Modernism postmodernism in literature. Postmodernism in modern literature

POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE - literary direction, which replaced modernity and differs from it not so much in originality as in the variety of elements, quotation, immersion in culture, reflecting complexity, chaos, decentralization modern world; “spirit of literature” of the late 20th century; literature of the era of world wars, scientific and technological revolution and information “explosion”.

The term postmodernism is often used to describe the literature of the late 20th century. Translated from German, postmodernism means “what comes after modernity.” As often happens with something “invented” in the 20th century. prefix “post” (post-impressionism, post-expressionism), the term postmodernism indicates both the opposition to modernity and its continuity. Thus, the very concept of postmodernism reflects the duality (ambivalence) of the time that gave birth to it. The assessments of postmodernism by its researchers and critics are also ambiguous and often directly opposite.

Thus, in the works of some Western researchers, the culture of postmodernism received the name “weak related culture" (R. Merelman). T. Adorno characterizes it as a culture that reduces human capacity. I. Berlin is like a twisted tree of humanity. By expression American writer John Barth, postmodernism is an artistic practice that sucks the juices from the culture of the past, a literature of exhaustion.

Postmodern literature, from the point of view of Ihab Hassan (The Dismemberment of Orpheus), is essentially anti-literature, since it transforms burlesque, grotesque, fantasy and other literary forms and genres into anti-forms that carry a charge of violence, madness and apocalypticism and turn the cosmos into chaos .

According to Ilya Kolyazhny, characteristics Russian literary postmodernism - “a mocking attitude towards one’s past”, “the desire to go to the extreme, to the last limit in one’s home-grown cynicism and self-deprecation.” According to the same author, “the meaning of their (i.e., postmodernists’) creativity usually comes down to “fun” and “banter,” and as literary devices, “special effects,” they use profanity and frank descriptions of psychopathologies...”

Most theorists oppose attempts to present postmodernism as a product of the disintegration of modernism. Postmodernism and modernity for them are only mutually complementary types of thinking, like the ideological coexistence of the “harmonious” Apollonian and “destructive” Dionysian principles in the era of antiquity, or Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China. However, in their opinion, only postmodernism is capable of such a pluralistic, all-examining assessment.

“Postmodernism is present there,” writes Wolfgang Welsch, “where a fundamental pluralism of languages is practiced.”

Reviews about domestic theory postmodernism are even more polar. Some critics argue that in Russia there is neither postmodern literature, nor, moreover, postmodern theory and critics. Others claim that Khlebnikov, Bakhtin, Losev, Lotman and Shklovsky are "Derrida themselves." As for the literary practice of Russian postmodernists, according to the latter, Russian literary postmodernism was not only accepted into its ranks by its Western "fathers", but also refuted Douwe Fokkem's well-known position that "postmodernism is sociologically limited mainly to university audiences" . In just over ten years, books by Russian postmodernists have become bestsellers. (For example, V. Sorokina, B. Akunina ( detective genre unfolds in him not only in the plot, but also in the mind of the reader, first caught on the hook of a stereotype, and then forced to part with it)) and other authors.

The world as a text. The theory of postmodernism was created on the basis of the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as a culturologist, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, "the world is a text", "text is the only possible model of reality". The second most important theorist of post-structuralism is considered to be the philosopher, culturologist Michel Foucault. His position is often seen as a continuation of the Nietzschean line of thought. Thus, history for Foucault is the largest manifestation of human madness, the total lawlessness of the unconscious.

Other followers of Derrida (they are also like-minded people, and opponents, and independent theorists): in France - Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes. In the USA - Yale School (Yale University).

According to the theorists of postmodernism, language, regardless of its scope of application, functions according to its own laws. For example, the American historian Headen White believes that historians who “objectively” restore the past are rather busy finding a genre that could organize the events they describe. In short, the world is comprehended by man only in the form of this or that story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of “literary” discourse (from the Latin discurs - “logical construction”).

Doubt about authenticity scientific knowledge(by the way, one of the key provisions of physics of the 20th century) led postmodernists to the conviction that the most adequate comprehension of reality is accessible only to intuitive - “poetic thinking” (the expression of M. Heidegger, in fact, far from the theory of postmodernism). The specific vision of the world as chaos, appearing to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, was defined as “postmodern sensitivity.”

It is no coincidence that the works of the main theorists of postmodernism are works of art rather than scientific works, and the worldwide fame of their creators eclipsed the names of even such serious prose writers from the postmodernist camp as J. Fowles, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Sukenick, Philip Sollers, Julio Cortazar, Mirorad Pavic.

Metatext. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the American literary critic Frederic Jameson developed the theory of “narrative”, “metatext”. According to Lyotard (The Postmodern Destiny), “postmodernism is to be understood as a distrust of meta-narratives.” “Metatext” (as well as its derivatives: “metanarrative”, “metastory”, “metadiscourse”) is understood by Lyotard as any “explanatory systems” that, in his opinion, organize bourgeois society and serve as a means of self-justification for it: religion, history, science, psychology, art. Describing postmodernism, Lyotard states that it is engaged in a “search for instabilities,” such as the “catastrophe theory” of the French mathematician René Thom, which is directed against the concept of a “stable system.”

