The main characteristics of postmodernist literature.

Scholars and historians most commonly hold postmodernism to be a movement of ideas contrary to modernism. One of the most significant differences between modernism and postmodernism is the interest of the latter in universality or totality. While modernist artists aimed to capture universality or totality in some sense, postmodernists have rejected these ambitions as "metanarratives."

This usage is ascribed to the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard understood modernity as a cultural condition characterized by constant change in the pursuit of progress, and postmodernity as the culmination of this process, where constant change has become a status quo and the notion of progress.

In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Also, Richard Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes are also influential in 1970s postmodern theory.

The key word for postmodernism is not knowledge but sensibility. According to B. McHale, postmodernism is ontological by its nature: it doesn’t try to study the world as modernism does, but it just ascertains the fact of its existence.

This existence is uncertain, chaotic and decentralized; it is impossible to form the models of the world because all the hierarchical and logocentric systems are absurd. From here we have the so called postmodernist uncertainty and decentration. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the term " rhizome ", which refers to the botanical rhizome (a kind of roots without one central root), to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. They compare the Western logocentrism with the tree and the Eastern philosophy with rhizome. A rhizome works with horizontal and trans-species connections, while a model of tree works with vertical and linear connections. It means that postmodernist reality is heterogeneous and doesn’t have a strict structure. The absence of rules causes the postmodernist irony: a postmodernist parodies everything, including himself and his work. The specific kind of postmodernist parody is called pastiche - a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful (as opposed to parody, which is not).

A postmodernist writer sees the world as one great text with different allusions (hints), citations and references. The shaping of texts’ meanings by other texts is named intertextuality. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” was coined in 1966 by the French poststructuralist Julia Kristeva who used Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. According to Kristeva, there is a dialogue between all the texts of the world literature. Moreover, the entire world is the text, which includes culture, history, society, people’s consciousness.

Some examples of intertextuality in literature include:

· East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck: A retelling of the story of Genesis, set in the Salinas Valley of Northern California.

· Ulysses (1914) by James Joyce: A retelling of Homer's Odyssey, set in Dublin.

· The Dead Fathers Club (2006) by Matt Haig: A retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, set in modern England.

A postmodernist cannot create something new; he just plays with the well-known meanings to create a new combination of old ideas for revaluing them. Thus, postmodernism has much in common with the literary game.

A term of simulacrum (plural: simulacra) is very important for postmodernist theory. It comes from the Latin simulare, "to make like, to put on an appearance of", originally meaning a material object representing something (such as a cult image representing a deity, or a painted still-life of a bowl of fruit). Fredric Jameson uses the example of photorealism to describe simulacra. The painting is a copy of a photograph, not of reality. The photograph itself is a copy of the original. Therefore, the painting is a copy of a copy.

The typical features of postmodernist work are: decentration and fragmentation, total irony and parody, mixture of tragedy and farce, intertextuality, reflection and self-reflection (for instance, the author’s comments on his writing of this work), open ending (the work is open for different approaches towards its interpretation). The important symbols are carnival, labyrinth, library, lunatic asylum, etc.

Among the theorists and critics of postmodernism we should name Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva (France), Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson (USA), Umberto Eco (Italy), etc.

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