What is postmodernism

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

LITERARY POSTMODERNISMThe consciousness of the break between language and reality – the understanding of the limitations of languageAn awareness of the text as an artificial thing – self-reflexivity or hyperconsciousnessHow does this manifest itself?Unreliable narratorsDrawing attention to the text as a construct (rupturing or metatext)Blurring of lines between genres (hybridity)Between high and pop art (democratisation)The parody or pastiche of other textsOr the intertextual borrowing from other texts and genres (intertextuality)The blurring of lines between truth and fiction…reality and invention…history and literature…And the irony that it recognises its own contradictions yet continues to use literature to express these contradictions…

OUTLINETHREE areas that postmodernism ‘responds’ to:1. The Enlightenment;2. Structuralism;3. (Aesthetic) Modernism.THEN going to look at some theorists and how they approach contemporary issues using post-modern approach.THEN going to think about how we might begin to answer to the question…WHY? Because both the texts we’ve studied could be called post-modern and we need to know why…?

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Sapere

Aude!

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

COUNTER ENLIGHTENMENT

Karl Marx (1818-1883) Jean-Jacques Rousseau

(1712-1788)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913)

STRUCTURALISMCourse in General Linguistics (1916)‘Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world.’Roy Harris, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Oxford

Claude Levi-Strauss(1908-2009)

STRUCTURALISM & ANTHROPOLOGY

‘The underlying structure of

society is kinship structure’

‘For centuries the humanities and the social sciences have resigned themselves to contemplating the world of the natural as a kind of paradise they will never enter. The sciences have truth over there, we just have strong opinions, and all of a sudden there’s a small door which is being opened between the fields and it is linguistics which has done it.’Claude Levi-Strauss

POST STRUCTURALISM• ‘Who said the underlying

structure was stable?’• ‘How do we know that we don’t

change the results in the act of observing the structure?’

(AESTHETIC) MODERNISM

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) ‘Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow’ (1930)

‘Figure dans un Fauteuil’ (1909-10)

Pabl

o Pi

cass

o (1

881–

1973

)

‘Art is the lie that makes us realise the truth’

Weeping Woman (1937)

Weeping Woman (1937)

‘Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face or what’s behind the face?’

Jack the Dripper

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) ‘Blue Poles’ Number 11 (1952)

Salvador Dali ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931)

Salvador Dali ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931)

‘…to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.’

MODERNISTARCHITECTURE

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, New York

(1958)

POST MODERNISM• ‘What if there is no underlying

truth to Art or architecture?’• ‘What if, just like in post-

structuralism, there is no underlying structure, there’s no one way that things can be?’

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE

The Pompidou Centre, Paris (1977)

The Pompidou Centre, Paris (1977)

Will Alsop, The OCAD U, Toronto (2004)

Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1997)

‘Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone, stony.’ Viktor Shklovsky

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

Michel Foucault(1926 – 1984)

‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to

discover what we are but to refuse what we

are. We have to imagine and build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of

political double-bind of the discourse which

simultaneously individualises us, and

reinforces the totalising power structures of our

society’

discourse

Jacques Derrida(1930-2004)

deconstruction‘there is nothing

outside the text’

Judith Butler (1956-) Jean Baudrillard(1929 – 2007)

Gender Trouble

There is no Gulf War

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?COUNTER ENLIGHTENMENTAN EMPHASIS ON PROCESS RATHER THAN SYSTEMSA REJECTION OF ALL TRUTHS

Daniel Libeskind, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2007)

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?COUNTER ENLIGHTENMENTAN EMPHASIS ON PROCESS RATHER THAN SYSTEMSA REJECTION OF ALL TRUTHS

John Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750)

John Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750)

KEEP OUT!

HANDS OFF!

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!