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I subscribe to Danto's 'post-historical' description of PoMo (though it's fallen somewhat out of favor). He claims that, with the end of modernism came the end
by diiq 14y ago
I subscribe to Danto's 'post-historical' description of PoMo (though it's fallen somewhat out of favor). He claims that, with the end of modernism came the end of rules and sweeping movements -- it was no longer possible to distinguish, on physical examination, between art and non-art. So everyone started making art in ten thousand different ways.
By that measure, all writers writing today are, technically, postmodern; but even among those writers who are writing difficult, academic, contemporary literature, there are stuffy pompous ones and funny snarky ones and everything in between.
It's hard to think of it, because we don't consider the books we like as literature. Vonnegut, certainly by Timequake, is deeply postmodern. Murakami undoubtedly is, and is often very funny; Jasper Fforde tickles; hell, a very strong case could be made for Douglas Adams as a leading Postmodern humourist.
- Fargren 14y agoWhere is Murakami funny? I've found him wise and deeply moving, but never funny.
- diiq 14y agoHe is often wise and moving. But In Kafka on the Shore, a nameless concept embodies itself as Colonel Sanders, who is a magical pimp. A line from The Second Bakery Attack1: "Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt." Murakami makes me laugh a lot. 1 http://ctina.com/bakeryattack.html http://ctina.com/bakeryattack.html
- evan2m 14y agoSee "A Wild Sheep Chase." It's full of humor.
- philh 14y ago> By that measure, all writers writing today are, technically, postmodern By that measure, isn't absolutely everyone, living or dead, a postmodern artist?
- diiq 14y agoNo; Jan van Eyck painted the way he did in large part because that is what he was expected to do; 'Art', for him, in his time, had a fairly specific definition. It is the lack of such a definition that makes postmodernism. If someone painted like Jan van Eyck today, it would be postmodern --- both because of the year, and because of the current culture of art. Same painting, different classification. (There's a hilarious story by Borges with almost exactly this premise: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote") Please understand refraining from saying whether this freedom is good or bad. I mean only to name a distinction between western art up through modernism -- art which met specific expectations according to period and place --- and western art post-modernism, which defies any uniform expectation.