Generally speaking, unlike modernist poetry, postmodernist poetry is often open-ended, “distracted”, and bent on presenting states of consciousness or ways of speaking which are not easily associated with a recognizable speaker, narrative voice, or subject. In some respects, postmodernist speakers are ‘more anonymous,’ and the poets more “anti-historical” and obsessed with artifice.
Artifice as in artificial, that is. For instance, postmodernist works are often a “pastiche” (「空心反諷」) of earlier works, the style, feel, and symbolism of preceding generations—-but not because they adore the past! Instead, the postmodernists, we might say, are “cannibalists” with regard to earlier forms, styles, artists, and poetic conventions. They want to take apart history and put it back together again as a delicious “hodge podge” of various older styles. John Ashbery, for instance, even writes poetry about cartoon characters (who speak like characters in a John Milton poem), as in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”
Modernist | Postmodernist
image | simulacrum
depth | surface
centered | marginalized
hierarchical | anarchical
High Culture | popular culture
loss of certainty | loss of belief
fragmentation | distraction
epiphany | hallucination
irony | nostalgia
parody | pastiche
paranoia | schizophrenia
human vs. machine | human-as-machine (cyborgs)
identity/personality | difference/alias (Ashbery)
work of art | art-as-reproduction (Warhol)
the novel/opera/poetry | TV, weblogs, movies, etc.
Notable Postmodernists:
Poets: John Ashbery, Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Charles Olson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, Sharon Oldes.
Novelists: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster.
Visual Artists: Willem De Kooning (Abstract Expressionism), Jackson Pollock (Action Painting), Andy Warhol (Pop Art), Richard Tuttle (post-minimalism).
Philosophers/Thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler.
Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men and considered by many (including me) to be the greatest living American writer, has given a long interview with Oprah Winfrey. This is great news to me because part of my dissertation was about McCarthy and his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. It’s also a rare treat for fans of his writing because, to my knowledge, McCarthy has never given a television interview to anyone! In part one below he talks about his recent novel, The Road, which won the Pullitzer Prize last year:
