Postmodernist Fiction

First invoked in response to the mid‐twentieth‐century waning of modernism's revolutionary energies, postmodernism is among the most slippery and frequently debated terms in literary history. At its most coherent, the term specifies writing that inverts features associated with the modernist literature of the early twentieth century: where modernism promotes depth psychology, postmodernism offers deliberately flat characterization; where modernism upholds the boundary between high and low culture, postmodernism blurs this boundary; where modernism emphasizes control and structure, postmodernism incorporates contingency and play; where the modernist artist strives, in the words of James Joyce, to be “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (1999), the postmodernist endlessly intrudes and comments upon the work in progress. Yet to the extent that this account casts postmodernism as the rebellious child of a stern father (with the masculine gender dynamic that this implies), it overstates the differences between modernism and postmodernism and oversimplifies the internal differences within each category. One of the major debates about postmodernism concerns whether it overturns or continues the modernist project. And indeed this is not surprising given that postmodernism arises in response to the midcentury institutionalization of modernism, seeking to overturn its predecessor in the interest of reviving and extending modernism's own revolt against the canons of proper literary taste (Huyssen 1986). Both modernism and postmodernism, moreover, set themselves against the majority of twentieth‐century literature, which remains committed to realism. In this respect we can define postmodernism most simply as the twentieth century's second great flowering of experimental, anti‐realist fiction.