M.K.Bhavnagar UniversityDepartment of English

Name:- Pandya Riva m.Roll no :-25

Paper:- 8Topic :- Postmodernism and popular

culture

What is postmodernism Postmodernism is a late 20th century

movement that is a reaction to the worldwide view of the 16th mid 20th century

It is a movement away from more especially it is a trend in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and natural (suspicion).

Postmodernism in literature

Postmodern authors tend to reject outright meaning in their novels, stories or poem and instead highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings or a complete lack of meaning within a single literary work.

Its also rejects the boundaries between high and low forms of art and literature as well as the distinction between difference genres and form of writing .

Truth is differs to “Other” Post modernism question everything

rationalist European philosophy held to be true , arguing that it is all contingent and that most cultural construction served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of others.

Beginning in the mid 1980s ,post modernism emerged in art, architecture ,literature, society, fashion and other fields.

Major figures of high modernism Modernist literature using new techniques

drawn from psychology experimented with point of view ,time, space and stream of consciousness writing.

Major figures of high modernism who radically redefined poetry and fiction included Virginia Woolf, James Joyce , Ezra pound , T.S.Eliot, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner.

Modernism deployed fragmented forms , discontinuous narratives and pastiche as in Faulkner's the sound and the fury.

Modernist novels sought to be metafictive or self referential about their status as text their production as art and their reception.

Postmodern authors tend to depict the world as having already undergone countless disasters and being beyond redemption and understanding.

In postmodernism we find three main areas of capitalism,

Market capitalism

Realism was the predominant

style within 18th and 19th century

with its new technology such

as the stream engine that transformed

every day life.

Monopoly capitalism

From late 19th century trough

world war 2, modernism ruled

the arts within monopoly capitalism

associated with electricity and

internal combustion.

Consumer capitalism

The third phase is dominated by global consumer capitalism the

emphasis placed on advertising

and selling goods, now called the

information age.

Jean Francois argues that stability is maintained through grand narratives or master narratives stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs in order to keep going .

Democracy will lead to universal human happiness.

But postmodernism Francois adds is characterized by incredulity toward metanarratives .

Postmodernism prefers mini narratives of local events.

Jean Baudrillard describes the simulacra of postmodern life which have taken the place of real objects ,

For e.g.:- Video game and music we observe that virtual reality games add another dimension to the artificiality of postmodern life. “Artificiality turns into reality.”

Perhaps postmodernism is best compared to emergence of computer, technology.

Popular culture Popular culture is the entirety of ideas ,

perspectives attitudes means images and other phenomena .

There was a time before the 1960s when popular culture was not studied by academics when it was well just popular culture .

But within American studies at first and then later in many discipline , including semiotics, literary criticism, history , women’s study, comic books, television, film, music , and computer cyber culture. They asses how such factors as ethnicity , race , gender, class ,age and sexuality are shaped in popular culture.

Types of popular culture

Popular culture

If we discussed of Frankenstein , sometimes popular culture can so overtake and repackage a literary work that it is impossible to read the original text without reference to the many layers of popular culture that have developed around it.

The popular culture reconstructions work like Frankenstein can also open it to unforeseen new interpretation.

Thank you