes from Jean Baudrillard
and looks back to the linguistic insights of Ferdinand de Saussure. Overturning
the common-sense notion of language, wherein a word refers directly and inher-
ently to a thing that exists in the world, Saussure argued that a word (or signifier)
refers instead to a concept of the thing. This notion allows for great ambiguity in
the use of apparently stable language: words do not mean anything in isolation
but only in relation to other words; language is, finally, the only reality. Baudril-
lard extends this notion by arguing that the world is a simulacrum: an image of
an image. Ideas and concepts refer not to the physical world but to other forms
of representation. One finds oneself looking at copies or images for which no
ultimate reality exists; Baudrillard calls these images “hyperreal.” The popular
Matrix movie trilogy (1999–2003) was heavily influenced by, and makes allusions
to, Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum. The Internet has accelerated this sense
of the world. The idea of the simulacrum is useful for understanding the roles
that intertextuality, parody, pastiche, and allusion play in Postmodernist fiction.
The principal points of reference in a text are to other texts; there is little—per-
haps no—reference to an independent reality. This phenomenon, along with the
blurring of lines between high and popular culture, leads to the mixing of genres: