Features of Postmodern Literature

 

For literary critics, the postmodern narrative emerges in response to postmodern culture. This narrative may appear very similar to the modernist narrative, differing only in its attitude. Nevertheless, literary critics have defined a number of features they see as common to many postmodern texts.

Metafiction

The common feature of many postmodern writers essentially is metafiction.When the fiction as a genre examines the elements of fiction itself (about the funtionality of fiction). For instance, a story that explores how stories are made by the author. It is a form of literature that emphasizes its own consciousness in a way that it frequently reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. 

 

Metafiction is self conscious about language and literary form. In simple sense of the term it is about the composition itself (writing about writng). An attempt to make the reader aware of its fictionality and sometimes the presence of the author.The term was first used by Wayne C. Booth in his 'Rhetoric of Fiction' (1961) but now widely associated with postmodernism.

E.g.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

The French lieutenant's Woman by John Fowls

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Bleeding Edge and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

  Historiographic metafiction

The term was Coined by Linda Hutcheon through her critical work 'The poetics of Postmoernism'. the process of writing history through the works of fiction. The rewriting of Victorian history is conspicuous  in the novel The French lieutenant's Woman by John Fowls through the Character Sara woodruf.

Others examples

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

 

 Intertextuality

A process of shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, or rather it is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence to interpret another text. It is a literary device which establishes the interrelationship between texts.

The famous poet John Donne once wrote that ‘No Man is an Island’ similarly for postmodern writers no text is an island.

E.g.  the novel The French lieutenant's Woman  begins with the epigraph , which is the poem riddle by Thomas Hardy. Each chapter begins with the epigraph by different writers from the Victorian age.

 

The term Intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva. The key component in postmodern fictions to acknowledge the best works of the past . It is an extended discussion of a particular work. Some notable examples are as follows.

Autumn novel by Ali smith.
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The Name of the rose by Umberto Eco

 

 Pastiche

It is similar to intertextuality. A combination of multiple elements in the sense, it imitates a literary work by another writer in a respectful manner. The aim is not the mock the existing work but to honour its literary merits.

One of the best examples for pastiche is the Drama “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” by Tom Stoppard. It develops upon two minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who appear in Shakespeare’s masterpiece work Hamlet. 

 

Temporal distortion

It refers to movements across space and time; the disruption of straightforward clock or calendar time reflects the confusion of contemporary reality. 

Disruptions of realism 

include genres such as magical realism, which are often seen as postmodern forms, although postcolonial critics have recently argued that in fact it may be more accurate to see postmodernism as a derivative of magical realism. Nevertheless, the desire to expose realism’s artificiality (related to metafictionality), and to engage with the surreal and/or absurdist nature of contemporary life, is something often seen in postmodern literature.