If modernism, according to the Dutch critic T. Dan, “was largely justified by the authority of metanarratives, with their help” intending to “find consolation in the face of chaos, nihilism, as it seemed to him,” then the attitude of postmodernists to metanarratives is different They usually resort to it in the form of a parody to prove its impotence and meaninglessness. Thus, R. Brautigan in Trout Fishing in America (1970) parodies E. Hemingway’s myth about the beneficialness of man’s return to virgin nature, T. McGwain in 92 no. shadows - parodies his own code of honor and courage.In the same way, T. Pynchon in the novel V (1963) - W. Faulkner's faith (Absalom, Absalom!) in the possibility of restoration true meaning stories.

Examples of deconstruction of metatext in modern Russian postmodern literature can be the works of Vladimir Sorokin (Dysmorphomania, Novel), Boris Akunin (The Seagull), Vyacheslav Pietsukh (novel New Moscow Philosophy).

In addition, in the absence of aesthetic criteria, according to the same Lyotard, it turns out to be possible and useful to determine the value of a literary or other work of art by the profit they bring. “Such a reality reconciles all, even the most contradictory trends in art, provided that these trends and needs have purchasing power.” It is not surprising that in the second half of the twentieth century. Nobel Prize in literature, which for most writers is a fortune, begins to correlate with the material equivalent of genius.

"Death of the Author", intertext. Literary postmodernism is often called "quotational literature." Thus, Jacques Rivet’s novel-quote Ladies from A. (1979) consists of 750 borrowed passages from 408 authors. Playing with quotes creates so-called intertextuality. According to R. Barth, it “cannot be reduced to the problem of sources and influences; it represents a general field of anonymous formulas, the origin of which can rarely be discovered, unconscious or automatic quotations given without quotation marks.” In other words, it only seems to the author that he himself is creating, but in fact it is the culture itself that is creating through him, using him as its instrument. This idea is by no means new: during the decline of the Roman Empire, literary fashion was set by the so-called centons - various excerpts from famous literary, philosophical, folklore and other works.

In the theory of postmodernism, such literature began to be characterized by the term “death of the author,” introduced by R. Barthes. It means that every reader can rise to the level of the author, receive legal right recklessly complete and ascribe to the text any meanings, including those not remotely intended by its creator. So Milorad Pavic In the preface to the book, the Khazar Dictionary writes that the reader can use it “as it seems convenient to him. Some, as in any dictionary, will look for the name or words that interest them at the moment, others may consider this dictionary a book that should be read in its entirety, from beginning to end, in one sitting...” This invariance is associated with another statement of postmodernists: according to Barthes, writing, including a literary work, is not

Dissolution of character in the novel, new biography. Postmodern literature is characterized by the desire to destroy the literary hero and character in general as a psychologically and socially expressed character. This problem was most fully illuminated by the English writer and literary critic Christina Brooke-Rose in her article The Dissolution of Character in the Novel. literary postmodernism work of art

Brooke-Rose cites five main reasons for the collapse " traditional character": 1) the crisis of the “internal monologue” and other techniques of “mind reading” of the character; 2) the decline of bourgeois society and with it the genre of the novel that this society gave birth to; 3) the emergence of a new “artificial folklore” as a result of the influence of mass media; 4) the growth of the authority of “popular genres” with their aesthetic primitivism, “clip thinking”; 5) the impossibility of conveying the experience of the 20th century by means of realism. with all its horror and madness.

The “new generation” reader, according to Brooke-Rose, increasingly prefers fiction documentary or “pure fantasy”. This is why the postmodern novel and science fiction are so similar to each other: in both genres, the characters are the personification of an idea rather than the embodiment of individuality, the unique personality of a person with “some civic status and a complex social and psychological history.”

Brooke-Rose's overall conclusion is that: “There is no doubt that we are in a state of transition, like the unemployed, awaiting the emergence of a restructured technological society in which there will be a place for them. Realistic novels continue to be created, but fewer and fewer less people they are bought or believed in, preferring bestsellers with their carefully measured seasoning of sensitivity and violence, sentimentality and sex, the ordinary and the fantastic. Serious writers shared the fate of poets - elitist outcasts and became isolated in various forms self-reflection and self-irony - from the fictionalized erudition of Borges to Calvino's cosmic comics, from Barthes' poignant Menippean satires to Pynchon's disorienting symbolic quest for who knows what - they all use the technique realistic novel to prove that it can no longer be used for the same purposes. The dissolution of character is the conscious sacrifice that postmodernism makes by turning to the technique of science fiction.

The blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction has led to the emergence of the so-called "new biographism", which is already found in many predecessors of postmodernism (from the self-observation essays of V. Rozanov to the "black realism" of G. Miller).

Abstract on the topic:

"Literature of postmodernism of the late 20th century"

IN Lately it became popular to announce that at the beginning of the new century, postmodernism finally passed all the possible stages of its self-determination, having exhausted the possibilities of existence as a phenomenon with signs of universality modern culture. Along with this, manifestations of postmodernism in the last third of the twentieth century. are often considered as an intellectual game, loved by the elite creative intelligentsia both in the West and in Russia.

