Session 9: British and American Postmodernism

Postmodernism

continuation (intensification) and break (fragmentation) with modernism

• hard to limit temporally: from 1960s/1970s onwards

postmodern

temporally situated after modernism

postmodernist

takes modernist concerns further and goes beyond them (i.e. not simply a

hostile rejection of modernism

general tendencies

• continuation of modernist views: intensification of general sense of loss

and alienation

• particularly: loss of reality, loss of history, loss of truth(s)

• but: fragmentation and disintegration are often celebrated

• art no longer seen as means to produce stable form and structure, playful

approaches tend to dominate

Margaret Atwood

• 1939 –

• Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic

• most famous novels include The Handmaid’s Tale

• literary innovator, playing with literary forms and convention

How does Happy Endings play with perceptions and perceiving reality?

• all scenarios are true and false, plot is broken up

  → multiplicity of different scenarios (which cannot be brought together –

  and which don’t need to be reconciled (?)) – only the ending is certain

metaficiton

fiction about fiction/self-referential and -reflective

Postmodernist Elements in Happy Endings

• happy ending → love story → genre expectations bent/not met: emotionless and

detached

• multiplicity of scenarios = distancing effect: we don’t get to know John and Mary

as “real” and become immersed; instead, we become aware of their constructedness as characters in the narrative

• draws attention to the reader and their attempt to make sense and untangle

meaning → also uncovers readers’ desire to make sense of and create coherence,

longing for clarity and certainty which are being withheld though; instead sitting

with uncertainty and multiplicity

African American Studies

• in the US: shift of attention to other, largely silenced kinds of history, memory, truth

• voices African American experience(s)

• important origin/driving force: the (classical) Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the 1960s

• first Black Studies department established at San Francisco State University in 1968

frequent topics in African American Literature (2nd half of 20th century)

• cultural memory

• slavery and its legacy

• racism and the effects of white supremacy

• multiple oppressions (race, class, gender → intersectionality; cf. Toni

Morrison, Audre Lorde etc.

counter narratives in African American Literature (2nd half of 20th century)

• identity (re)construction; resistance to (Western/white) stereotypes

• empowerment and agency of “the Other” (cf. Postcolonial Studies

Toni Morrison

• *1931-2019

• Literary critic and writer

• Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winner

• author of 11 novels: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Paradise

• “Recitatif” (1983) is Morrison’s only published short story

How does Morrison challenge/play with stereotypes of Blackness and whiteness?

• by raising expectations/triggering assumptions and denying satisfaction of clarity and certainty

• giving racial clues and markers

Busing as a Desegregation Measure

attempt to diversify the racial make-up of schools, used frequently after the CRM (using racial classification ruled unconstitutional in 2007); faced a lot of opposition from Black

and white parents

Recitatif

Radical openness and ambiguity about girls and Maggie

• confronts readers with absurdity and impossibility of racial categorization through

contradictions

• impossibility of racial categorization

• playing with readers’ expectations – makes readers aware of their own prejudices

and stereotypes

➢deconstruction of racial constructs and stereotypes

➢reconstruction of history and racial identity

What does Maggie represent in Recitatif?

• another binary aside from Black and white – between those who (somewhat)

belong and those who fall out of the system: the forgotten, the outcast

• they begin fighting over Maggie and what happened to her in the midst of “racial

strife” → e.g. busing

• is the fight over (race in) US history and (in)justice mirrored in their escalating claims? What happens if some refuse to honestly look at history? Can you move on/forget without fully reckoning with history first?

• in their final reunion, they are willing to talk about Maggie honestly/openly

without simply pointing fingers – maybe, just maybe, that’s a start?

Recitatif as an Experiment

removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial

→ reader is subject of the experiment

Patience Abgabi

• born in 1965

• Nigerian parents, childhood in North Wales

• studied at the University of Oxford

• poet, performer, workshop facilitator

Jackie Key

• born in Edinburgh in 1961

• Scottish mother, Nigerian father, adopted at birth

• studied at Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Stirling University

• writes fiction, poetry and drama

From Africa Singing

• sonnet form reference: metafiction

• text type: sort of letter (magazine), diary entry?

• features a question and an answer

• looks like a prose text (5 margins)

Pride

• narrative form

• lyrical I on a nighttrain: has a realisation of their own self

• very realistic setting, but not sure about reality: reality does not matter

• stereotypical image of Nigeria: possibly absorbed

• man could be pride personified

Some Key Features of Agbabi's and Kay's Poetry

• search for identity, often but not always playful

• constructedness of identity is often (but again not always) highlighted

• mixture of oral and written forms and techniques/ pronounced

intermediality

• ‘updating’ / deliberately reworking traditional literary forms and tradition

• frequent use of musical elements and linguistic playfulnes

Martin Crimp

• studied English Literature in Cambridge

• has been writing plays (as well as radio plays and screenplays) since the 1980s; breakthrough with Attempts on Her Life (1997)

key features of postdramatic theatre

• the most fundamental elements of drama like plot development and the presence of different characters are destroyed

• genre mixing: drama which is often very close to poetry (or prose?)

• distribution of the text on the page is important (i.e. the play is situated between reading and performance/watching)

• succession of isolated snippets, titles often remain obscure

→ complete denial of coherence

Attempts on Her Life

• written for performance

• highlightes constructedness of all kinds of identities → metatheatrical → considers implications for direction

• seemingly random mix of different forms and media: popular culture

• → intermediality

General Characteristics/Markers of Postmodernism (both)

modernist fragmentation is intensified; but: often no longer linked with a sense of

loss but with a liberating opportunity for creative play and individual freedom

• playfulness, irony; in content, language, intertextual elements e.g. parody,

pastiche (~imitation)

• fluidity of genre boundaries, heightened intermediality

• metafiction, self-reflexivity

• questioning fixed identities

➢constructedness (of texts, identities, realities, truths)

➢disappearance of the real

• embrace of “low” culture, popular culture

• (further) dissolution of cultural structures (e.g. religion, family)

• skepticism towards authoritarian understandings of historical knowledge

→ rejection of “grand narratives” of science, politics, humanity (Althusser)

• multiplicity (of forms, of identities, of meaning etc.)

• focus on individual, less widely generalizable forms of experience, memory,

and knowledge