Postmodernism 1946 present Literature From Modernism to Postmodernism

Postmodernism 1946 -present

Literature: From Modernism to Postmodernism • Modernism - Loss of trust in rationality - Influenced by Freud’s view of the unconscious - Great work of art is immortal -”Fine art” is superior to “low” culture • - Postmodernism Life is meaningless Less confidence in art’s uniqueness - Loss of confidence in art’s immortality - Loss of belief in division between “high” and “low” culture (cartoon is as good as a poem)

Other Postmodern elements • • • Multi-culturalism Technology Mixing of many historical styles without concern for coherence

Postmodern Literature • Lots of novelists/short story writers • Increase in nonfiction writing • Mixing fiction and nonfiction • Poetry becomes more esoteric • Ethnic writers joining WEDM

Nonfiction writers • • Paul Theroux (1941 - ) The Great Railway Bazaar N. Scott Momaday (1934 - ) The Names

Mixing Fiction/nonfiction • Truman Capote (1924 -1984) In Cold Blood • E. L. Doctorow (1931 -) Ragtime

Poets Theodore Roethke Elizabeth Bishop (1908 -1963) (1911 -1979) The Waking: Poems 1933 -1953 North and South Allen Ginsberg A. R. Ammons (1926 - ) Howl and other poems Garbage

• • • The Waking by Theodore Roethke I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me, so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.

• • Howl by Allen Ginsberg I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

Ethnic Writers Maxine Hong Kingston (1940 - ) The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Sandra Cisneros (1954 - ) The House on Mango Street Amy Tan Julia Alvarez (1952 - ) (1950) The Joy Luck Club In the Time of Butterflies

Final Thoughts • • • Postmodernism is a bit difficult to apply to real life. If there is no truth in life, why study, why research, why live life in a world that is ultimately meaningless? What will the next movement in American Literature be called? Postpostmodernism?