Meanwhile, researchers who turned to the issue of postmodernism in a situation of apparent dominance of the postmodern worldview and the emergence of a huge number of works devoted to postmodernism come to the conclusion that “numerous publications turned out to be inconsistent and contradictory: the new aesthetic phenomenon was fluid, vague and defying definition.” D. V. Zatonsky, referring to theoretical and literary texts in order to identify and formulate general conclusions about postmodernism, called the term itself an “unintelligible word”, the use of which does little to streamline the picture of the world in in the usual sense words. One way or another, we have to admit, following the scientist, that the most significant reason for the spread of postmodernism was the state of general crisis, and its significance lies in the fact that it called into question the traditional "system of the existence of spirit and culture."

Indeed, the emergence of postmodernism is primarily associated with those profound changes in the picture of the world that accompany the post-industrial, information and computer stage of development of modern civilization. In practice, this turned into a deep and often irrevocable disbelief in the universal significance of both the objective and subjective principles of knowledge real world. For many, the events and phenomena of the modern world perceived by consciousness have ceased to have the character of images, signs, concepts that contain any objectively significant meaning or spiritual and moral significance, correlated with the idea of real progressive historical development or free spiritual activity. According to J.-F. Lyotard, now the so-called "zeitgeist" "may express itself in all sorts of reactive or even reactionary attitudes or utopias, but there is no positive orientation that could open up to us any new perspective." In general, postmodernism was “a symptom of the collapse of the previous world and, at the same time, the lowest point on the scale of ideological storms” that the coming 21st century is fraught with. This characteristic of postmodernism can find many confirmations in theoretical works and literary texts.

At the same time, the definition of postmodernism as a phenomenon that states the general crisis and chaos that opened up after the collapse of the traditional system of understanding and knowledge of the world sometimes does not allow us to see some essential aspects of the postmodern period of the state of mind. We are talking about intellectual and aesthetic efforts undertaken in line with postmodernism to develop new coordinates and determine the outlines of that new type of society, culture and worldview that have emerged at the modern post-industrial stage of development of Western civilization. The matter was not limited to general denial or parody of cultural heritage. For some writers, called postmodernists, it has become more important to determine those new relationships between culture and man that develop when the principle of progressive, progressive development of society and culture in a society existing in the era of information and computer civilization loses its dominant significance.

As a result, in works of literature, a coherent picture of life based on the plot as the unfolding of events was often replaced not so much by the traditional genre plot principle of selection and arrangement of material in the spatio-temporal dimension and linear sequence, but by the creation of a certain integrity built on the combination of various layers of material , united by characters or the figure of the author-narrator. In fact, the specifics of such a text can be defined by using the term "discourse". Among the numerous concepts that reveal the concept of "discourse", one should single out its understanding, which allows one to go beyond linguistics. After all, discourse can be interpreted as a "supra-phrasal unity of words", as well as "any meaningful unity, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual." In this case, the discourse is a system of socio-cultural and spiritual phenomena fixed in one form or another, external to the individual and offered to him, for example, as a cultural heritage consecrated by tradition. From this point of view, postmodern writers have conveyed quite acute sensation the fact that for a modern person living in a world of formed, “ready-to-use” diverse social and cultural material, there are two ways left: a conformist acceptance of all this or an awareness of one’s state of alienation and lack of freedom. Thus, postmodernism in creativity begins with the fact that the writer comes to understand that any creation of works traditional form degenerates into the reproduction of one discourse or another. Therefore, in some works of modern prose, the main thing is the description of a person’s presence in the world. various types discourses.

In this regard, the work of J. Barnes is characteristic, who in the novel “England, England” (1998) proposed to reflect on the question “What is real England?” for a person of the post-industrial era living in a “consumer society”. The novel is divided into two parts: one is called “England”, and in it we meet the main character Martha, who grew up in a simple family. Having met her father, who once left the family, she reminds him that as a child she put together the “Counties of England” puzzle, and she was always missing one piece, because... his father was hiding him. In other words, she presented the geography of the country as a set of external outlines of individual territories, and this puzzle can be considered a postmodern concept that reveals the level of knowledge of an ordinary person about his country.

This is how the novel defines the fundamental question “What is reality”, and the second part of the novel is devoted to a certain project to create the territory of “Good Old England” next to modern England. Barnes proposes to present the entire culture of England in the form of a sociocultural discourse consisting of 50 concepts of “Englishness”. These included the Royal Family and Queen Victoria, Big Ben, Parliament, Shakespeare, snobbery, The Times, homosexuality, Manchester United Football Club, beer, pudding, Oxford, imperialism, cricket, etc. Additionally, the text provides an extensive menu of real “English” dishes and drinks. All this is placed in a designed and specially created socio-cultural spatial analogue, which is a kind of grandiose reconstruction or reproduction “ old England» on a specific island territory selected for this purpose. The organizers of this project proceed from the fact that historical knowledge is not like an accurate video recording real events past, and modern man lives in a world of copies, myths, signs and archetypes. In other words, if we want to reproduce the life of English society and cultural heritage, it will not be a presentation, but a representation of this world, in other words, “its improved and enriched, ironized and summarized version,” when “the reality of the copy will become the reality that we will meet in our own paths." Barnes points out that the postmodern condition modern society manifests itself, among other things, in the fact that in the sphere of culture, i.e. spiritual life of a person, now certain technologies are also used. The world of culture is designed and systematically created in the same way as is done, for example, in the field industrial production.

