May 2009
16 posts
A list of postmodern characteristics.
Irony, playfulness, black humor Postmodern authors were certainly not the first to use irony and humor in their writing, but for many postmodern authors, these became the hallmarks of their style. Postmodern authors will often treat very serious subjects—World War II, the Cold War, conspiracy theories—from a position of distance and disconnect, and will choose to depict their histories ironically...
The first page of 100 Years of Solitude
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things...
The Waste Land--T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land is a poem from a high modernist, T.S. Eliot, that marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. It is modern in its stream-of-consciousness flow, but there are elements of postmodernism in the strange changes in subject matter, the use of other languages, and the “art-for-art’s sake” feel of some of the poem.
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
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Information on House of Leaves. →
Kid A—Radiohead
Thom Yorke and the rest of...
I think this should clear things up.
A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
—Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Wikipedia on postmodernism →
WatchA trailer for the film Memento, which features shifts in time, an unreliable narrator, and an acknowledgement of the process of creation within the film.