Badji Mokhtar University, Annaba, Prof.

Salah Bouregbi
Faculty of Letters & Languages,
Department of English
Master I: S II (G2 & 3)
Lesson, N°1
British Literature

Postmodernism

Introduction

Postmodernism, also spelled post-modernism, in Western philosophy, a late 20th-

century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general
suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and
maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural
and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines
including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and
technology. Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. The latter was an earlier
aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has
often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the
Modernist stance.
Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid
boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a step further and
deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another.
Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism’s use of
lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also
employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another’s style. Parody and pastiche serve to
highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody
and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not ―real‖ but fictional and
constructed.
Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily convey a solid
meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple
interpretations. The individual, or subject depicted in these works, is often decentred, without
a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics. In
short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and
fragmentation of the 20th century western world, which began to experience this deep sense
of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two
major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact
of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations,
new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States.
Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation , discontinuity and
decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is
hidden in this very aspect. Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of
contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests
that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in
modern life.
In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism,
on the other hand, celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as
the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions. This is
where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism—both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre. In Derridean terms,
the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving
towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely
powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually
tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there
are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its
position is what Derrida called differance. In Postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation,
there is, thus, an underlying belief in differance, a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is
continually postponed.

I-Postmodernism and Modern Philosophy

Postmodernism is largely a reaction against the intellectual assumptions and values

of the modern period in the history of Western philosophy (roughly, the 17th through
the 19th century). Indeed, many of the doctrines characteristically associated with
postmodernism can fairly be described as the straightforward denial of general
philosophical viewpoints that were taken for granted during the 18th-century
Enlightenment, though they were not unique to that period. The most important of
these viewpoints are the following:
1. There is an objective natural reality, a reality whose existence and properties are
logically independent of human beings—of their minds, their societies, their social
practices, or their investigative techniques. Postmodernists dismiss this idea as a kind
of naive realism. Such reality as there is, according to postmodernists, is
a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language.
2. The descriptive and explanatory statements of scientists and historians can, in
principle, be objectively true or false. The postmodern denial of this viewpoint—
which follows from the rejection of an objective natural reality—is sometimes
expressed by saying that there is no such thing as Truth.
3. Through the use of reason and logic, and with the more specialized tools
provided by science and technology, human beings are likely to change themselves
and their societies for the better. It is reasonable to expect that future societies will be
more humane, more just, more enlightened, and more prosperous than they are now.
Postmodernists deny this Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments
of human progress. Indeed, many postmodernists hold that the misguided (or
unguided) pursuit of scientific and technological knowledge led to the development of
technologies for killing on a massive scale in World War II. Some go so far as to say
that science and technology—and even reason and logic—are inherently destructive
and oppressive, because they have been used by evil people, especially during the 20th
century, to destroy and oppress others.
4. Reason and logic are universally valid—i.e., their laws are the same for, or apply
equally to, any thinker and any domain of knowledge. For postmodernists, reason and
logic too are merely conceptual constructs and are therefore valid only within the
established intellectual traditions in which they are used.
5. There is such a thing as human nature; it consists of faculties, aptitudes,
or dispositions that are in some sense present in human beings at birth rather than
learned or instilled through social forces. Postmodernists insist that all, or nearly all,
aspects of human psychology are completely socially determined.
 6. Language refers to and represents a reality outside itself. According to
postmodernists, language is not such a ―mirror of nature,‖ as the
American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty characterized the Enlightenment
view. Inspired by the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
postmodernists claim that language is semantically self-contained, or self-referential:
the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world or even an idea in the mind but,
rather, a range of contrasts and differences with the meanings of other words. Because
meanings are in this sense functions of other meanings—which themselves are
functions of other meanings, and so on—they are never fully ―present‖ to the speaker
or hearer but are endlessly ―deferred.‖ Self-reference characterizes not only natural
languages but also the more specialized ―discourses‖ of particular communities or
traditions; such discourses are embedded in social practices and reflect the conceptual
schemes and moral and intellectual values of the community or tradition in which they
are used. The postmodern view of language and discourse is due largely to the French
philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the originator and
leading practitioner of deconstruction.
7. Human beings can acquire knowledge about natural reality, and this knowledge
can be justified ultimately on the basis of evidence or principles that are, or can be,
known immediately, intuitively, or otherwise with certainty. Postmodernists reject
philosophical foundationalism—the attempt, perhaps best exemplified by the 17th-
century French philosopher René Descartes’s dictum cogito, ergo sum (―I think,
therefore I am‖), to identify a foundation of certainty on which to build the edifice
of empirical (including scientific) knowledge.
8. It is possible, at least in principle, to construct general theories that explain many
aspects of the natural or social world within a given domain of knowledge—e.g., a
general theory of human history, such as dialectical materialism. Furthermore, it
should be a goal of scientific and historical research to construct such theories, even if
they are never perfectly attainable in practice. Postmodernists dismiss this notion as a
pipe dream and, indeed, as symptomatic of an unhealthy tendency
within Enlightenment discourses to adopt ―totalizing‖ systems of thought (as the
French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas called them) or grand ―metanarratives‖ of
human biological, historical, and social development (as the French philosopher Jean-
François Lyotard claimed). These theories are pernicious not merely because they are
false but because they effectively impose conformity on other perspectives or
discourses, thereby oppressing, marginalizing, or silencing them. Derrida himself
equated the theoretical tendency toward totality with totalitarianism.

This Course is compiled from the following references:

Cambridge Dictionary
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english
access: 1/2/21

Duignan, Brian.―Postmodernism Philosophy.‖

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy
Access: 20//1/21

Mambrol, Nasrullah. ― Postmodernism. » Literary Theory and Criticism, March 31, 016
https://literariness.org/2016/03/31/postmodernism/
Access: 15/2/21

www.wikipedia.org
Access: 12/02/21