“England, England” is a space where the archetypes and myths of this country are presented as a spectacle and where only clouds, photographers and tourists are genuine, and everything else is the creation of the best restorers, actors, costume designers and designers using the most modern technology to create the effect of antiquity and historicity. This product of modern show business in the era of the “consumer society” represents a “repositioning” of myths about England: the England that foreign tourists want to see for their money was created, without experiencing some of the inconveniences that accompany guests when traveling through a real country - Great Britain.

In this case, the literature of postmodernism highlighted one of the phenomena of the post-industrial world as a world of realized utopia of universal consumption. Modern man finds himself in a situation where, placed in the sphere of mass culture, he acts as a consumer, whose “I” is perceived as “a system of desires and their satisfaction” (E. Fromm), and the principle of unhindered consumption now extends to the sphere classical culture and all cultural heritage. Thus, the concept of discourse as a sociocultural phenomenon gives Barnes the opportunity to show that the picture of the world within which modern man exists is essentially not the fruit of his own life experience, but was imposed on him from the outside by certain technologists, “developers of Concepts” as they are called in the novel.

At the same time, it is very characteristic that, recreating some essential aspects of the postmodern state of the modern world and man, the writers themselves perceive their work as a series of procedures for creating texts outside classical tradition prose. We are talking about understanding creativity as a process of individual processing, combination and combination of individual already formed layers of material, parts of cultural texts, individual images and archetypes. In the second half of the twentieth century. It is precisely this postmodern type of activity that temporarily becomes dominant in protecting, preserving and realizing the primordial human need and ability to cognition and creativity.

In this case, the internal interconnections of text fragments, images and motifs in the postmodern text are reproduced as a discourse, which is generally characterized as one of the evidence of the so-called “post-historical state” of artistic consciousness in the last third of the 20th century. In postmodernism, there is a consistent replacement of the real historical perspective of the transition from the past to the future by the process of deconstructing an individual picture of the world, whose integrity is entirely based on discourse, in the process of recreating which this picture of the world acquires a certain connection for the reader, sometimes opening the way for him to a new understanding of this world and his own. positions in it. In other words, postmodernism draws new sources of artistry in recreating a picture of the world from various historical, socio-cultural and informational fragments. Thus, it is proposed to evaluate the existence and spiritual life of an individual not so much in social and everyday circumstances, but in the modern historical and cultural context.

At the same time, it is the informational and cultural aspect of the selection and organization of material that constitutes the specificity of postmodernism texts, which look like a multi-level system. Most often, three levels can be distinguished: artistic (figurative), informational and cultural. At the information level, there is an extremely characteristic use of postmodernism outside literary texts s fragments, which are usually called documents. The stories about the heroes and their lives are supplemented by heterogeneous material that has already been processed and organized for understanding. In some cases, parts of the texts may be any genuine formalized samples of it or their imitations: for example, diaries and diary entries, letters, files, trial records, data from the field of sociology or psychology, excerpts from newspapers, quotes from books, including including works of art, poetry and prose, written in a variety of eras. All this is mounted into a literary text, contributing to the creation cultural context narrative and becomes part of the discourse accompanying the description, which has the genre characteristics of a novel at the plot level and reveals the problems of the individual fate of the hero.

This informational and cultural layer most often represents the postmodern component of artistic storytelling. It is at this level that the material is combined different eras, when images, plots, symbols from the history of culture and art are correlated with a system of norms, values and concepts at the level of modern theoretical knowledge and humanitarian issues. For example, in U. Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum,” excerpts from scientific, philosophical, and theological literature from different eras are given as epigraphs to individual chapters. Other examples of the intellectual saturation of postmodern prose with informational, cultural and theoretical material are various types of prefaces by authors, having the character of independent essays. Such are, for example, “Marginal Notes on “The Name of the Rose” by W. Eco or “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to the novel “The Worm” by J. Fowles, “Interlude” between two chapters in “History of the World in 10 ½ chapters" by J. Barnes. According to the sample scientific treatise J. Barnes ends his “History of the World” with a list of books that he used to describe the Middle Ages and the history of the creation of the painting by the French artist Géricault “The Raft of the Medusa,” and his novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” is supplied with a fairly detailed chronology of the life of the French writer.

In these cases, it is important for the authors to prove the possibility of fruitful spiritual activity and intellectual freedom based on literary work. For example, A. Robbe-Grillet believes that modern writer cannot, as before, transform outwardly solid and real everyday life into a source of creativity and give his works the character of a totalitarian truth about the norms and laws of virtue and complete knowledge about the world. Now the author "does not oppose individual provisions of this or that system, no, he denies any system." Only in his inner world can he find a source of free inspiration and a basis for creating an individual picture of the world as a text without the all-encompassing pressure of the principle of pseudo-plausibility of form and content. Living in the hope of an intellectual and aesthetic liberation from the world, the modern writer pays the price by "feeling himself as a kind of shift, a crack in the usual orderly course of things and events ...".

