The document discusses several key aspects of postmodernism and postmodernity including: 1) The Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis from the 1950s-1970s that was designed based on modernist principles but failed due to social and design flaws. 2) Jean-François Lyotard's definition of postmodernity as the altered status of knowledge in postindustrial, postmodern societies and cultures. 3) Characteristics of postmodern literature such as intertextuality, performativity, fusion of genres, inclusion of multiple voices, historiographic metafiction, and cultural critiques.

1. Postmodernity
Postmodernism

2. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Pruitt-Igoe Housing complex,
St Louis, Missouri
1950s to 1970s

3. ‘Pruitt-Igoe was constructed according to the most
progressive ideas […] It consisted of elegant slab blocks
fourteen storeys high, with rational ‘streets in the air’
(which were safe from cars but, as it turned out, not safe
from crime); ‘sun, space and greenery’, which Le
Corbusier called the ‘three essential joys of urbanism’
(instead of conventional streets, gardens and semi-
private space, which he banished). It had a separation of
pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the provision of play
space, and local amenities such as laundries, crèches and
gossip centres – all rational substitutes for traditional
patterns.’
Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977)

5. „Our working hypothesis is that the
status of knowledge is altered as
societies enter what is known as the
postindustrial age and cultures enter
what is known as the postmodern age.‟
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1984)

6. ‘Exxon is 45th on the list, making it
comparable in economic size to the
economies of Chile or Pakistan. Nigeria [with
a population of 135 million] comes in just
between DaimlerChrysler and General
Electric, while Philip Morris is on a par with
Tunisia, Slovakia and Guatemala.’
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

7. „The radical disruption of the linear flow of narrative,
the frustration of conventional expectations
concerning unity and coherence of plot and character
and cause-and-effect “development” thereof, the
deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions
to call into question the moral and philosophical
“meaning” of literary action, the adoption of a tone of
epistemological self-mockery aimed at the naïve
pretensions of bourgeois rationality, the opposition of
inward consciousness to rational, public, objective
discourse.’
John Barth, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’(1979)

8. „If the modernists […] taught us that linearity,
rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve
illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote
and middle-class moral conventions are not the whole
story, then from the perspective of these closing
decades of our century we may appreciate that the
contraries of those things are not the whole story
either. Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-
illusionism, self-reflexiveness […] moral pluralism
[…] these are not the whole story either.‟
John Barth, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’(1979)

9. „Simplifying to the extreme, I
define postmodern as incredulity
towards metanarratives.‟
J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984)

10. Intertextuality – self-conscious appropriation and
transformation of works from the literary canon. Zadie
Smith On Beauty (2005).
Performativity or self-reflexivity – where the story
becomes a performance of and commentary on the
process of narrating, writing and reading. Italo Calvino
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), Martin Amis
Time’s Arrow (1991).
Fusion of genres – where the novel might contain
elements of journalism, historical account,
autobiography, science fiction, etc. Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse 5 (1969).

11. Multiple voices/diaspora – narrative voices historically under-
represented in literature. Caryl Phillips Cambridge (1991), Salman
Rushdie Satanic Verses (1988), Tariq Ali Shadows of the
Pomegranate Tree (1991), Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000) &
Andrea Levy Small Island (2004).
Historiographic metafiction – writer re-imagines historical events
but fictionalizes or transforms them. Peter Ackroyd Dan Leno and
the Limehouse Golem (1994). A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes, Peter
Carey, E.L. Doctorow.
Cultural critiques – novel stands in an evaluative relationship to
the culture of postmodernity. J.G. Ballard Cocaine Nights (1996).
Will Self, Angela Carter, Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis,
Ian McEwan, Philip Roth.