Postmodern Literature Guide: 10

Notable Postmodern Authors

Written by MasterClass

Last updated: Jun 7, 2021 • 4 min read

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, modernist literature was the
central literary movement. However, after World War II, a new school of literary theory,
deemed postmodernism, began to rise.

What Is Postmodern Literature?

Postmodern literature is a literary movement that eschews absolute meaning
and instead emphasizes play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality.
The literary movement rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s
as a reaction to modernist literature’s quest for meaning in light of the
significant human rights violations of World War II.

Common examples of postmodern literature include Gravity’s Rainbow by

Thomas Pynchon, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Catch-22 by
Joseph Heller. Literary theorists that crystalized postmodernity in literature
include Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges,
Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard.
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What Are the Origins of Postmodern Literature?

Postmodern literature’s precursor, modernist (or modern) literature,
emphasized a quest for meaning, suggesting the author as an
enlightenment-style creator of order and mourning the chaotic world—
examples include James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.

However, after the series of human rights violations that occurred during and
after World War II (including the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Japan,
and Japanese internment in the US), writers began to feel as if meaning was
an impossible quest, and that the only way to move forward was to embrace
meaninglessness fully.

Thus, postmodern literature rejected (or built upon) many of the tenants of
modernism, including shunning meaning, intensifying and celebrating
fragmentation and disorder, and initiating a major shift in literary tradition.
5 Characteristics of Postmodern Literature
Postmodern literature builds on the following core ideas:

1. 1. Embrace of randomness. Postmodern works reject the idea of absolute

meaning and instead embrace randomness and disorder. Postmodern novels
often employ unreliable narrators to further muddy the waters with extreme
subjectivity and prevent readers from finding meaning during the story.
2. 2. Playfulness. While modernist writers mourned the loss of order,
postmodern writers revel in it, often using tools like black humor,
wordplay, irony, and other techniques of playfulness to dizzy readers and
muddle the story.
3. 3. Fragmentation. Postmodernist literature took modernism’s fragmentation
and expanded on it, moving literary works more toward collage-style forms,
temporal distortion, and significant jumps in character and place.
4. 4. Metafiction. Postmodern literature emphasized meaninglessness and
play. Postmodern writers began to experiment with more meta elements in
their novels and short stories, drawing attention to their work’s artifice and
reminding readers that the author isn’t an authority figure.
5. 5. Intertextuality. As a form of collage-style writing, many postmodern
authors wrote their work overtly in dialogue with other texts. The techniques
they employed included pastiche (or imitating other authors’ styles) and the
combination of high and low culture (writing that tackles subjects that were
previously considered inappropriate for literature).

10 Notable Postmodern Authors

Here are some notable authors who contributed to the postmodern
movement:

1. 1. John Barth: Barth wrote an essay of literary criticism titled The Literature
of Exhaustion (1967), detailing all writing as imitation and considered by
many to be the manifesto of postmodern literature. Barth’s fourth
novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a prime example of the metafiction
characteristic of postmodernism, featuring several fictional disclaimers in the
beginning and end, arguing that the book was not written by the author and
was instead given to the author on a tape or written by a computer.
2. 2. Samuel Beckett: Beckett’s “theatre of the absurd” emphasized the
disintegration of narrative. In the play Waiting for Godot (1953), Beckett
creates an entire existential narrative featuring two characters who
contemplate their day as they wait for the ambiguous Godot to appear.
However, he never arrives, and his identity is not revealed.
3. 3. Italo Calvino: Calvino’s novel If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) is an
excellent example of a metanarrative—the book is about a reader attempting
to read a novel titled If on a winter's night a traveler.
4. 4. Don DeLillo: Following an advertising executive in New York during the
Nixon era, DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) is an exceptionally fragmented
narrative, exploring the rise of global capitalism, the decline of American
manufacturing, the CIA, and civil rights, and other themes. White
Noise (1985) reframes postmodernism through consumerism, bombarding
characters with meaninglessness.
5. 5. John Fowles: Fowles’s The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is a
historical novel with a major emphasis on metafiction. The book features a
narrator who becomes part of the story and offers several different ways to
end the story.
6. 6. Joseph Heller: Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) tells many storylines out of
chronological order, slowly building the story as new information is
introduced. Heller also employs paradox (a literary device that contradicts
itself but contains a plausible kernel of truth) and farce (a type of comedy in
which absurd situations are stacked precariously atop one another) to
complicate the narrative further.
7. 7. Gabriel García Márquez: Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude (1967) is an exceptionally playful novel that follows several
characters sprawled out over an extended length of time, emphasizing the
smallness of human life.
8. 8. Thomas Pynchon: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is the
poster child of postmodern literature, using a complex, fragmented structure
to cover various subjects such as culture, science, social science, profanity,
and literary propriety. The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) employs a significant
amount of silly wordplay, often within contexts of seriousness.
9. 9. Kurt Vonnegut: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969) is a non-linear
narrative in which the main character has been “unstuck in time,” oscillating
between the present and the past with no control over his movement and
emphasizing the senseless nature of war.
10.10. David Foster Wallace: Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) embodies
postmodernism through its eclectic, encyclopedic structure, characters
trapped within the postmodern condition, obsessive endnotes and footnotes,
and meandering consciousness. The Pale King (2011) is also highly
metafictional, employing a character named David Foster Wallace.