It is not without reason that in U. Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, for the narrator, the computer becomes a symbol of unprecedented freedom in handling creative material and, thereby, the intellectual liberation of the individual. “Oh happiness, oh the dizziness of dissimilarity, oh, my ideal reader, overwhelmed by the ideal “sleeplessness”... “The mechanism of one hundred percent spirituality. If you write with a quill pen, creaking on greasy paper and dipping it every minute into the inkwell, thoughts get ahead of each other and the hand cannot keep up with the thought; if you type on a typewriter, the letters get mixed up, it is impossible to keep up with the speed of your own synapses, the dull mechanical rhythm wins. But with him (maybe with her?) your fingers dance as they please, your brain is combined with the keyboard, and you flutter in the middle of the sky, you have wings like a bird, you compose a psychological critique of the sensations of the first wedding night..." “Proust, in comparison with such a thing, is a child’s spillie.” Access to an unprecedented variety of knowledge and information from the most diverse areas of the sociocultural past and present, the possibility of their immediate perception, free combination and comparison, the combination of pluralism of values and norms with their conflict and totalitarian pressure on human consciousness - all determine the contradictory foundations of the postmodern method of creating art. pictures of life. In practice, postmodernist manifestations of the creative process method appear in the form of a clearly defined repertoire of various methods, techniques and “technologies” for processing source material to create a multi-level text.

However, the appearance in the 80s. a number of works of prose allows us to see that such features as quotation, fragmentation, eclecticism and playfulness do not exhaust the possibilities of literary postmodernism. Such features of postmodern prose as the creation of a cultural, philosophical and artistic narrative (for example, a historical novel or detective story) that do not correspond to the rooted traditional ideas about prose genres have revealed their dominant significance. Such non-genre qualities are possessed, for example, by “The Name of the Rose” (1980) and “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1989), the “illustrated novel” “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (2004) by U. Eco, historical novel- “fantasy” by J. Fowles “The Worm” (1985), “History of the World in 10 ½ chapters" (1989) by J. Barnes, autobiographical trilogy A. Robbe-Grillet “Romanesque” (1985-1994). These works show that the choice of postmodern creativity methodology is largely due to the desire to move away from the image of a virtual picture of the world imposed on a person from the outside in line with the entrenched genre discourse, when the content and plot are determined by the generally accepted aesthetic, ideological and moral canons of modern society and mass culture. Therefore, Robbe-Grillet refused to mislead readers simply by extracting reality from the material in the form of a “simple and honest story.” The writer, for example, sees untapped creative possibilities in the fact that in the imagination of an author writing about the war of 1914, historically reliable military episodes may well be combined with images of heroes from medieval epic tales and chivalric romances. According to J. Barnes, artistic deconstruction of the world is necessary because, as a rule, “we invent our own story to circumvent facts that we do not want to accept” and, as a result, “we live in an atmosphere of general triumph of untruth.” Only art as a result of freedom from outside pressure creative activity a person can overcome the rigid fable of an ideologized picture of the world, reviving old themes, images and concepts through their individual rethinking, combination and interpretation. In “History of the World,” the author set the task of overcoming the superficial plotliness and approximateness of the generally accepted panorama of the historical past and present. The transition from one “elegant plot” to another over a complex flow of events can only be justified by the fact that by limiting his knowledge about life to selective fragments connected into a kind of plot, modern man moderates his panic and pain from the perception of the chaos and cruelty of the real world.

On the other hand, it is precisely the transformation of actual historical or contemporary events and facts into piece of art remains the most important asset creative personality. Barnes sees a significant difference in the understanding of fidelity to the “truth of life” in classical art and now, when in modern popular culture Through literature, newspapers and television, the practice of imposing a false view of the world on people has taken root. He draws attention to the obvious differences between the picturesque scene depicted in Gericault’s canvas “The Raft of the Medusa” and the real ones scary facts maritime disaster of this ship. Freeing his viewers from contemplating wounds, abrasions and scenes of cannibalism, Géricault created an outstanding work of art that carries a charge of energy that liberates inner world viewers through the contemplation of powerful figures of characters suffering and maintaining hope. In the modern post-industrial era, in the postmodern state, literature poses an essentially eternal question: will art be able to preserve and increase its intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic potential for comprehending and depicting the world and man.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that in postmodernism of the 80s. attempts to create literary texts containing modern concept life are associated with the development of humanistic issues, which was one of the main assets of classical literature. Therefore, in the novel “The Worm” by J. Fowles, episodes of origin in England in the 18th century. one of the unorthodox religious movements is interpreted as a story about “how the sprout of personality painfully breaks through the rocky soil of an irrational, tradition-bound society.” Thus, in last decades XX century postmodernism reveals a clear tendency to return man to the field of art and creativity as a valuable individual, freed from the pressure of society and generally accepted ideological and worldview canons and principles. postmodernism creativity cultural text

Used Books

1. Kuzmichev I.K. Literary studies of the twentieth century. Crisis of methodology. Nizhny Novgorod: 1999.

Zatonsky D.V. Modernism and postmodernism. Kharkov: 2000.

Foreign literature. 1994. №1.

Vladimirova T. E. Called to communication: Russian discourse in intercultural communication. M.: 2010.

Bart R. Selected works: Semiotics: Poetics. M., 1989.

