Term coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard; refers to that part, period or personage which finds itself following after or in the wake of
the Modern era (...which incidentally, according to french philosopher Bruno LaTour, in his
We Have Never Been Modern we've never actually gotten around to in the first place...).
Modernity seems to usually be pegged by most historians as the period co-inciding with the rise of Scientific
Thought and Rationalism during the Renaissance : this period also led to the secularization of the world, the rise of the nation
state as a political entity and the individual with certain rights and responsibilities within the secular order. Sounds all fine
and dandy, and things were going 'relatively' well until Modernism culminated in the dark, satanic mills of the Industrial
Revolution, which then resulted in some bad poetry and bad art on account of all the alienation (see T.S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound & Futurism); and then Rationalist efficiency and bureaucracy, which seemed to help along the atrocities of World War II
and the Holocaust quite nicely.
The Result: According to the critics, Modernity collapses as a set of aesthetic and philosophical assumptions, and post-modernist chaos and introversion results. The chaos is characterized, at least as far as fiction goes, by the following tropes (see if
you can spot these in your own habits):
- the over-obtrusive, visibly inventing narrator (...oh, i'm an author, look at me; isn't writing fascinating. ex. John Barth
and Robert Coover...)
- ostentatious typographies (...and i have word processor. ex. Stephane
Malarme...)
- explicit dramatization of the reader (...and look at you, the reader, here in my story, and how i address you. ex. Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme...)
- 'Chinese box' structures (...and the i, the alleged author, remember when x, the unreliable narrator, was telling me about
the time y the idealized reader. ex. Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster...)
- 'incantory' or absurd lists and songs (...hated car alarms, loathed barking dogs, despised giggly children. ex. Donald
Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon and Kathy Acker...)
- infinite regress (...the non-horror of the un-written is the not having the re-written undone. ex. Samuel Beckett, Maurice
Blanchot and Edmund Jabes...)
- self reflexive images (...oh now there's a symbol for the art of writing, look can you see it, oh it is so good. ex. Vladimir
Nabokov...)
- critical discussion of the story within the story (...and then x happened. what do you think of that dear reader? oh, it is
bad? okay, x didn't happen. ex. David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers...)
Initial readings:
1.
The postmodern urban condition / Michael J. Dear. Oxford ; Malden, Mass. : Blackwell, 2000.
2.
Theories of culture in postmodern times / Marvin Harris. Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira Press, c1999.
3.
Toward the postmodern / Jean-François Lyotard ; edited by Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts. Amherst, N.Y. :
Humanity Books, 1999