Contemporary Fiction: Diversity and Vitality
One of the words most commonly used to describe contemporary American culture is postmodern, a term that, like our age, is still in the process of being defined. Postmodernism sees contemporary culture as a change--a development or a departure--from modernism, the dominant movement in the arts from about 1890 to 1945. In literature the great American modernists--notably Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway--forged new styles and new forms with which to express the sensibility of the early twentieth century. Postmodern writers build with many of the tools the modernists provided, but they are constructing a body of literature that is strikingly different from that produced by the modernists.
Perspectives in Postmodern Fiction
Postmodern writers of fiction allow for multiple meanings and multiple worlds in their works. Realistic and literal worlds, past worlds, and dreamlike metaphorical worlds may merge, as they do in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Narrators and characters may tell different versions of a story, or a story may deliberately accommodate several valid interpretations. The postmodernist asks, "Why choose only one version? Why limit ourselves?"
Writers of our time often structure their works in a variety of nontraditional forms. They do not abide by conventional rules for shaping fiction. Donald Barthelme's story "Sentence," for example, is a nine-page tale that consists entirely of one sentence. In Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) every word in the first chapter beings with the letter a, every word in the second chapter begins with a or b, and so on through the alphabet to z and then, in reverse, all the way back to a.
Some postmodern works are also intensely self-conscious: They comment on themselves, criticize themselves, take themselves apart, and encourage us to put them together again. In his novel Operation Shylock (1993), the author Philip Roth meets a character named Philip Roth and wonders which one of them is real. In other words, postmodern literature is aware of itself as literature and encourages the reader's self-awareness as well (an example of a self-conscious postmodern point of view in a nonfiction title is Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.).
The vitality of contemporary fiction lies in its cultural diversity, in it's enthusiasm for blending fiction with nonfiction, and in its extraordinary sense of play. It also demonstrates a typically American ability to invigorate the old by means of the new.
Válclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, said this about postmodernism at Independence Hall on July 4, 1994, after receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal:
"There are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else,, still indistinct were arising from the rubble.
The distinguishing features of transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
Today, this state of mind, or of the human world, is called postmodernism."
Now pick one of the contemporary texts below and read about the plot overview (and any other information on the site). Write a 1/2 page about how the attributes of the contemporary period are reflected in the text.
Life of Pi http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lifeofpi/
The House on Mango Street http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mangostreet/
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