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A characteristic feature of postmodernism in literature is the recognition of the diversity and diversity of socio-political, ideological, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic values. The aesthetics of postmodernism rejects the principle of interconnection that has already become traditional for art. artistic image and the realities of reality. In the postmodern understanding, the objectivity of the real world is questioned, since ideological diversity on the scale of all humanity reveals the relativity of religious faith, ideology, social, moral and legislative norms. From the point of view of a postmodernist, the material of art is not so much reality itself as its images embodied in different types art. This also explains the postmodern ironic play with images already known (to one degree or another) to the reader, which are called simulacrum(from the French simulacre (similarity, appearance) - an imitation of an image that does not indicate any reality, moreover, indicates its absence).

In the understanding of postmodernists, human history appears as a chaotic accumulation of accidents, human life turns out to be devoid of any common sense. An obvious consequence of this attitude is that postmodern literature uses the richest arsenal of artistic means that creative practice has accumulated over many centuries in different eras and in different cultures. The quotation of the text, the combination of various genres in it, both mass and elite culture, high vocabulary with low, specific historical realities with the psychology and speech of modern man, borrowing plots from classical literature - all this, colored by the pathos of irony, and in some cases - self-irony, are characteristic features of postmodern writing.

The irony of many postmodernists can be called nostalgic. Their play with various principles of attitude to reality, known in artistic practice of the past, is similar to the behavior of a person going through old photographs and yearning for what did not come true.

The artistic strategy of postmodernism in art, denying the rationalism of realism with its faith in man and historical progress, also rejects the idea of the interdependence of character and circumstances. Refusing the role of an all-explaining prophet or teacher, the postmodernist writer provokes the reader into active co-creation in search of various kinds of motivations for events and the behavior of characters. Unlike a realist author, who is the bearer of truth and evaluates heroes and events from the standpoint of the norm known to him, a postmodernist author does not evaluate anything or anyone, and his “truth” is one of the equal positions in the text.

Conceptually, “postmodernism” is opposed not only to realism, but also to modernism and avant-garde art beginning of the 20th century. If a person in modernism wondered who he was, then a postmodern person trying to figure out where he is. Unlike the avant-garde artists, postmodernists refuse not only socio-political engagement, but also the creation of new socio-utopian projects. The implementation of any social utopia with the aim of overcoming chaos with harmony, according to postmodernists, will inevitably lead to violence against man and the world. Taking the chaos of life for granted, they try to enter into a constructive dialogue with it.

In Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism as artistic thinking for the first time and independently of foreign literature declared itself in Andrei Bitov’s novel “ Pushkin House"(1964-1971). The novel was banned from publication; the reader became acquainted with it only in the late 1980s, along with other works of “returned” literature. The beginnings of a postmodernist worldview were also revealed in Wen’s poem. Erofeeva " Moscow — Petushki”, written in 1969 and for a long time known only from samizdat, the general reader also became acquainted with it in the late 1980s.

In modern domestic postmodernism in general, two trends can be distinguished: “ tendentious» ( conceptualism, who declared himself as an opposition to official art) and “ untendentious" In conceptualism, the author hides behind various stylistic masks; in works of untendentious postmodernism, on the contrary, the author's myth is cultivated. Conceptualism balances on the line between ideology and art, critically rethinking and destroying (demythologizing) symbols and styles that are significant for the culture of the past (primarily socialist); untendentious postmodern movements are addressed to reality and the human personality; related to Russian classical literature, they are aimed at new myth-making - remythologizing cultural debris. Since the mid-1990s, postmodern literature has seen a repetition of techniques, which may be a sign of the self-destruction of the system.

At the end of the 1990s, modernist principles of creating an artistic image were implemented in two stylistic movements: the first goes back to the literature of the “stream of consciousness”, and the second to surrealism.

Book materials used: Literature: textbook. for students avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010

It is believed that postmodernism in literature first emerged in the United States, and then gradually spread to many European countries. People became more interested

literary studies
post-Freudian,
intellectual concepts.

Moreover, for many reasons, it was the American “soil” that turned out to be the most favorable for the perception of such new trends. The fact is that in the 50s many unknown and completely new trends in literature and art appeared. All these growing trends needed to be comprehended. As a result, it turned out that in the 70s a change in the cultural paradigm gradually began to occur, where postmodernism in literature took the place of modernism.

The first examples of postmodernism in literature

Already in 1969, an article entitled “Cross Borders, Fill Ditches” was published, which in this regard turned out to be significant. The author of this sensational article was Leslie Fiedler, a famous literary critic. In this article one could clearly see the whole pathos of combining languages mass literature with the language of modernism. Both completely different poles were combined and brought closer to each other in order to make it possible to erase the boundaries between fiction, which was despised by aesthetes, and elitist and modernist literature.

The ideas of poststructuralists from France, who migrated to the United States at that time, not only made it possible to much better understand all the processes emerging in American art, but also added new impetus to discussions regarding postmodernism.

Development of postmodernism

The new concept of postmodernism (which originated in the USA) over time influenced not only art and literature, but also many sciences:

political,
business,
right,
psychoanalysis,
management,
sociology,
psychology,
criminology.

