The document discusses key themes and devices of postmodern literature, comparing it to modernism. Postmodern literature continues modernism's tendencies of alienation, discontinuity, and social individualism. It focuses on fragmentation, pastiche, and presenting unordered universes. Postmodernist critics like Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault were academically trained in philosophy including Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger. The term "postmodernism" began being used in literature in the 1960s to describe styles like "black humor" and "fabulism".

2. Central themes : Industrialization - urban jungle- alienation of the individual . totalitarian systems (dystopias) Psychological control of the human mind . Schizophrenia Virtual reality Fantastic elements in a real world ID vs. social background Surveillance

3. Devices: Pastiche (collage) Intertext Short-circuit game Irony/black humor Fragmentation Maxi/mini –malism deconstruction

4. New kind of literature: Magical realism Techno-gothic Hypertext Lunatic Cyberpunk

5. Modernism/Postmodernism Continued the fundamental philosophical assumptions of modernism Continued its tendency toward historical discontinuity Continued its preoccupation with alienation Continued to focus on a social individualism

6. Modernism/postmodernism Modernism relied on existentialism -а philosophy that claims that the individual must make decisions concerning right and wrong, or the self without access to universal truths Postmodernism’s tendency to use solipsism , a philosophical perspective that holds that one саn only truly know oneself and that all other experiences are potentially false since they are filtered through the senses

7. Modernism/postmodernism The tendency of the modernists - to construct intricate forms - to interweave symbols elaborately - to create works of art that, although opposed to some established present order, create within themselves an ordered universe All that has given up in postmodern literature

8. Philosophy of Postmodernism Denial of order Presentation of highly fragmented universes in the created world of art Presentation of critical theories that are а form of phenomenology

9. Phenomenology A highly subjective contemporary philosophy which argues that the meaning of an object is a concept separate from its existence.

10. Postmodernist Critics Jacques Lacan The members of the Frankfurt School Michel Foucault Ihab Hassan Jacques Derrida Academically trained in philosophy, used substantially the works of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Каrl Маrх, Martin Heidegger, оr G.W.F. Hegel

11. Postmodernism as a Name Used in architecture in the 1960s by Frederic Jameson In literature began to be used instead of less satisfactory labels such as "black humor" or "fabulism“.Ihab Hassan in his essay “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” emphasize some critics who used this word in different contexts:

12. Postmodernism - etymology 1. Charles Olson (1950 -1960) 2.Harry Levin 1959 , to denote the high modern culture declining. 3. Bernard Smith , 1945 used this term with the meaning of the socialist realism used in picture. Charles Jencks used the word “postmodernism” in his works with the meaning which we have today.

13. Postmodernist Writers William Golding Thomas Pynchon John Fowles Solman Rushdie George Orwell John Ashberry Paul Auster Mircea Cartarescu

14. Postmodernism- It has no a rigid definition because if would happen to have , for sure a postmodern critic would make a deconstruction for it.