Prose in Postmodernism

             Prose in Postmodernism

          The term of postmodernism go into use in literature after modernism period. Yet, there is no certain date of it, although Federico de Onis used the word of postmodernism in his Antologia de la poesi espanola e hispanoamericana(1882-1932) ; and Dudley Fitts picked it up again in his Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American poetry of 1942. Also, mentioning this knowledge in his essay, Ihab Hassan spoke of people studying  different branches ; such as history, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, music, dance, art, etc., which these people are  too heterogeneous to form a movement , paradigm, or school. So, he purposed to tell that they may pay the way for several related cultural tendencies, a constellation of values, a repertoire of producers and attitudes.

          Furthermore , Ihab Hassan suggested that play, parody, pastiche, postmodernism style and rules of sensitiveness tended to relativity, as well as certainty and uncertainty and pragmatic philosophy. The previous features are elements of postmodernism. He try to make people understand that there was no response or contrast between postmodernism and modernism by preparing the table that reveals the characteristics of modernism and postmodernism. In this table, it was revealed that exceptions and transformations doing for the sake of postmodernism are excessive. Therefore, it could be understood that postmodernism is into root of modernism. So, he thought that modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iran Curtain or Chinese Wall; for history is a palimpsest, and culture establish connection between, time past, time present and, time future.

          In short, he describes the postmodernism as interdetermanence (indeterminacy+ immanence). For that matter postmodernism has some issues about semantic instability. According to him a “period” must be perceived in terms both of continuity and discontinuity, the two perspectives being complementary and partial.

         Thinking and interpreting postmodernism in the same direction with Hassan, Witcombe think that postmodernism do not separate from modernism completely, too. It is inevitable there are people supporting postmodernism as anti-modernist movement but to Witcombe postmodernism is called deconstruction of modernism. It “deconstructs” the tenants and values of modernism by taking apart or ‘unpacking’ the modernist worldview in order to reveal its constituent parts. To sum up, according to him aspects of constructive postmodernism will appear similar to what is called ‘New Age’ thinking.

          Like Hassan, another essay writer Whisnant does not give a certain date about appearance of postmodernism. The one option is that postmodernist epoch began at the end of World War II but more frequently starting as late as the 70’s. The other option is date back to the late 60’s with such postructuralist thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard etc.

          Moreover, postmodernism means something a little different for every area of the arts or every specific field of knowledge. There are some characteristics of postmodernism to tell what it is:

     First of them is to reject of ultimate sources of meaning and truth. Many philosophers and literary theorists question the absolute reality and knowledge is a free-floating system.

     The second is the death of “depth models” and the embrace of “the surface”. “With rejection of truth they ignore Plato’s, Kant’s, Marxism, and Freud’s philosophical thoughts. Postmodernist value for “the surface”, ”mere appearances”.

     The third one is play. Postmodernism in many different areas has tended to be drawn to the nation of play: the play of meanings, the play of images, the play of language, the play of structural forms. So, it is suggested that play can work against system of domination.

     The forth one is that language is not something that reveals, but constructs. Language is not transparent. Language was used to construct the reality around people.

     The other is narratives and metanarratives. The difference between them is that narratives tell more ordinary stories but metanarratives are more talented to tell “big stories” such as; Christianity’s story of sin and redemption; the Enlightment’s story of the progress of history towards absolute knowledge which metanarratives are very essential to people.

     The next is the inherent instability of meaning. If “truth” has no relationship to any stable source, then meaning is inherently instable, constantly changing depending on the context.

      The seventh one is the death of the author. Postmodernist though,would suggest that, first, the ultimate meaning intended by the author can never really by known, second, though, the author’s intentions wouldn’t matter, even if they could be discovered.

      The next is intertextuality. Because “truth” is not stable, people try to generate specific meanings producing films, novels etc. In the other words, they will draw associations between the new object and past objects they have encountered that will in effect  set up networks of relationships and meanings between the texts. In contrast, the work of deconstruction has shown that the meaning of text can be never be contained within the text itself; it always escapes the borders of the story, while at the same time working against itself until the artificiality and arbitrariness of  the constructed meaning finally becomes painfully obvious.