Moreover, when rethinking American culture, art and literature served as a methodological basis in postmodernism as theoretical basis poststructuralism. All of this contributed to changing racial and ethnic attitudes among Americans. Postmodernism in literature has also become fertile soil for the emergence of a feminist approach.

And in the 90s, postmodernism gradually penetrated the spiritual culture of society.

Main features of postmodernism in literature

Most researchers believe that with postmodernism, an artificial destruction of traditional views and ideas about the completeness, harmony, and integrity of all aesthetic systems arose. The first attempts to identify the main features of postmodernism also appeared:

predilection for quotation compound incompatible;
blurring of binary and too rigid oppositions;
hybridization of different genres, which gives rise to mutant new forms;
ironic reassessment of many values, decanonization of most conventions and canons;
erasure of identity;
playing with texts, metalinguistic games, theatricalization of texts;
rethinking the history of human culture and intertextuality;
mastering Chaos in a playful manner;
pluralism of styles, models and cultural languages;
organization of texts in a two- or multi-level version, adapted simultaneously for mass and elite readers;
the phenomenon of “death of the author” and the author’s mask;
multiplicity of points of view and meanings;
incompleteness, openness to designs, fundamental unsystematicity;
"double coding" technique.

Texts with a capital T have become the most basic object of postmodernism. In addition, cultural mediation, ridicule and general confusion began to appear in this direction.

“Hidden Gold of the 20th Century” is a publishing project by Maxim Nemtsov and Shasha Martynova. Within a year, they are going to translate and publish six books by major English-language authors (including Brautigan, O'Brien and Barthelme) - this will close the next gaps in the publication of modern foreign literature. Funds for the project are raised through crowdfunding. For Gorky, Shashi Martynova prepared a short introduction to literary postmodernism based on the material of the authors under her supervision.

The twentieth century, a time of planetary delight and the darkest disappointments, gave literature postmodernism. From the very beginning, the reader had a different attitude towards postmodern “unbridledness”: it is not at all marshmallows in chocolate and not Christmas tree to please everyone. The literature of postmodernism in general is the texts of freedom, the rejection of the norms, canons, attitudes and laws of the past, the child goth / punk / hippie (continue the list yourself) in a respectable - "square", as the beatniks used to say - a family of classical literary texts. However, pretty soon the literary postmodern will be about a hundred years old, and during this time, in general, people have got used to it. He has grown a considerable audience of fans and followers, translators tirelessly hone their professional skills on him, and we decided to summarize some key features postmodern texts.
Naturally, this article does not pretend to exhaustively cover the topic - hundreds of dissertations have already been written about postmodernism in literature; however, an inventory of the toolbox of a postmodernist writer is a useful thing in the household of any modern reader.

Postmodern literature is not a “movement”, not a “school” and not a “creative association”. It is rather a group of texts united by a rejection of the dogmas of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to literature. The earliest examples of postmodern literature in general can be considered Don Quixote (1605–1615) by Cervantes and Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) by Laurence Sterne.
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear about postmodern literature is the pervasive irony, sometimes understood as “dark humor.” For postmodernists, there are few things in the world (if any) that cannot be desecrated. That is why postmodernist texts are so generous with mimicry, parodic antics and similar fun. Here's an example - a quote from the novel Willard and His Bowling Prizes (1975) by Richard Brautigan:

“More beautiful,” said Bob. - This is all that remains of the poem.
“By running away,” said Bob. - That's all that's left of the other one.
“He’s cheating on you,” Bob said. - “Breaking.” “With you, I forgot all my troubles.” Here are three more.
“But these two are simply marvelous,” said Bob. - “My sorrow is immeasurable, for my friends are good for nothing.” "Takes a bite out of the cucumbers."
- What do you say? Do you like it? - asked Bob. He forgot that she couldn't answer him. She nodded: yes, she likes it.
- Do you still want to listen? - asked Bob.
He forgot that she had a gag in her mouth. (Translated by A. Guzman)

Postmodern literature is not a “movement”, not a “school” and not a “creative association”

The entire novel is billed as a parody of sadomasochistic literature (you can hardly find more seriousness anywhere) and at the same time a detective story. As a result, both sadomasochism and detective fiction in Brautigan turn into a piercing watercolor of loneliness and the inability of people to understand and be understood. Another excellent example is the cult novel by Miles on Gapalin (Flann O'Brien) The Singing of Lazarus (1941, translated into Russian 2003), a vicious parody of the Irish national-cultural renaissance of the turn of the century, written by a man who spoke excellent Irish , who knew and loved Irish culture, but had a deep disgust for the way the revival of culture was embodied by cliques and mediocrities. Irreverence as a natural consequence of irony is the trademark of postmodernists.

