Post Modernism: 1950- Present

• Began in the late 1960's (??) and continues into the present in some aspects of literature and culture
• Attitudes influenced by catastrophic events of WWII and the potential for catastrophe that followed:
• Fascism
• Nazism
• The Holocaust
• the atomic bomb (and later the hydrogen bomb)
• then the cold war with it's large nuclear arsenals
• Postmodernism often involves an ironic attitude toward life, culture, and meaning: a loss of faith in culture, political, and religious authority. But whereas Modernist writers were distrubed by this loss of traditional values, postmodern writers revel in the ridiculousness of the human experience. 
• Humor, Absurdity, Satire, and Parody are often used in postmodern literature, even when seemingly serious subjects are addressed. 
• Everything is a joke, everything is a play.
• Accepts that fragmentation is a characteristic of contemporary life and beliefs. There's a sense that nothing may have any one clear meaning that everyone agrees on, but postmodernism embraces the chaos. The literature laughs at the twists and turns of the human psyche as we try to find meaning in a world where truth is constantly shifting. Life is not meaningless; it is endlessly full of multiple meanings. We do not have a lack of truth; instead, we have an infinite number of possible truths.
• Language itself is unstable and indeterminate; language is play
• We can never say what we mean because meaning attaches to meaning in an infinite chain.
• We have nothing upon which to base a final, definite meaning for anything
• Focus on the process of writing and on the disordered flow of thought and ideas--seeking a set meaning is not the goal.
• Mixing of blurring the line between "high" and "low" culture. 
• "high culture" = opera, theater, classic literature, etc
• "low culture" = TV sitcoms, trashy literature, movies, comic books, etc
• Authors include John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and many more
• Examples from popular culture: "The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Shrek, YouTube, the Internet, etc.
• Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for readers
• No heroes
• Concern with individual in isolation
• Detached, unemotional
• Usually humorless
• Narratives
• Metafiction
• Present tense
• Magical realism
• Erodes distinctions between classes of people
• Insists that values are not permanent but only "local" or "historical"
• Criticism of consumerism
• Appreciation of freedom & spontaneity
• Indeterminacy: nothing is certain
• partly due to fragmentation - with the death of God, everything else is fragmented - this is an on-going process.
• This can be seen in the breaking of forms, mixing of genres
• Reuses old forms in new ways
• Intertextuality
• Deceptiveness of appearances (irony, complexity, cynicism, inadequacy of reason, unreliability of perception)
• Literature shifts from omniscient narrator, comforting, all-knowing absolute, to mult. subjectivities:
• If you have no "truth" to fall back on, what is reality?
• id takes over --> ego has to try to maintain control
• Left with imperfect human position
• rise of 1st person, central narrator
• Preoccupation with the trivial, the shallow
• makes own values
• search for stimulation on diversion or escape rather than purpose or meaning.
• Key aspects of Modern Poems:
• stylistic individuality
• formal experimentation
• subjective voice
• image
• symbol
• ellipses
• opacity
• irony
• fragmentation
• impersonality
• avoidance of generalizations, morals, and messages

Trends in American Literature and Culture since 1950

• The Beat generation
• The so-called "Beat Generation" was very influential from the mid 1950's into the 1960's. Beat poets included Allen Ginsberg (one of the founders of the movement), Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others while Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were important novelists. The term "beat" refers to the sense of being weary or worn out, but also to the term "beatific," meaning spiritually blessed or blissful. The beat writers rebelled against social conventions of the 1950's, criticizing American culture as hollow, overly commercialized, and spiritually dead. They favored individualism, non-conformity, and experimentation of all kinds: with literary form, drugs, sex, spirituality (especially Buddhism), and with the "hip" lingo of jazz musicians. Ginsberg's "Howl" is one of the earliest and most famous poems defining Beat attitudes.
• Confessional poetry
• Term applied to a number of poets in the 1950's-60's, including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsburg, Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman. Confessional poetry typically uses the first-person "I" and reveals autobiographical information, often including the author's emotional and psychological experiences related to death, depression, relationships, trauma, or other aspects of private experience. Later poets such as Sharon Olds have continued the confessional tradition into the present day.
• Black arts movement
• The Black Arts Movement was founded by the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. This movement in theater, poetry, and fiction involved the creation of a new, experimental Black aesthetic meant to accompany the political and social protest of the Black Power movement. The movement's poetry often included a vibrant, tough tone, new spellings, old or absent punctuation, strange line breaks. The literature often used a "street" vocabulary, and the subject matter and rhythms were often allied with African American music, including jazz, blues, soul, and funk. The movement is closely connected to the concept of Black Pride, which one sees in 1960's slogans such as "Black is Beautiful" and singer James Brown's rallying cry, "Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud!" A good example of the style is Amiri Baraka's poem "Black Art" (1965), which states that "we want 'poems that kill.'/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot"; the poem concludes with these lines
• Let Black people understand
  that they are the lovers and the sons
  of warriors and sons
  of warriors Are poems & poets &
  all the loveliness here in the world
  
  We want a black poem. And a
  Black World.
  Let the world be a Black Poem
  And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
  Silently
  or LOUD
• Multicultural literature
• This term refers to literature written by authors from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds, including African American literature, Asian American literature, Native American literature, and Latino American literature. It can also include authors who draw on other kinds of cultural identity: working class authors, disabled authors, and so forth. Although multicultural literature has existed throughout the entire history of the United States, the concepts of multicultural literature and multicultural education became especially prominent in the 1980's and beyond, due in part to the effect of various civil rights movements during the 1960's-70's: the Black Power movement, women's rights, gay rights, the American Indian movement, and so forth. During the 1980's and after, more and more works by multicultural authors (such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Amy Tan, and many others) were published and sold. Additionally, multicultural literature became increasingly prominent in education at both the high school and college levels. After many public debates over the direction of American education, today the literary canon (the collection of texts considered to be the most important "great works" or "classics") has greatly expanded to include more diverse texts than it used to.