Descartes spent too much time in bed, subject to the obsessive hallucination that he was thinking. You are ill with a similar illness. (“Dolka Archive”, Flann O’Brien, trans. Sh. Martynova)

The second is intertextuality and the associated techniques of collage, pastiche, etc. A postmodern text is a prefabricated constructor from what was in the culture before, and new meanings are generated from what has already been mastered and appropriated. This technique is used all the time by postmodernists, no matter who you look at. Masters Joyce and Beckett, modernists, however, also used these tools. The texts of Flann O'Brien, Joyce's reluctant heir (it's complicated, as they say), are a bridge between modernity and postmodernity: " Hard Life"(1961) is a modernist novel, and "Two Birds Floated" (1939, in the Russian edition - "About Waterfowl") is also some kind of postmodern. Here is one of thousands of possible examples - from “The Dead Father” by Donald Barthelme:

Children, he said. Without children I would not have become a Father. Without childhood there is no Fatherhood. I never wanted it myself, it was forced on me. A tribute of sorts, which I could do without, the generation and then the upbringing of each of the thousands, thousands and tens of thousands, the swelling of a small bundle into a large bundle, over a period of years, and then making sure that the large bundles, if of the male sex, wear their caps with bells, and if not him, then they observe the principle of jus primae noctis, the shame of sending away those who are unwanted to me, the pain of sending those who are desired into the lifestream big city, so that they never warm my cold ottoman, and the leadership of the hussars, maintaining public order, maintaining postal codes, preventing crap in the drainage, I would prefer not to leave my office, comparing Klinger's editions, first print, second print, third print and so on, Didn't it fall apart on the fold? […] But no, I had to devour them, hundreds, thousands, fifaifof, sometimes along with shoes, you bite a child’s foot well, and right there, between your teeth, is a poisoned sports sneaker. And hair, millions of pounds of hair have scarred their guts over the years, why couldn’t they just throw children down wells, throw them on mountain slopes, randomly shock toy railways? And the worst thing was their blue jeans; in my meals there was dish after dish of poorly washed blue jeans, T-shirts, saris, tom makans. I probably could have hired someone to peel them for me first. (Translated by M. Nemtsov)

Another good example" old fairy tale on new way" - Donald Barthelme's novel "The King" published in Russian (published posthumously, 1990), in which a creative rethinking of the legends of the Arthurian cycle takes place - in the scenery of the Second World War.

The mosaic nature of many postmodern texts was bequeathed to us by William Burrows, and Kerouac, Barthelme, Sorrentino, Dunleavy, Eggers and many others (we are listing only those who were translated into Russian in one way or another) used this technique in a lively and varied way - and still use it.

Third: metafiction, in essence, is a letter about the process of writing itself and the associated deconstruction of meanings. The already mentioned novel “Two Little Birds Floated” by O'Brien is a textbook example of this technique: in the novel we are told about an author who writes a novel based on Irish mythology (please: double postmodernism!), and the characters in this embedded novel plot against the author intrigues and conspiracies. The novel “Irish Stew” by postmodernist Gilbert Sorrentino is based on the same principle (not published in Russian), and in the novel English writer Christine Brooke-Rose's "Textermination" (1992) only characters act at all classical works literature, gathered in San Francisco for the Annual Congress of Prayer for Being.

The fourth thing that comes to mind is a non-linear plot and other games with time. And baroque temporary architecture in general. "V." (1963) by Thomas Pynchon is a perfect example. Pynchon, in general, is a great fan and skillful at twisting pretzels out of time - remember the third chapter of the novel “V.”, from reading which the brains of more than one generation of readers are twisted into a DNA spiral.

Magic realism - the merging and mixing of life-like and non-life-like literatures - to one degree or another can be considered postmodern, and in this regard, Marquez and Borges (and even more so Cortazar) can also be considered postmodernists. Another excellent example of such interweaving is Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel with a title rich in translation options “Crystal Vision” (1981), where the entire work can be read as an interpreter for a deck of tarot cards and at the same time as everyday chronicles of one Brooklyn neighborhood. Sorrentino characterizes numerous implicitly archetypal characters in this novel only through direct speech, their own and addressed to them - this is also, by the way, a postmodernist technique. Literature does not have to be reliable - this is what the postmodernists decided, and it is not very clear how and why to argue with them here.

The mosaic nature of many postmodern texts was bequeathed to us by William Burroughs

Separately (fifthly), it is necessary to say about the tendency towards technoculture and hyperreality as a desire to go beyond the framework of reality given to us in sensations. The Internet and virtual reality are, to a certain extent, products of postmodernity. In this sense, perhaps the best example can be Thomas Pynchon’s recently published novel “The Edge Bang Bang” (2013), published in Russian.
The result of everything that happened in the twentieth century is paranoia as a desire to discover order behind chaos. Postmodern writers, following Kafka and Orwell, are making an attempt to re-systematize reality, and the suffocating spaces of Magnus Mills (Cattle Drive, Full Employment Scheme and the upcoming Russian All Quiet on the Orient Express), The Third Policeman "(1939/1940) by O'Brien and, of course, all of Pynchon are about this, although we have only a couple of examples from many.

Postmodernism in literature is generally a territory of complete freedom. The toolkit of postmodernists, compared to what their predecessors used, is much broader - everything is allowed: an unreliable narrator, surreal metaphors, abundant lists and catalogues, word creation, word play and other lexical exhibitionism, and the emancipation of language in general, breaking or distortion of syntax, and dialogue as the engine of storytelling.

Some of the novels mentioned in the article are being prepared for publication in Russian by Dodo Press, and you can have time to personally participate in this: the project “Hidden Gold of the 20th Century” is a substantive continuation of the conversation about literary postmodernism XX century (and not only).